Letter from NBA LIVE 14 Executive Producer Sean O’Brien

I’m not going to lie; it’s been a rough week. As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly the NBA LIVE comeback story we were hoping for this year.

We hear loud and clear that some of you are disappointed in various aspects of NBA LIVE 14, and I’m sorry if the game doesn’t live up to your expectations. Looking at your feedback, we have laid out a plan to make NBA LIVE 14 a better game as quickly as we can.

First, you’ve told us that the game is too hard to learn, and that the only way to figure it out is through frustrating trial-and-error. As a result, we are working on improving the way the game teaches the controls and on-boards new users. We realize that every single one of you is a new user and know we need to make the game easier to understand and simpler to pick up and play.

We’re also conducting an ongoing series of Twitch Live Streams to teach the skills that will help make your game experience a better one. We have our producers and designers online seven days a week to answer your questions and to offer other helpful game advice. Additionally, we’ve posted Controller Guide, Perfecting Your Style and Levels of the Dribble blogs on the NBA LIVE website which we hope will help you with basic offense, defense, play calling and more.

We’re not going to stop there. You’ve also let us know that you’re disappointed by the graphics and animations, and I can tell you that we are committed to making drastic and immediate improvements. In order to get gameplay up and running this year we had to prioritize. We felt authentic gameplay, control and the connected experience would provide the best foundation for the future. As a result, game visuals and animation polish suffered.  Improvements on these fronts are also in development now for NBA LIVE 14. You will notice in the coming weeks and months that the game’s visuals and animation will improve significantly.

A goal from the start was to stay relevant to the ongoing NBA season and evolve your gaming experience. We’ve been hearing that you love LIVE Season, and many of you are having a lot of fun with BIG Moments. We’re really glad to hear you’re enjoying the mode, and rest assured we will continue updating LIVE Season with new BIG Moments and NBA Rewind games every single day of the season. We’ve also gotten a lot of great feedback on LIVE Ultimate Team, and we’ve still got some big announcements and major additions coming down the road, so stick around for that.

Let me wrap up with this; for those of you who have supported us throughout this development cycle and continue to have our backs now, thank you. We’ve got a lot of work to do; I’ve got a lot of work to do. It started 12 months ago, and continues until we build this franchise bigger and better than it ever was. This is just the first chapter in the NBA LIVE comeback story.