NBA LIVE 18

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LEAD ONLINE DESIGNER - PS4 / XB1

Online features continued to make an impact in NBA LIVE 18 with the inclusion of LIVE Events (a new live service feature) and ongoing improvements to the Pro-Am experience started in NBA LIVE 16. The majority of my time however was spent designing a new single-player campaign mode called Pro-Am Tour. This mode, along with LIVE Events, combined to make up "The Streets" half of our new "The One" experience.

"Online in general has been and remains a strength for EA Sports games" - Sporting News

"Playing with other people is as unpredictable as it is enthralling but a bigger draw of multiplayer is its team-based scrimmages against CPU-controlled legends like Allen Iverson or Gary Payton. These side matches add variety to a campaign already stacked in diverse activities..." - Game Spot

"No matter which online mode I played, the servers and framerates proved stable, a refreshing change of pace from 2K’s on-again-off-again online experience." - Game Informer

DESIGN CHALLENGES

Pro-Am Tour

Building off the success of Pro-Am on LIVE 16, we decided to expand the street concept and integrate it into our new offline career feature, "The One". In an effort to mimic the always changing landscape of street ball teams, I set out to design a system that allowed us to generate dyanmic yet balanced teams around the user each time they played. The mode itself included a light narrative system delivered through text conversations and videos about each venue and league the user plays in. The experience is rounded out with the addition of objectives in each game to provide a secondary goal for the user to achieve.

Online Lobby UX

Although the online lobby was a success coming out of LIVE 16, there were a number of improvements that needed to be made in order to support our new progression systems. Redesigning the lobbies was an intense challenge simply due to the nature of having to balance visual complexity against the amount of information and functionality we needed to communicate to the user. In the end, we managed to make substantial changes which included adding 3D animated player models, a new lobby environment, the ability to view/swap player traits and support for displaying information about every player in the lobby.

Global Messaging System

One of our goals for LIVE 18 was to introduce more RPG-like systems into our game. To that end, in collaboration with our engineers, we came up with a design for a robust objective system which ultimately ended up being used for more than just objectives. The system was versitle enough to where it could be accessed from any area of the game and ended up being used for all of our different objective types (daily, in-game, etc.), as the basis of our rewards system, used to unlock various forms of content, as well as triggering telemetry and achievements. The dividends from this system were used directly in my Pro-Am Tour mode which was entirely constructed using this feature.

LIVE Events

The NBA LIVE series has always prided itself in delivering some form of "live" content to users and for LIVE 18 we wanted to create a new service model that could deliver online "live events" on a regular basis. My goal when setting out to design this system was to make sure that it was both modular and flexible. To that end, the modularity manifested itself through three different event types (solo, co-op and competitive) and the ability to template a number of different game types or rule sets. Within each game type you have the ability to tweak a shared list of settings in various ways in order to create variety.