NBA 2K20

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NBA 2K20

Welcome to the glorious Las Vegas, where you can gamble in this magnificent casino, and play one of the best sports in this one casino: basketball!

Genre(s):	Sports
Platform(s):	iOS Microsoft Windows Nintendo Switch Playstation 4 Xbox One Stadia
Release Date:	iOS, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One September 6, 2019 Stadia November 19, 2019
Developer(s):	Visual Concepts
Publisher(s):	2K Sports
Series:	NBA 2K
Predecessor:	NBA 2K19
Successor:	NBA 2K21

NBA 2K20 is a basketball simulation game based on the 19/20 NBA season developed by Visual Concepts and published by 2K as the successor to NBA 2K19 and the predecessor to NBA 2K21. It was released on September 6, 2019 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Stadia, Nintendo Switch, and PC. It is the 21st game in the NBA 2K series.

Why It Got Rejected By Anthony Davis

NOTE: Some of the problems were carried over from NBA 2K18 and 2K19.

As revealed in the MyTeam trailer, the pay-to-win features that were in the previous NBA 2K games are back, and worse than ever. This caused many people to consider this game to be more like a casino simulator than it is a basketball game.
- Considering that the game is supposed to focus on basketball, casino-like features have no business at all being in the game.
  - Despite a senate bill to ban these mechanics, 2K/Take-Two just increased them further. These microtransactions are even as bad as Asphalt 8: Airborne's microtransactions after Vivendi's takeover of Gameloft.
  - 2K added more fuel to the fire by responding to criticism of underage gambling and the ban in Belgium by petitioning children to pressure the government to bend the knee and allow exploitative gaming mechanics. Their actions were blatant enough for the Australian Department of Justice (Risk Assessment) to define their actions as a form of child exploitation.
False advertising: The Legend Edition is stated to include twenty MyCAREER Skill Boosts and a MyPLAYER Shoe Collection, but neither appears in-game. Related to the gambling controversy above is the implication of the game being either a basketball game when it is actually a casino and defenders citing that the game is promoted as a gambling sim when it's actually not.
- Another thing relating to the false advertising, Ronnie2K (the 2K spokesperson), announced new hairstyles in the final product but there are no new hairstyles in the game.
A ton of assets from NBA 2K19 are copy-pasted here, making the game essentially a carbon-copy of NBA 2K19 with the title NBA 2K20 slapped on it.
- The desktop icon in the PC version is literally the same as NBA 2K19.
A bunch of features in the previous NBA 2K games are absent here, such as player customization or roster customization.
- Despite all these features being removed, the game still costs $60. Thus making the game overpriced.
While both modes have a lot of depth, MyGM and MyLeague have been dumbed down.
The animations of almost everything are sluggish, it's as if the entire game is played in slow-motion.
Not only that, but the overall quality of the animations is mediocre and stiff. An example of poor animation can be seen here.
The controls are unresponsive, this is likely because of the slow animation as mentioned above.
There are a lot of bugs, such as the progression systems freezing out of nowhere, or players missing shots no matter how perfectly they execute the shot.
- Crashes are also common.
Loading screens are incredibly long. Some loading screens can take up to 12 hours, even longer than all of Sonic '06's loading screens combined. This can easily make someone believe that the game's broken.
Connecting to online servers also takes an incredibly long time. More often than not the game will fail to connect to the servers.
- These errors can also cause players to lose whatever progression they have made, wasting their time as a result.
There is a new feature called the "Action Point" system that is downright terrible. You're forced to do a task every day just to be able to play a game mode.
- This mechanic is very similar to the "energy" mechanic used by many mobile games to limit the player's actions, usually with the possibility of obtaining extra energy by paying varying amounts of real-world currency.
The story mode is very short.
Most of the dialogue in the story mode is poorly written and cringy.
Very poor optimization on the PC version. Even on the lowest graphic settings, the game will struggle to reach 30fps.
The game forces players to watch unskippable ads, a feature that is more suitable for free-to-play mobile games than AAA console games.^[1] This is not the first time that NBA 2K has done this, as NBA 2K19 also had the same issue.
Even the cover has drawn criticism with some not liking Anthony Davis as well as being crept by his appearance. Frankly, he looks like a pedophile, which seems appropriate given 2K's predatory push for underage gambling and their efforts to use children against regulation as exploitation, and 2K charging extra for the Dwayne Wade special edition.
On January 22, 2020, 2K took everyone's VC due to glitches to get it free in the system. But even innocent players who bought it also got theirs removed. Due to this, everyone is calling NBA 2K20's VC a scam.
They banned half the people who play the game due to technical issues flagging them for boosting and gaining an unfair advantage that allows them to avoid gambling mechanics. When asked to show what the issue is 2K refuses to provide evidence or allow the ban to be appealed, causing basically half their fan base to turn on the company.
The game's play now mode became unplayable for a while, with only a few matches that were frozen for months, due to the ongoing real life NBA season being suspended until July 31, 2020 because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which started on December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has been spread to the United States since January 13, 2020, thus breaking the game's simulation!
The soundtrack is almost exclusively rap (with a couple of Pop/EDM songs and "Live Wire" by 80's rock band Motley Crue).^[2] Almost all of the songs are very heavily censored to remove words that wouldn't be acceptable in an E-rated game.
Like previous years and other series by 2K, the game cheats. It's even worse in My Player as part of the progression involves rating your performance. Okay, nice touch, so what? Numerous times this will be rigged against you, for example, you are assigned to guard a player, then on a whim, it changes to someone way out of position, and your rating drops for leaving the assignment and drops further because you allowed the opponent to score despite doing as you're told and no way of being able to stop them. Likely tied to pushing to pay to win or gamble for boosts.
The Neighborhood in this game is also literally copy-pasted from the predecessor, aside from the court colors changing, and the Jordan REC Center becoming a simple REC Center.

Redeeming Qualities

At least the NBA 2K MyTeam mode has a good amount of daily content produced during the pandemic, unlike MUT 20, which stopped putting out content after June 2020.
Despite the slow animation, the graphics are still good.
The WNBA makes its debut in the 2K series.
The soundtrack (despite being censored) is actually good.
This is the last game in the series where (if you’re at legend rep at park) you can VIP someone off their court (which means removing someone off of their court). That mechanic caused many complaints among players, most notably FlightReacts. Thankfully this has been removed in installments after this game.
Despite somewhat being dumbed down with the introduction of the aforementioned Action Point system, the MyGM and MyLeague modes are still the best part of the game with their depth.

Reception

Despite getting mostly mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, (likely due to 2K bribing them, similar to NBA 2K18) NBA 2K20 has been heavily review bombed by users, and is often considered the worst NBA 2K game to date. On Metacritic, the game has a user score of 1/10 on the PS4, a 1.2 on the Xbox One, a 1.1/10 on the PC, and a 1.8/10 on the Nintendo Switch.^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]

On Steam, the game initially received "overwhelmingly negative" reviews, with only 16% of over 1,700 reviews being positive. Most of the "most helpful" reviews warn people to not buy the game due to the pay-to-win features, and a majority of the reviews that actually recommend the game are very sarcastic. The percentage of positive reviews increased over time, (probably because of people starting to enjoy the game throughout the first months of COVID-19) with 46% of the reviews now recommending the game.^[7]

In his video about the game being review bombed, YongYea called the game an "utter disaster".

The controversy surrounding NBA 2K20 played a role in exposing the corruption of PEGI and the ESRB as most of these rating boards willfully rated a game with loot boxes and gambling mechanics a rating that would allow children as young as 3 to play them. It was also pointed out that PEGI had given old Pokemon games with a casino minigame were given PEGI 12 ratings for having "simulations of gambling" yet those same organizations gave NBA 2K20 a PEGI 3 rating despite having direct gambling imagery.

In response to the lackluster sales of the game, Take-Two gave out free digital copies of NBA 2K20, proving that their microtransactions and money hungriness are at the level of most free mobile games.

Angry Joe ranked it as the 10th worst game of 2019, along with the other sports games released in 2019. In fact, it is considered to be one of the worst games of 2019 not just from Angry Joe.

Videos

References

Comments

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[1] ttps://gamerant.com/nba-2k20-unskippable-ads/

[2] ttps://nba2kw.com/nba-2k20-soundtrack-complete-list-of-all-46-songs-feat-drake-nipsey-hussle-post-malone-more/

[3] ttps://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/nba-2k20

[4] ttps://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-one/nba-2k20

[5] ttps://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/nba-2k20

[6] ttps://www.metacritic.com/game/switch/nba-2k20

[7] ttps://store.steampowered.com/app/1089350/NBA_2K20/

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