Coming to NBA 2K21 on next-gen consoles, the announcement of an improvement to previous installments’ The Neighborhood game mode, The City, aims to expand on the open-world aspects of exploring a basketball utopia. Unless one’s newly created character is female, oddly enough.
Boasting the inclusion of a WNBA-themed collection of modes, NBA 2K21 is curiously restricting female characters from exploring the expansive new City, a major draw for the series’ latest title as it makes its debut on next-gen consoles. Despite the hype surrounding women’s representation in the world of basketball being included in this year’s premiere basketball video game, the idea of female player characters being unable to explore the same open-world fantasy as male characters proves disappointing.
A well-loved feature of previous 2K NBA games, The Neighborhood offered players more of a RPG-style experience that accentuated the core sports gameplay. While a seemingly unexpected blend of game design elements at first glance, training a character of the player’s design to improve their various skills and capabilities has been a wildly popular and addictive addition to any sports game. With the addition of The City in NBA 2K21, the player is granted more freedom than ever to explore this open world, emulating an adventure-RPG more closely than ever.
Despite not being the first in the series to include playable female characters and taking steps to expand the WNBA-specific game modes, NBA 2K21 will be missing a golden opportunity to make a good first impression with its fans on the coming wave of next-gen consoles. Currently, anyone excited to experience everything the game has to offer will need to allocate attention separately to the WNBA career mode as well as The City, despite there existing enough crossover appeal against not enough reason as to why female player characters cannot participate outside of their designated mode. Criticized as lacking in new features as it is, this addition could do more towards justifying the price increase of $70.
Already drawing the ire of players with the announcement of unskippable in-game ads, NBA 2K21 may be banking a little too hard on their influence as one of the biggest basketball games series across the consoles, the alternative usually being EA Sports’ collection of games, not exempt from their own occasional divisive decision-making. Microtransactions and other modern grievances that accompany AAA titles as of the past few years will seemingly continue into 2021, while inclusive design philosophies are seemingly slower for the franchise adopt. Hopefully, the decision can be amended in a future update.
NBA 2K21 is available now on PC, PS4, Stadia, Switch, and Xbox One, with PS5 and Xbox Series X versions in development.
Source: Erick Boenisch
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