Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five provides five reasons why The City and The Neighborhood in NBA 2K’s MyCAREER quite frankly suck.

I realise that bluntly stating that The City and The Neighborhood suck isn’t exactly constructive criticism, and provocative to the point of almost being clickbait. With that being said, am I wrong? When The Neighborhood was announced for NBA 2K18, I remember it being met with considerable enthusiasm. I also recall feeling more cynical about the idea, and although I wasn’t alone in that regard, 2K had enough goodwill at the time for people to shout down any criticism as hating. Not to be smug or anything, but five years later, we supposed “haters” were proven right.

That’s not to say that everyone now hates The Neighborhood in Current Gen, or The City in Next Gen. Several gamers bemoaned NBA 2K20’s recycling of NBA 2K19’s Neighborhood, as if it were the biggest issue with MyCAREER and the online scene. However, many more gamers have come to see the problems with MyCAREER attempting to have an open world, and are growing fed up with its impact on online and offline play alike. It may sound like hyperbole to say that they’re the absolute worst additions to NBA 2K’s career and connected experiences, but as these five criticisms outline, The City and Neighborhood have had a major negative impact.

1. So Much Wasted Time

2K loves to tout how many hours basketball gamers have spent in the latest release. It’s understandable, as those numbers are always impressive. Of course, unless 2K’s metrics only account for time actually spent on the virtual hardwood and blacktop, those numbers are being padded by traversing The City and Neighborhood. Even if they aren’t counting towards numbers that 2K can brag about to the community and shareholders alike, the bottom line is that since The Neighborhood debuted and then evolved into The City on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, we’ve been wasting time navigating them as part of the MyCAREER experience; even if we don’t play online.

Sure, if we tallied up the time we spend in MyCAREER’s pseudo open worlds and compared it to the hours we accumulate actually playing virtual basketball, the latter would likely be the larger figure. I’m not going to exaggerate and say that we literally spend half of our time in The City or Neighborhood. That time does add up though, and since NBA 2K18, it’s made simple tasks such as loading into Pro-Am or Walk-On/The Rec, or obtaining cosmetic items, a longer process than they need to be. NBA 2K isn’t Fallout, or The Elder Scrolls, or Grand Theft Auto. Even with Fast Travel in NBA 2K23, there’s a lot of time-wasting filler that could be spent playing basketball.

2. Shifting Focus Away from Basketball

The introduction of quests has contributed to the aforementioned filler, while also shifting focus away from the NBA and a pure virtual basketball experience. Yes, it still comes down to playing virtual hoops at the end of the day, but if we want to earn additional VC and XP, we’re tasked with taking photos, being in fashion shows, and meeting up with NPCs in The City. Meanwhile, The Neighborhood is on a cruise ship these days, featuring quests of its own. We literally shop for clothes, and can grind for Season rewards such as go-karts and jetpacks. The VC rewards for quests – the only reason for slogging through them – are also far too small given the effort they require.

Speaking of clothing, cosmetic items have gained far too much importance. As I’ve noted before, they’ve become a makeshift matchmaking system, perpetuating elitism as gamers get shunned for not having the “right” look (not unlike the bullying that occurs with basic Fortnite skins). 2K only encourages this behaviour by promoting the premium clothing on social media more frequently than they discuss NBA-related topics. This of course is another fine opportunity to bring up Ronnie 2K’s remark back in 2016 that NBA 2K is “more than a Barbie dress-up game“, a snarky response that has aged terribly as The City and Neighborhood have become all about the “fit”.

3. More Excuses For Microtransactions

Even if you pre-order the special editions of NBA 2K, that 100,000 VC won’t stretch as far as it used to for attribute upgrades. Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing that you’ll need to budget for. That is to say, upgrades for your player are technically the only purchases you need to make with VC, but as I outlined above, making sure your avatar looks the part is essential if you don’t want to get shunned in The Playground. As such, you’ll inevitably wind up doing some clothes shopping to identify yourself as a serious online gamer (ironically by adopting a cartoonish style of fashion). You can avoid doing this, but the point is that there’s pressure to buy or grind for more VC.

Furthermore, while you personally may be able to abstain from buying any cosmetic items, or patiently grind to get them with a No Money Spent approach, not everyone can resist. Simply put, recurrent revenue mechanics are often predatory, aiming for gamers with poor impulse control and addictive personalities, and kids (or indeed anyone) who will fall victim to FOMO. They’re the ones who’ll pay extra to upgrade faster, get premium clothes so they don’t look like a newbie with the default outfit, and buy skateboards and bicycles, along with their expensive upgrades. These open worlds aren’t about having fun. They’re all about advertising, and getting us to spend.

4. Refusal To Implement Matchmaking

There’s a reason that the online scene in NBA 2K has become so toxic and elitist. When you throw everyone onto a server irrespective of progress and skill level, and leave matchmaking up to the userbase, it’s going to be a disaster. Consider the issues raised in this thread over on the official NBA 2K subreddit. A lot of gamers don’t want to play with newbies, and their objections aren’t completely unjustified. To that point though, it speaks to how a lack of matchmaking doesn’t allow newcomers to gain experience in the online arena, and level up to tougher competition as they improve. In turn, their inexperience ends up hurting the quality of competitive play.

Putting aside the supposedly elite squads that prefer to feast on newbies and teams of randoms rather than facing challenging competition – who shouldn’t be catered to in the first place – it would benefit everyone if there were robust matchmaking and ranking in The City and Neighborhood. It means less freedom, but it’d provide fair competition while allowing gamers to improve at their own pace. Mind you, when the game throws everyone into the same place, it pushes people towards buying VC to get upgrades, boosts, and clothes, as well as waste time working out in the gym. They’ve even charged for haircuts and private courts in the past, which was just disgraceful.

5. They’ve Killed MyCAREER Offline

Here’s the biggest reason that The City and The Neighborhood suck. You can avoid giving into FOMO, and patiently grind for VC. You can probably get games here and there without your MyPLAYER having the right look, or you may be more interested in Pro-Am/The Rec. You can find a way to tolerate the nonsense of the online scene and make the most of it, or avoid it altogether. As much as some gamers scoff at it, there are still people who enjoy the NBA side of MyCAREER. Unfortunately, thanks to the adoption of The City and The Neighborhood, even the NBA experience relies on server-side content and always being online. This has killed MyCAREER offline.

Admittedly, the offline version of MyCAREER was already being steadily stripped down by the time The Neighborhood came along in NBA 2K18, but that accelerated its demise. Whereas previous iterations of MyCAREER were still fairly intact after the servers were shut down, NBA 2K18 and NBA 2K19’s offline MyCAREER modes were glorified player-locked MyLEAGUE. You couldn’t even replay the pre-NBA stories! As of NBA 2K20, MyCAREER simply isn’t available offline. Thanks to fully adopting an open world MMORPG approach, a single player experience is no longer available once online support ends. This sucks for retro gamers, and content creators.

What’s your take on The City and The Neighborhood being an always online hub for MyCAREER? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.

The post The Friday Five: 5 Reasons The City & Neighborhood Suck appeared first on NLSC.