NBA Live 2008: Dunks and Layups now back to one button

Filed in archive PC Gaming Insights on June 8, 2007

According to Brian Ullrich, lead producer for NBA Live 2008, one of the things they looked into this year is the remapping of layups and dunks into 1 button. Some fans hated it the two button config of Live 2007 while others loved it. Ultimately, the decision to move layups and dunks back to one button were the in game occurrences of a non dunker trying to dunk the ball (and failing miserably) when he should have just tried to do a layup.



Imagine a point guard like Steve Nash driving down the lane, the player mistakenly presses the dunk button instead of the layup button and you get a awkward animation of Nash trying to be like Mike but fumbling the ball instead. The real life Nash wouldn't attempt to dunk the ball, he probably would try to get an arching Teardrop or a fingeroll instead. I believe the remapping is better overall since it relies on the new and improved contextual system in Nba Live 2008. More about the new contextual system in later updates.

Dunking has always been one of the best things about NBA LIVE. In fact, past versions of LIVE have done it so well,,that driving to the basket became too easy, and a little unrealistic in the process. This year we knew we needed to make a lot of improvements to dunks and lay-ups, especially under the basket. The first thing we fixed was some of the more frustrating issues like warping to the hoop on dunks and players dunking through the rim and backboard. We also tuned the numbers on missed dunks and lay-ups as this was happening way too often. While all of these things made dunking in the game a whole lot better, the biggest change we wanted to make was to really tighten things up defensively in the lane, and make dunks and lay-ups as realistic as possible. We felt it was too easy to get to the hoop, and once someone beat the first defender there was no way to stop a player from going right to the basket

via IGN Blogs