NBA LIVE 19

PRODUCT OWNER - PS4 / XB1

For LIVE 19, I pitched an idea that I'd been sitting on for a while, which eventually ended up becoming Court Battles. I designed the experience from the ground up, including the initial design for the court customization feature, and led a diverse rock-star team of devs working in three different studios through to completion.

Since launch, Court Battles has been lauded as one of the more fun and unique experiences to be found in recent sports games.

"The Court Battle mode is probably the most unique mode I have seen in a basketball (or perhaps any sports title) in some time." - Digitally Download

"NBA Live 19 is heads and shoulders above its competition with its Court Battles mode and it's a fantastic piece of innovation." - Screen Rant

"It’s a surprisingly deep mode that adds some significance to the act of recruiting new players from The Streets and a welcome addition to the overall package of The One." - EGM Now

Design Challenges

DESIGN CHALLENGES

Online Asynchronous Mode

I designed Court Battles to be an online asynchronous mode for two reasons: first, because I wanted to create a gateway feature for users who weren't typically comfortable competing in the online space and second, because I wanted to experiment using mobile-inspired strategy mechanics in a console sports game. The asynchronous nature of the mode brought with it a slew of new challenges like handling battle exchange states between friends vs random users or handling rewards for games started while a campaign (the window within which users could accumulate courts) was valid but completed after it expired. These challenges forced us to tread into unfamiliar territory, but through a lot of discussion and collaboration we were able to come up with efficient and viable solutions.

Player Motivations

Court Battles was originally designed as a feature for our moneitzed Ultimate Team mode. My original intent for the feature was to solve a specific issue within that mode around motivating users to care about more than their five best players and encourage them to collect and manage multiple teams of players. Due to a creative pivot late in the cycle in which the feature was moved into our non-monetized RPG-like "The One" mode, those motivations were no longer relevant and I was forced to rethink what would drive the player in this new environment. Since we couldn't faithfully recreate the collection mechanics from Ultimate Team in the time we had, I ultimately I ended up focusing more on the accumulation and celebration of controlling other people's courts. This was manifested within the UI and through the rewards system, which resonated with users in our testing.

Customization

Some of my main goals and challenges within Court Battles were to encourage self-expression, generate variety and replayability within the feature and to motivate player retention. These goals would largely be achieved through various forms of customization. In the case of self-expression, we allowed users to customize the look of their court with various logos, colors, textures, fonts and text. These customized courts complimented our defense crafting mechanic which allowed users to build their defensive team and set customizable rule sets to protect their court. Combined, these customized courts and defenses created an enormous amount of variety within the community and made every game a different experience. Lastly, to encourage players to return we created a plan to provide post launch content both within the in-game store and through limited time live events.

Previous Game

TOP

Next Game