Warning: This post features spoilers for NBA 2K16’s story mode, Livin’ Da Dream

Visual Concepts has long dominated video game basketball. For NBA 2K16 they made one of their more ambitious moves with Livin’ Da Dream, a single player story mode. While a career mode has become an expected part of sports games, having a narrative driven mode hasn’t been attempted by the biggest brands. For many players these career modes go beyond simply following a single player and allow them to create their own stories. This time Visual Concepts attempted to build a story for the player. Written and directed by Spike Lee, Livin’ Da Dream ends up falling short. It pulls the player out of their story and the tone frequently clashes with the on-court action.

The story follows Frequency Vibrations, or Freq, a Harlem born basketball player as he goes from high school phenom to the NBA. The other major players in the story include your childhood friend Vic, your sister Cee Cee and your parents. Later on your girlfriend and agent become recurring characters and the team owner for your NBA franchise also makes a couple appearances. The story itself is mostly predictable; your sister thinks your girlfriend is a gold digger, your best friend drops your name to get women and your agent is always looking for a buck. These clichés could be overlooked if the rest of the story fit with your character but unfortunately it never connects.

Right away the story shoves the player aside by renaming your character. While the in-game announcers have recorded hundreds of names the story crafted by Lee isn’t about your character, it’s about Freq. None of the characters ever refer to your player by anything other than Frequency or Freq. Not only is it ridiculous to hear the team owner talk about how they are welcoming Frequency Vibrations to their team, it also removes the feeling that your character is the center of this story. The clash becomes even more obvious if you build a character who isn’t black. Your family is unchanged, and while this makes practical since as the characters are modeled after their respective actors, it doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. It can lead to some almost laugh out loud moments like your mother talking about what is was like when she was pregnant and you couldn’t look more different than her.

After playing a three game high school season you are given the option to choose a college. In a surprising, but welcome, twist the game licensed 10 real college teams such as Kansas, Michigan and Arizona. They even have the 2016 rookies on their respective college teams so when you play Wisconsin you see Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker on the court. Unfortunately picking your college is one of the only choices the game allows you to make.

The college season lasts four games, with the final game being the National Championship game. After each game you are given a measure of how your draft stock is trending and where you are likely to be picked. In my playthrough I struggled a bit in college and was projected to be picked outside the lottery. Coupled with a loss in the title game I thought it would be best to return to school for my sophomore year to improve my stock and take another shot at a championship. The game makes a big deal about this decision, culminating in a long cut scene featuring a conference call between your parents, agent Dom Pagnotti, your sister and your girlfriend Yvette who is introduced in this scene with no background at all.

The central conflict is between your father and Dom. Your father is adamant that you need to finish college while Dom is certain he will make you the number 1 pick. Ignoring the fact that the game had already told me there was no way I was going to be picked first overall I had already decided that returning to school was the best option. I told everyone I would sleep on it and as the screen faded I expected to see another menu, similar to when I chose a college, with the option to jump to the NBA or stay in school. Instead I was told that I had entered the NBA Draft. In this pivotal moment of my character’s career the decision was made for me so that Spike Lee could tell his story.

From this point on the story becomes a chain of cut scenes with no input at all from the player. Decisions are made for you and there isn’t anything you can do about it. The crux of your first NBA season is how your relationship with Vic is affecting your career. The game goes out of its way to stress your loyalty to Vic, however from the start they paint him as a selfish deadbeat. The very first scene talks about how he is constantly skipping class and discusses the benefits he has as an F.O.F. or friend of Freq. From there you see him ogling cheerleaders at every one of your high school games (and even your sister at one point). Everything about the guy made him out to be a dirt bag so when the team owner talked to me about cutting him loose and revealed how much I spent to solve some legal issues for him I was beyond done with the guy. Of course the game doesn’t care because this isn’t my story and it’s not my choice to make.

This all comes to a head in one of the more ridiculous scenes in the entire game. Freq and Vic get in a fight over the way he is spending your money and abusing your status. When Freq threatens to cut him off Vic reveals his ace in the hole. Years ago as children you got in a fight on a stair case with another boy and this other boy ended up falling down the stairs to his death. You ran away leaving Vic to take the fall and he did it to protect your brand. There was never any hint and the game never mentions this incident again. It was as if even Lee realized that there wasn’t any chance someone would like Vic so he had to give a reason for your character to stick by him.

While this craziness is happening off the court the basketball isn’t left out. The announcing crew also refers to you as Freq, only occasionally using your character’s name when announcing lineups. On top of that the characters in the game continually talk about your superstardom, at one point you are given your own line of Jordan’s, even when your play doesn’t warrant it. I had a typical rookie season, there were some ups and downs and I was never more than a role player. Off the court however, every cut scene talked about how much of a star I was. The dissonance between my level of play and the way everyone treated me added a layer of unintentional comedy to even the most serious scenes.

The most egregious gameplay error the game makes is sacrificing basketball for the story. In order to pace the story your rookie season is reduced to eight games plus playoffs. Player progression in the career mode is heavily reliant on playing games. You earn currency at the end of each game based on your performance and this is spent to upgrade your player. An average game performance will earn enough currency to level one of your skills up by a level or two at the early stages. When I started my player was rated 55 overall and by the end of my 8 game season I hadn’t even cracked 65 overall. The game robbed a year of player development to tell a story I wasn’t even able to influence. Thankfully the story only lasts your rookie season and after that the game changes to a more familiar career mode.

Livin’ Da Dream is an interesting experiment for sports games. It’s held back by Lee, who isn’t trying to hide the fact that he is making a movie and not a piece of interactive entertainment. While the experiment ultimately fails there is some potential for a narrative in a sports game. It’s easy to imagine a more interactive story with branching options and room to allow players to imprint their own personality and ideas into their characters. Hopefully Livin’ Da Dream is the first of many attempts to make this interesting idea work.

Yea, the idea of playing through HS, college(with real teams) and only some of your rookie year while telling a story was a good idea just poorly executed. Also, for being a high draft pick and vital to the team you sure do start off with a shitty rating.

While the experiment ultimately fails there is some potential for a narrative in a sports game.

Real Talk, i'm inclined to be more interested in conventually storyless games when they have a story added to it, and if a game would (did?) manage to have a compelling, actually interesting narrative about life as a pro athlete, i'd probably want to play it regardless of genre/sport

Always a bit disappointing to me that Codemasters never really pursued thier "story" content after the first Race Driver game. Sure, as opposed to more "traditional" sports, there are quite a bunch of racing/motorsport games with a story, but i'd love to see another racing game that manages to have a narrative set outside of the "EXTREME AND DANGEROUS WORLD OF ILLEGAL STREET RACING".

That said, my personal ideal would be that EA finally makes a new NBA Street game with a story that is a shameless rip-off of "White Guys Can't Jump", or a super ambitious sequel/reimagining of Punch Out!

EDIT: I'd also like to mention "Tony Hawk's Underground", first one specifically, for pulling of a "sports movie" story rather well with pitting you against your backstabby asshole best friend (Spoiler but really not) and centering around the end goal of giving you a shot to skate against the Pro's

@frybird: I don't know if telling it like a movie is the right way to go. I think Lee ultimately dragged this down because he had a story he wanted to tell and to do so meant taking away choices from the player. I think you can balance having a narrative through line with player choice in a manner similar to a game like Witcher 3. There was a story that you followed regardless of some choices but they made it believable no matter the path you took to get there.

@mems1224: The low rating didn't bother me as I was the 17th pick. I have huge upside because I can progress to a star so it's pretty similar to a lot of NBA picks. They bet on my upside.

I mean, sure, actually seeing footage of "Livin Da' Dream" turned me off that game again. But that is still more interest than i had in the first place....

The only good moment was that Vic Van Lier died. The biggest weakness was the fact that I didn't kill him myself. The lack of any real decision making (what you chose HS and College, that's it) was really limiting.

I've just watched some videos of it online, but man, that last cutscene is SO LONG.

In retrospect it's basically the same as the college and highschool parts with 4 more games tacked on. Second season is where the game actually starts but it takes away any chance of getting rookie of the year, which i guess most not be an achievement anymore. Good thing is you can skip all the cut scenes.

Just wait till "Chiraq" comes out, the city already boycotting this movie and it's not even released lol. Feels like Spike Lee is searching for a paycheck these days.

I'm left just thinking that a mode that actually followed you skills and actually lasted more than 8 games would have just been more fun? Right?

Start the mode where YOU make your character choosing everything from how they look to how they talk, and you pick two colleges as your "hopefuls". You pick one of eight women NPCs, with one of six voices to be your sister; you pick one of eight male NPCs with one of six voices to be your buddy; and you choose one of eight MEN or WOMEN to be your significant other. (Yes, you can be gay...and no nobody will really say anything about it...that person is just your girlfriend or boyfriend.) After you make yourself, your sister, buddy, and boy/girl friend; you choose one of 12 nicknames and you choose your full name to be used THROUGHT the story mode.

The game has six games in highschool with some story elements to intruces and get thinsg started. You then choose a college and how much fanfair is used about recruiting you, is based on you played/stats in high school. There will be a lot of story in college. You play six games per year in college (so as few as 6 and as many as 24 games before being recuited). The story is top heavy in freshman year, but the longer you stay in the more you see, but you won't miss a lot by getting drafted after sophomore year. Finally, you pick an agent and then you choose a team. How much fanfair there is when they draft you is based on how well you played in college. If you played poorly there will be no party or peopel cheering, if you plated well teh party gets bigger. The story mode moves into your rookie year in the NBA and culminates at the end of that first season.

The story throughout is based on how well you played foremost, but also based on choices you make and attitudes you take with NPC characters. Each character has a few different paths based on your choices. How well you play also opens/closes off actions/attitudes with those NPC characters, so there will also be a system in "New Game +" (after you finish the whole story mode) where you can replay any "game" to adjust how well you are going thus adjusting what happens or can happen next. After you play the story mode once you get some extra stuff in New Game + like adding a wardrobe choice taht will be seen throughout the story mode for you and YOUR NPC friends. If you want to dress preppy off the court you can. Clothing choices might be "Prep-school", "Suburban", "Urban Baller", "Goth Dark Lords", "Fabulous Contour", and "Napolean Dynamite". So those no only change how you dress but how your sister, buddy, and significant other dress.

@quarters: Its so long and it doesn't really do a good job of closing out the story. Again it felt like a point where Lee tried to make Vic likable because no one was going to feel any connection to him at all based on the way he was portrayed during the rest of the story. That is a major flaw of the story, characters are just dropped in and we are expected to just agree with the plot and accept their relationships with the main character. You know absolutely nothing about Yvette. She is dropped in as your girlfriend but you never find out how you met, what she does with her life (beyond one mention that she is starting a clothing line) or where she came from. The dissonance becomes distracting because Freq ostensibly cares about and knows these people but as the player I felt no connection to anyone in the story, except for maybe the parents.

My biggest issue with the failures of the story is that there are strong improvements to the rest of career mode this year. The way you actually manage your off days between fans, teammates, practice, endorsements and other NBA players was an interesting dynamic that I hope they expand on. It's also alluded at certain points, like making it to the all-star game, that you have a strong relationship with the other young stars in the league like Curry, Harden, The Brow, etc..Tthat is the stuff I want to see more of. I missed the aspect from recent year where players would come to your house at free agency to convince you to stay or come to their team. Or when you would be approached to do a shoot around because of a poor performance from the field.