Wayback Wednesday: Roster Editing in NBA Live 18
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at roster editing in NBA Live 18.
Roster editing is a feature that’s very easy to take for granted. It’s been a staple of basketball video games since the mid 90s, and even earlier titles such as TV Sports Basketball allowed us to modify the names and ratings of its generic players. With that being said, we couldn’t always count on games to provide us with roster editing functionality. A number of games in the 90s and even early 2000s also bungled the basics of roster customisation, making it needlessly difficult to trade players or alter a team’s rotation.
During its heyday, NBA Live was the gold standard in many aspects of sim basketball games, including roster editing. To that end, many of the best NBA Live games also feature deep and robust roster customisation functionality. In fact, the quality of NBA Live’s roster editing features remained fairly consistent even as the series faltered on the virtual hardwood. By the eighth generation however, the customisation options had become as disappointing as the gameplay. Fortunately, NBA Live 18 saw a big turnaround in both areas. Let’s take a look back…way back…
Although the biggest problem with NBA Live on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One was that the games failed to impress on the sticks, the lack of depth in its modes and other core features was still a major issue. It made the games feel barebones, and vastly inferior to releases from the sixth generation, never mind the seventh. Roster editing was extremely conspicuous by its absence. The PS4/X1 version of NBA 2K14 had also come up short in that area, as it was missing Create-a-Player and only had one custom roster slot. However, at least we could trade players, sign free agents, and modify lineups. NBA Live 14 had no roster customisation outside of Dynasty mode.
Such a limitation may have been understandable in the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95, in which we could only make trades in Season mode; and even then, only swap players in the starting lineup. To only provide a method of viewing but not editing the rosters in a 2013 release was extremely disappointing. Yes, gameplay is paramount, and it certainly needed to be the priority as the series attempted a comeback in the wake of NBA Elite 11 and NBA Live 13 being cancelled. However, depth was still important, and the lack of it was another knock on NBA Live 14. And so, we hoped that NBA Live 15 would see the return of roster editing and other staple features.
Sadly, that wasn’t the case. While NBA Live 15 displayed some improvement on the court, roster editing remained absent. I was then dismayed to discover that it wouldn’t be included in NBA Live 16 when I attended a community event for the game. What really concerned me was the surprised reaction from developers and the community manager when I brought it up, and mentioned that there were people who indicated they wouldn’t buy the game if it lacked roster editing and other such staples. Their focus on LIVE Pro-Am and online play was understandable, but they clearly weren’t aware of how important it was for long-time NBA Live fans to have familiar features.
It was worrying because it suggested that they weren’t listening to gamer feedback, or were underestimating the popularity of some key modes, features, and functions. It’s why I made a point of mentioning the importance of roster editing at that community event, and to their credit, the people I spoke to seemed to take my feedback seriously. Given how late in the development cycle it was, I wasn’t surprised that they weren’t able to implement roster editing in NBA Live 16. Unfortunately, even after taking a year off, NBA Live 18 launched without any roster editing functionality. It seemed as though it was a desire – frankly, a need – that the developers were content to ignore.
And then, December 2017 brought some fantastic news. Patch 1.08 for NBA Live 18 added roster editing, transforming the Rosters menu into something that was actually useful! We were now able to change player heights, weights, numbers, play styles, ratings, traits, gear, years pro, and contract information; in short, pretty much all of their key attributes. Players could be traded for each other or assigned to a new team, as well as be released into and signed from the free agents pool. There were also 135 created player slots, which was a pleasant surprise. Custom rosters couldn’t be shared with other gamers, but as in older games they could be used to start a new Franchise.
With one post-release update, NBA Live 18 had gone from lacking roster editing to having some of the deepest roster customisation in the series! In previous games, we weren’t able to modify much of the bio data for original players, necessitating the creation of roster editing tools (and later, the use of software that could edit DBF files). Key attributes that governed tendencies were often hidden, as was contract size and length. We couldn’t edit contracts and other hidden attributes for created players, either. The need to edit that data externally instead of through an in-game function is why detailed roster mods were really only possible for the PC versions of NBA Live.
The roster editing functionality in NBA Live 18 also included another handy feature that we hadn’t seen in previous games. Teams can temporarily have fewer than the minimum of eight players on their roster, or more than the maximum of 15. It makes it far easier to move players around, since you don’t have to worry about freeing up a roster slot before adding a player to a team, nor will you be prevented from making a move because it would leave a team without the minimum number of players. You do need to ensure that teams have between eight and 15 players before you can save the roster though, and so the game will keep track of all the lineups that you need to fix.
Beyond the inability to share custom rosters, the biggest weakness with roster editing in NBA Live 18 is the limitations to face sculpting in Create-a-Player. There are a decent number of faces that can be chosen, and they can all be customised with ample hairstyle and facial hair options. However, since the head model can’t be modified, created players end up looking quite generic with superficial variations to the same base faces. In that respect, it’s probably easier to sculpt unique players in NBA Live 2000 PC! It’s way better than nothing though, and the base faces that we can choose from blend in with original players far more than created players did back in the day.
Another notable drawback is the sluggish load times when switching between the different roster editing screens, though that’s a game-wide issue in NBA Live 18. Basic tasks can be somewhat arduous as going back and forth between the roster, rotation, free agent pool, and create player screens is slower than it should be. It’s manageable, and again it’s an issue with NBA Live 18’s frontend in general – one that was particularly frustrating when accessing the Challenges in Ultimate Team – but it’s worth mentioning as an annoyance. Once again though, I’d much rather deal with the menus being a tad too sluggish than not have roster editing in NBA Live 18 at all!
Upon developing a new appreciation for NBA Live 18, I’ve gone back and made use of the roster editing functionality. I’ve rolled a roster back to the 2017 season, so that it can basically be the NBA Live 17 that we never got. I also whipped up a minimalist 2025 roster to facilitate a handful of modern matchups. I’ve even dabbled with some makeshift classic teams. The options are far more limited compared to NBA 2K and earlier NBA Lives that featured Legends in the default rosters, but being able to re-create the 2012 Chicago Bulls and 2010 Orlando Magic still scratched a creative itch. It’s something to do with the game now that Ultimate Team is no longer available.
When NBA Live 19 was released, roster editing was available right out of the gate. Unfortunately, it had some issues that were never resolved. First of all, the trade function is missing. The only way to move players around in NBA Live 19 is via assigning them to other teams, or signing them out of the free agent pool. Sure, it gets the job done, but it slows things down when you can’t swap multiple players at once. Combine this with a familiar sluggishness in the menus, and basic roster editing tasks become even more arduous than they were in NBA Live 18! Mind you, that pales in comparison to the bugs that can and will ruin hours of hard work on a custom roster.
While roster editing in NBA Live 18 was fairly stable, there are a couple of nasty glitches in NBA Live 19’s functionality. Created player appearances will be reset out of nowhere, and though the continued lack of in-depth model customisation means that you won’t have wasted any time meticulously sculpting heads, you’ve still lost work that you put effort into. Player ages have also been known to change, and I’ve heard of unlucky situations where rosters have become corrupted through no fault of the user. It’s disappointing enough to not see any improvement to roster editing year-to-year, but NBA Live 19 both lost functionality and became much buggier to boot.
EA’s unwillingness to correct these errors underlines how the focus had shifted away from the NBA-oriented content to The Streets and LIVE Events in The One. We’d hoped the addition of roster editing in NBA Live 18 was a sign that long-time fans were being listened to, but sadly that didn’t turn out to be the case in the long run. Content creators who had supported the series for years and even decades were given the cold shoulder by a Ronnie 2K wannabe, so feedback regarding issues with roster editing and anything else they didn’t care about fell on deaf ears. As I’ve said before, I believe the current fate of the series speaks volumes about that being a bad decision.
Again, it’s preferable to not having roster editing at all, and it was still exciting when that functionality was added to NBA Live 18. It was also interesting to see EA Sports promote it not only by pumping up cover player James Harden’s blocking rating, but by trading him back to the Oklahoma City Thunder! Obviously NBA-licensed games are allowed to depict players in different jerseys via roster editing, as well as fantasy modes such as Ultimate Team, MyTEAM, MJ: Creating a Legend, and LeBron: Path to Greatness. All the same, it was a bold decision to demonstrate the addition of roster editing to NBA Live 18 by engineering a fictional trade involving its cover player!
We gamers have a tendency to continue to grumble when something that we want makes a return after being removed in a previous game, or we feel that a feature should’ve been in games much sooner. It’s happened with both NBA Live and NBA 2K over the years, and I do understand. Indeed, I’ve certainly muttered “about time” when we finally get a missing feature back! However, I think that detracts from the happiness we should feel at getting something we asked for. I’m not suggesting we should grovel in thanks, but I think sometimes we fail to appreciate a victory for our Wishlists. There have been times that we’ve been heard, and thus effected change.
The post-release addition of roster editing in NBA Live 18 was one of those times. Granted, it might’ve been one of the last times when it comes to the NBA Live series – at least as far as traditional staples and content are concerned – but even so, it was still worth speaking up. It resulted in some of the deepest roster editing functionality in the history of the series! Could it have been even better? Sure. Should it have been in the game at launch? I’d say so. Do I wish that we had a PC version that offered modding capabilities as well? Absolutely! Nevertheless, roster editing fleshed out NBA Live 18 and contributed to it being a respectably solid title in a rough generation for the series.
The post Wayback Wednesday: Roster Editing in NBA Live 18 appeared first on NLSC.