NBA 2K22 Does Not Want You to Play With Friends Online (On Next-Gen Consoles)

One of the more random issues that has cropped up during the NBA 2K generation change from last-gen consoles to new-gen/next-gen consoles has to do with the oversights relating to playing with friends online in the “play now” mode. The “play now” variant where you invite a friend to the “locker room” had one relatively large issue last year in NBA 2K21. Now with the NBA 2K22 play with the friends online mode, a new bug has become a major roadblock to playing the mode.

NBA 2K22 Play With Friends Online Bug On Next-Gen Consoles

Last year, the issue was that you could not pick your own team (if you were the guest/away team) or jerseys in NBA 2K21. Sometimes you even went into games and were controlling the wrong team. It was a weird bug but it was more a nuisance than a major roadblock. I played tons of games with friends and had a good time. At the end of the day, it’s not really a big deal having to pick the team or jersey for a buddy. And if you did end up controlling the wrong team, it was annoying but you just left the game and tried again.

While it was strange this bug never got fixed last year, we assumed during a crazy pandemic year with new consoles being launched that it was just one of those things that slipped through the cracks. With NBA 2K22, we’d get back to normal and everything would be cool again. After all, we really don’t expect much with this mode. We just want to be able to play friends with a minimal amount of control over a couple things.

This year, the irony is that the jersey selection and controlling the wrong team are no longer issues. The problem is now you can’t pick how long quarters are or the difficulty level. This means you’re locked into playing with five minute quarters on what’s likely the default pro difficulty. It’s a truly bizarre mistake that has gone uncorrected now months later, especially when factoring in that it’s still normal and functional on last-gen PS4/Xbox.

I honestly do not know why the different versions of the game would have different functionality in this very specific area, but I do know it’s a bummer. I would chalk this up to the generation changeover, but again, that happened last year and it was a different bug then. The audience for this specific online mode is probably small, and obviously no one can suckle on the microtransaction udder if they’re playing this mode, but I don’t think it’s something sinister like that being the reason this particular functionality is all goofed up. Instead, I do think this is a legitimate mistake that gets missed during testing — because technically it’s not a bug — and then it falls outside of some development scope and then never gets fixed.

I don’t want this sort of thing to go unnoticed for the future though (and it seems like a far less involved issue than something like help defense), so I do want to go through a bit of a “play now online” history lesson here before dipping out.

Looking Back

Playing with friends online in 2K has gone through many stages through the generations. Through the years, it’s constantly been streamlined, and that’s okay because so has the play now online (PNO) mode itself. The developers have ripped out a lot of the presentation during games (probably due to online de-syncs). They have taken out postgame replays some years. There was even a time years ago when lobbies were a thing. In short, things that slowed down the process of getting into a game or slowed you down from finishing a game were stripped out. These were planned cuts more or less I would say — and that’s fine.

More specifically to playing with friends online, the devs took out an ability to tweak game sliders before the game some years back (there may have even been custom rosters at one point but I might be crazy), but otherwise it’s mostly gone hand in hand with PNO. That said, the interface for a PNO game is much different than one for a play now game against a friend. PNO uses a specific user interface and intro screens that do not relate to playing a friend online. Instead, an online play now game mostly resembles a normal offline play now game in how it sets up.

My guess is because these two modes are just different enough, it’s led to some fraying at the seams and now the developers just miss something like this and then never get around to fixing it before shipping the game. I’m not excusing the oversight, but I’m just pointing out that “cuts” to the mode have been made before. However, this sort of “cut” does not feel like those. This feels like a legitimate mistake rather than just a development team streamlining the mode.

With that in mind, this most reminds me of one of my pet peeves from years ago. Probably two generations ago at this point, there was a UI setting in the options menu where you could set what was under a player you were controlling online. So depending on what you picked in the settings, when X player had the ball they would either have their name, or their number and position, or just their number displayed under them. However, at some point, you couldn’t change that online anymore. When a player received the ball on the opposing team or you picked a new player, you would just see their gamertag/PSN.

It bugs me to this day because as you can see above, the two players being controlled have their PSN names (ChucklesBiscotti/watson-17), but then the two players right next to the ball have their real names right there (Joe Harris/Lonnie Walker). It’s such a small change, but it still matters to me. If you don’t know the NBA inside and out or simply don’t recognize who has the ball right away, you might not know whether to shoot the ball or close out on a player. My assumption with something like this UI tweak years ago is it probably just got dropped when going from one console generation to the next because the UI team could not get everything done. It’s a small thing that gets overlooked, and then it never gets added back in when the new version launches.

I don’t want this play now change to be one of those things that lingers for a year or two, and then we just forget about it and accept the change. Playing with friends online being this lacking in the functionality department (especially when it works fine on last-gen consoles) is much bigger than my little pet peeve, but it could just as easily be one of those things we complain about for a cycle or two and then just forget about it because the audience playing this mode is not very big in the grand scheme of NBA 2K online modes.

Bottom Line

At the end of the day, you can still play with friends online how you want, but now you need to make online leagues to do that. It’s way more involved and way more annoying than it needs to be. Just let us play with our buds on HOF and with 12 minute quarters if we want to do that. This mode was not broken, and we didn’t even ask for anything new. We just wanted this mode to keep being the way we could get a game in with a friend online.

Please NBA 2K developers, we have to go back.