As promised, NBA Live 14 pumped out a very large patch today to address the many shortcomings, omissions or problems the title showed at launch. Straight away it includes something that should make the game a lot more understandable: A simple practice mode.
This weekend NBA Live 14 rolled out a patch, but cautioned it was more of a building-block update, designed mostly to help future patches improve the game more conspicuously. The team also dropped this tutorial video, which is notable because it appears to show a new practice mode.
NBA Live 14 showed a lot of problems at release a month ago—problems EA Sports vowed to fix through title updates. They rolled out the first patch for the game on Friday and, like everything else with this series for the past three years, it's another promise this will be a good game at some future date.
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It's hard to remember, but NBA Live was once a challenger to the formidable NBA 2K. If you care about aggregated ratings, NBA Live 10 and NBA 2K10 finished in a dead heat. Live had stolen away one of 2K's top designers. It was fargin' war. Then EA Sports burned down everything. We haven't seen the series since 2009.
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Maybe people aren't cooing over it the way they are the NBA 2K14 hype reel released Thursday, but NBA Live 14's gameplay trailer does have its virtues.
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NBA Live 14 announced its launch date earlier this week—Nov. 19, which is curious, as that is four days after the PlayStation 4 launches and still there's a PS4/NBA Live 14 launch bundle (currently sold out) due to drop on Nov. 15.
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Hall-of-fame stars from the NBA's past will be a part of NBA Live 14, though exactly how isn't known, as one of the game's designers took to Twitter to roll out some early details of a title that will have a lot to prove when it arrives.
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Reading between the lines of an open letter by NBA Live's new executive producer, one understands that whatever comes next in that franchise is really no continuation of last year's effort, which, like its 2010 predecessor, was aborted a few weeks before its assumed date of release.
In 2010, EA Sports brought NBA Elite 11 to E3 as a shootaround demo only. I remember this vividly. You played as one player in a practice setting, learning the timing of the new stick-shooting controls. If you still have the ill-fated NBA Elite 11 demo, go to its practice mode, that's what we saw three years ago.
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Back under new management, EA Sports' beleaguered NBA Live series will return late this year only on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game promises a new ballhandling and dribbling engine called "bounceTek" that you can see in this video.
NBA Live 14, assuming it ships, figures to add an Ultimate Team mode, if a developer's bio is any indication. I asked and EA Sports said no comment. If true, it probably means they're building a full retail product, not the $20 downloadable that NBA Live 13 was rumored to be.
