NBA Live 365: Rosters and AI baked fresh every morning
In what will undoubtedly become EA Sports’ signature feature throughout its product line in years to come, “365″ made its first public appearance at E3 on Monday with NBA Live 09.
At the recent NBA Live 09 community event in Burnaby, British Columbia, I sat down with the game’s producers, who took pains to explain what NBA Live 365 was and how it worked. While the assembled personnel didn’t have any problem wrapping their heads around it, it’s possible that it won’t make sense to the casual gamer at first. Nevertheless, NBA Live 365 stands to change the way sports video games are created and every gamer stands to benefit from it, whether they understand it or not.
Let me give you a little personal background into how this kind of feature is created. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked for a company called STATS, Inc.; one of the first sports tracking firms. My role was to track every pitch - and the result of every pitch - in baseball games played by the Colorado Rockies. During a game, I would have a computer in front of me, and I’d enter the pitcher’s name, the batter’s name and - pitch-by-pitch - what happened. But it wasn’t like keeping score. I would use a kind of shorthand, something like, “P3:S86A3-F7M”, which basically meant: The third pitch of the at-bat was an 86 mph slider thrown to grid location “A3″, the lower left corner of the plate. The batter swung and flew out to the left fielder in grid location “M”, shallow left field near the foul line.
The shorthand fit neatly into a database that I was accessing in real-time, and as the season went on, clear tendencies for each player in the major leagues would emerge. This data was often translated into a visual representation and became very valuable to baseball teams, managers and players. As sports tracking firms began to multiply, this data became the “hot and cold zones” you see on television today, as well as the base for many other new statistics. In the end, companies started tracking detailed statistics in every sport, and the seemingly-unpredictable human reactions of players became surprisingly predictable. Athletes, like every other human being, are creatures of habit, and for the first time, these habits became viewable by their opponents in a clear format.
This type of scouting changed the way sports themselves were played, and now, they’re set to do the same for video-game sports.
For NBA Live 09, EA Sports partnered with Synergy Sports Technologies, a sports tracking company that breaks NBA players’ actions down to reveal their tendencies. Gathered every night, every player and every team is updated with their latest information and delivered to the game through NBA Live 365, which drives team and player AI. So if cover athlete Tony Parker has been driving to his left more often, the next time you play the Spurs, he’ll do it to you, too.
The ramifications of this feature are clear; no longer does a game’s artificial intelligence have to be “scripted” by the development team - it can be driven by the data itself. And since the data’s ever-changing, Kevin Garnett, for example, won’t play on the Celtics like he did as a member of the Timberwolves.
Players’ tendencies change when they’re incorporated into a new team, and sometimes, teams’ tendencies change when a player gets injured or a coaching change is made. Now, this feature can help ensure that every team and every player plays like their real-life counterpart. The Pistons and Spurs will plod in their half-court set, while the Warriors and Nuggets will be firing up shots with reckless abandon. Instead of facing LeBron James and the game’s consistent “small forward” AI, you’ll be facing LeBron, knowing that his virtual alter-ego has the same mindset as the dynamic All-Star instead.
If NBA Live 365 works as it’s supposed to - and in reality, since it’s essentially a slight change of database numbers nightly, it should - NBA Live 09 stands to be a landmark in gaming; where the greatest innovation of game AI design may turn out to be doing almost nothing at all.
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5WG will return with a new editorial on Friday, July 18.
on July 14th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Wow.
Wow.
This is the most incredible thing I’ve heard of in a video game.
Any word on if Madden, or NHL will adopt this feature?
on July 15th, 2008 at 6:18 am
I like the concept, and I don’t think the “casual” will have difficulty understanding what’s going on. Peter Moore is currently on a campaign to make everything easily accessible and understood, I doubt he’ll allow this big of a feature to be portrayed as complicated and difficult to comprehend.
What is odd to me is that it will only apply to offense to begin with. That’s what is being reported (pastapadre.com). That seems unbalanced. You have this great innovative feature that will “change the ways sports games are made” and it will be included in 50% of the game. So, the conclusion I get is “We (EA) are introducing 365 as the better ratings technology, making the rating system in our sports games more dynamic, but for only half of the sport.”
Is that what is to be understood? If so, why not wait until it’s completely finished and introduce it in 2010 and then work on some of the things that have made the game inferior to the competition? In the last 2 years, EA Sports has added some very positive things into their games, but in this game, NBA Live, which is known among the sports gaming community as flawed and not where it should be in the gameplay department, I think the concentration should be on not introducing a new feature that is 50% done. They run the risk of getting tagged as the hype machine that doesn’t polish their games, they just introduce the latest “gimmick.”
on July 15th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Kory - Not this year for “Madden” or “NHL”, but if Synergy or another partner can provide EA with the right data, I’d expect 365 to be incorporated into all their games within a few years.
on July 15th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Dave -
That’s a good point, but consider that “tendencies” on defense are primarily a response to the offense, at least by a far greater margin. It’s not unbalanced, because it doesn’t provide the offense with any direct advantage - it’s used to differentiate the players from one another.
What they’ve done in NBA Live 09 in response, however, is to simplify things - something I covered here. There’s no “countering” necessary; if you can stay in front of your man, you can be effective on “D”.
The difference now is if you know that Tony Parker prefers to drive to his right, you can generally force him in a direction where he “feels” less comfortable, much like real NBA defenses try to do.
It’s no gimmick - if nothing else, the daily roster updates are worth it - but undoubtedly, if the game itself doesn’t tighten up and become something special, then 365’s impact is drastically lessened.
The play’s the thing, of course, but I see this as a real innovation; possibly the biggest one EA’s had since they started using right-analog-stick controls. It’s just “under the hood” instead.
on July 15th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
2 thumbs up Ea Sports… Great for this move…
on July 15th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
so once the NBA Season in over in real life time… whats happends next with nba live with the updates and game overall?
on July 15th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Hi Sean,
I too wouldn’t call it a gimmick. I just see that as being the response of many who feel NBA Live is lacking, and the last thing it needs is something external to the core gameplay.
I’d also say that online team play currently gets my nod for the greatest thing since right analog controls. I have really enjoyed FIFA 08, a game I don’t play at all unless it’s team play. If only EA had a baseball game to use the feature with.
on August 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 pm
i cant wait till this comes out im tryin to decide if i want this or madden