NBA 2K24 Unveils Gameplay Improvements

Ahead of NBA 2K24 being officially released on September 8, details were recently revealed as to just how things have improved on the court from a gameplay standpoint. Gameplay director Mike Wang detailed some of the biggest changes you can expect to see in NBA 2K24 and how developers have addressed areas where the series had been lacking in the past. Here’s a look at what items were discussed and how these changes are expected to impact the way the action unfolds in various game modes.

NBA 2K24 Gameplay Reveal

Shooting has received a great deal of attention in NBA 2K24, with this component of the game specifically customized for every difficulty. Within MyCareer where you can play 5-on-5 games in the Rec Center or assemble smaller teams on other courts within the City (which will be making a return), you’ll be subject to the ultimate challenge of shooting on Hall of Fame difficulty. Because you’ll still miss any shots in which you don’t “green” your release with perfect timing, this will make the component of the game even more skill-based than it already was in NBA 2K23. However, you can expect shooting to be slightly less challenging in any team-based mode where the timing mechanic will be a little more forgiving. To this end, NBA 2K24 will have a new visual cue setting that will help you to better time the shot release of players who are especially slow or quick at getting the ball out of their hands.

There have been some changes when you get closer to the rim as well, where wide open layups will be easier than ever to convert because of larger timing windows. The fancier layups are now expected to be more effective and you can pull them off in traffic — provided you’re able to time these up correctly. Dunking the ball seems as if it should be more fun this year as well, largely thanks to the fact that you can now hang and swing on the rim after throwing down any two-handed dunk. When you want to crush a flashier dunk and hype up the crowd, the game’s dunk meter will now be a little harder to time well on the higher difficulties. Play in the paint has been refined overall to have the strength and weight of big men truly felt, giving them more flexibility to put back offensive rebounds and make hop shots and fades from the post.

For better or worse, there have been enhancements to dribbling that will make point guards happy and likely all of their online teammates (and opponents) a little wary. There are hundreds of new dribble breakdowns that can be executed by just pushing up on the right stick, ranging from those that are designed to simply size up a defender to others that are a precursor to driving to the rack. With more dribble combos at your disposal and the ability to now control blowout dribbles on fast breaks, NBA 2K24 looks like it will cater to those who really enjoy bouncing the ball. There will even be the return of adrenaline boosts to make ball handlers more elusive. These have been redesigned to provide more freedom to create off the bounce while their defenders can reduce a ball handler’s shooting attributes if they stick close to them.

As if to combat the power of the dribble, developers have spent plenty of time revamping defense with a focus on eliminating the persistent sliding that has plagued the game for years and making it easier to body up your opponent. The improvement of contest logic should make it harder for players to drain shots as long as you’re in an ideal spot that would impact their accuracy. Blocks will see more risk and reward, allowing you to swat away balls when you jump at the right time and punishing you for those moments when you bite at a pump fake and rise up at the wrong time. Directional steals with the right stick will be making a return in NBA 2K24, which are intended to produce more steals when you reach with the hand closest to the ball and more fouls when you reach across the body.

The takeovers that players have been able to unleash in the past after making a series of nice plays have been tweaked slightly in NBA 2K24 to allow you to choose a category of takeover in real time. This has been done to introduce a strategic element that will force you to decide what takeover could best help your team depending on the game’s situation. A new simplified play-calling overlay will attempt to streamline what could be a needlessly complicated process in the past. There was also talk of better substitution logic to prevent your coach from removing all your scorers from the game at the same time and keeping the ideal lineup on the floor at crunch time.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Mike Wang teased the implementation in NBA 2K24 of something called Pro Play, which makes it capable of translating action from real-life NBA games into NBA 2K24 animations. This should help to alleviate the burden of having to motion capture players in a studio, which will especially add realism from players who have never been motion captured in the past for whatever reason, such as Kevin Durant.