NBA 2K26 is just a week out from launch for those who preorder or purchase the early-launch editions. When it gets here, players should expect to find that what was once the community’s biggest complaint has been scrubbed out of the game, according to its gameplay lead. Earlier this week, gameplay director Mike Wang told me in a chat from NBA 2K Community Day in San Francisco that 2K26 was designed from “day one” to eliminate what players most often found had plagued the game: “RNG”–short for random number generation–or what often felt like randomized outcomes.
The community, Wang told me, “felt like they didn’t have control over the outcomes of the shot or whatever it was on the court. That’s the biggest thing we addressed. Like, from day one, one of the points of emphasis was to make sure that [for] everything in the game, there’s a skill aspect to it, or it’s completely driven by skill, so that the gamer had the ability to dictate whether they did something right or wrong.
“That’s probably most felt in shooting. Shooting is such a touchy subject. We’re doing green-or-miss [mechanics] again,” he explained, describing the way a perfectly timed shot will always go in, while a shot that misses the on-screen green timing window never will. This mechanic frustrated some players in 2K24, leading to the team creating different difficulty, or “shot timing” profiles for players to choose at will in last year’s game, but this created its own set of issues by pitting players with different profiles against one another.
“So, the scary thing about that, obviously, is that people who are really, really good at timing a button can be unstoppable like Steph Curry. So we’re trying to balance that with a stronger contest system, and it’s in a good spot now […] There are people who mastered this frame of this jump shot” but savvy defenders can now better “hold them in check if you play your defense and just play basketball.”
He added that the team learned a lot from past mistakes and explained how this year’s game aims to conclude a three-year debate over shooting gameplay by applying last year’s shot-timing profiles to specific modes and difficulties, evening the playing field on the basis of mode and difficulty level. “And [the idea in 2K25 was], ‘Okay, if you’re not into the timing [element], you can set this profile to be this lower-skilled one.’ So we’ve taken that concept, and basically, that’s what Rookie and Semi-Pro and Pro [difficulties and their related modes] feel like. It’s like, you could be a little sloppy with your timing, but still play the game and have fun. Then, when you move up in the difficulty to the higher ones, those feel more like, ‘Okay, if I don’t really master my shots or learn my players, then I’m gonna miss shots.'”
The debate over NBA 2K shot mechanics and green timing windows has raged for years now, and from the outside looking in, the process seems dizzying. I asked Wang what it’s like trying to appease every corner of the game’s massive audience, with differing and sometimes mutually exclusive ideas on how shooting ought to behave.
With a (perhaps only half-joking) fatigued exhale, he told me, “It’s really hard.” Like in recent years, the debate over shooting mechanics will come down to the data. Those are really only visible once millions of people are playing it at once and the series’ analytics-obsessed community starts to pick it apart. That process begins next week, when NBA 2K26 launches for early-edition players on August 29.
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