One of the first things everyone does when they pick up a new version of 2K is experiment with building a new MyPLAYER. This year, the major goals for the Player Builder were refinement, polish, and balance. You still have complete control to build any type of player you want, but the new builder ensures that all builds, regardless of size or specialty, are fun and balanced.
The 5v5 environment used last year to test work-in-progress player builds, is also now accompanied by a 3v3 environment. For New Gen players, this is especially useful if you love to hoop on the City courts and want to make sure your player can hang in the streets.
Another huge addition to the build system is that animation purchases will now be account-bound rather than specific to one save file. In other words, if you purchase an animation for your playshot build, it will then be available to equip on your slasher build, assuming your player meets all the animation’s requirements. For Current Gen users, you’re no longer limited by the pie chart build system from the last couple years as it’s been replaced with the more robust Player Builder that New Gen uses.
The most impactful change, when it comes to building players, is in the form of a new badge system for New Gen. When looking at telemetry from previous years, we noticed that players often gravitated towards the same badges and, as a result, became a little overpowered by stacking certain badges together. This year, we’re moving to a tiered badge system. There are 16 badges per attribute category: eight in Tier 1, four in Tier 2, and four in Tier 3. Tier 1 badges are the least powerful for your player, but also cost the least amount of badge points. Costs go up as you climb the tiers and acquire the more impactful badges. The basic idea is that you’ll need to equip a certain number of badges in the lower tiers before you can equip badges in the highest.
The motive behind this change was to encourage players to make some tough choices when creating their badge recipes, make loadouts more valuable as a feature, and bring a better overall balance to the badge game in general. Along with the tiers, we’re also introducing “Core” badges, which are four unique badge slots (one in each attribute category) that can be filled with badges that don’t count toward your badge points. Each badge will have a challenge requirement that, once met, will allow the badge to be placed into a core badge slot. We also made several changes to the badges themselves, which are highlighted below:
FINISHING
SHOOTING
PLAYMAKING
DEFENSE/REBOUNDING
Takeovers are special abilities you can equip on your MyPLAYER that you can activate after building up your Takeover meters. Basically, like getting hot in real life. While the primary and secondary Takeovers remain the same, Team Takeover has been redesigned.
In the last couple of versions, a player would activate Team Takeover for the entire team and make everybody hot after filling up the primary, secondary, and then Team Takeover meters in sequential order. For NBA 2K24, Team Takeover works as a cooperative team system with the entire team sharing a single meter. Each player on the team has an equal portion that they’re responsible for filling up by performing well on the court and being good teammates. Once each player has filled up their portion of the meter, Team Takeover automatically fires off for the entire team. The new design makes a lot more sense and does a better job representing what it means to be hot as a team and to take over the game as a unit.