

Now, you can pursue different careers while waiting to continue your basketball focus, which provides you with other rewards that you can use as you progress.Įven with additional NPCs and a focus on activities, we couldn't help but feel like the city was included for commercial showcase rather than reinventing the M圜areer mode. Interestingly for an NBA game, Visual Concepts - the developers - have tied the side stories and activities around the city with your character's involvement on the court. You will be meeting with various NPCs to progress through the campaign and engaging with other core characters that shape your playable character's identity. The storyline for M圜areer is primarily the same but uses the city as a central location for quests and activities. Despite this, the city returns and is a core component of M圜areer. NBA 2K21 introduces the city, which is underwhelming mainly due to the lack of content. M圜areer makes a return in NBA 2K22 with additional changes sure to keep previous players enticed to try their luck once more. These new systems, tied with new animations, help prevent more infuriating playstyles from previous games and create overall fairer gameplay for both sides. NBA 2K22 has also updated various systems supporting contesting, blocking, and defense in general. To some, this can add further playability and increase the reward to succeeding and coming ahead of your opponent, especially in an online setting. Similarly, learning to use these skills helps create a higher skill cap ceiling, allowing players to learn the in-depth systems to create an advantage, rather than mindlessly using the same tactic in each game.


A strategic style of play like this naturally slows the game's pace down but creates a realistic feel as a result. This system now forces players to consider how they will move up the court and what other strategies and skills to use to take the shot to have a minimal impact on stamina.

When your player's stamina is low, your shot bar will continually shrink, making it substantially more challenging to land the perfect shot. NBA 2K22 noticed this and said it was time for a change. Running along the perimeter was a well-exploited strategy that would see you break the AI defense for some easy points. In previous NBA 2K titles, it was easy to create a hole in the defense line by abusing each player's abundant stamina.
