 Hey, guys, I'm back. Well, I haven't been missing if y'all subscribe to the second channel, top link in the description. I'm uploading there real consistently. This channel, all back on top of my shit now. Hey, so if you guys been paying attention, you might've seen me make a beautiful appearance on 2K TV. At least 2K hit me, I was like, hey man, you wanna do 2K TV with me? I was like, yeah, actually, I would love to. I was just coming off the whole Fredo incident and plenty of people that didn't know me that were just lied to were sending me hundreds of death threats a day. Yeah, I need some positivity in my life. Yeah, I'll do that. Then he told me Mike Wang is gonna be there. I went, oh man, because I wasn't invited to the 2K event last year. Mike Wang is gonna be there. Who would have been a couple of years since last time I spoke to Mike Wang? I was excited, man, I hopped in there. I kind of figured some of the conversation was gonna be 2K, 21 related because that's what everybody's excited about. But I did not know that the purpose of the interview was to ask Mike Wang questions. I had a cane way more prepared. So I was on the top. I was like, oh my God, what do I even ask? There's so many things to ask. So a lot has happened. Now there's some things I was cut out the episode that they didn't include. And I'm not gonna lie, I kept it in more things than the episode that I thought it was gonna keep in. Now I was advised to not say anything about things that were cut out. Even though one of those things, I asked Mike Wang, I was like, Mike Wang, there's anything you wanna tell people about 2K, 21, that was the time? And Mike sat there and pondered for like 10, 15 seconds. Then the 2K kind of just rolled with it and just started saying some stuff over here. And then Mike Wang was like, hold on, hold on, hold on. I got something. And he dropped a little bit of news, but it didn't make it in the episode. Nah, I'm gonna tell you right now, nothing in the episode was so crazy that anybody would get gassed about it, but you might be like, huh, that's pretty cool. Hey, so there's a few key notes I wanna go over about that interview. And then I have to make a plea, man, cause it's getting scarce out here. Hey yo, y'all new to the channel? Then how come you haven't subscribed yet? Guys, I can't tell if I'm slowly losing my mind here waiting for news, but I think that's what's happening. NBA 2K on Reddit put together this compilation. Shout out to Agent for doing a great job with the interview and representing the community well. There's more details here. You guys are being nice. I came in there woefully unprepared, but I didn't think he was gonna answer any real questions. Turns out Mike Wang was actually willing to answer a lot of questions. They didn't look like that in the episode, but he was. Maybe because they just figured, like if we don't want it in there, we'll just cut it out. Probably. Okay, so let's go over. Development is still working from home, but now with 100% efficiency. True. Mike Wang mentioned there was some stuttering at first because everybody had started working from home, but they worked through it, and now they're back to normal. Current Gen and Next Gen are worked on by two completely different studios. Yes. I'm surprised that this made it in the episode. I definitely thought they were gonna cut that part out. Mike Wang is working on the Next Gen version of the game. When I asked Mike Wang questions about the game, that's why he was saying Next Gen, Next Gen, because he's not on the team with the current Gen guys. The thing he's working on is Next Gen. That's what he's excited about, which kind of concerns me a little bit, and I knew I wasn't gonna get a direct answer, but I really should have followed up and asked, did they divide the already existing team in two, or is there like an entirely different team? Did they hire people, but there's existing people at the same time? I really don't know. So for the remainder of this video and for that interview, I kind of just assumed any questions that I asked Mike Wang, and he answered them about gameplay or whatever, had to do it Next Gen. Safe assumption to make. A focus is here on how 2K can be more enjoyable. Devs wanted to find a balance between fun and realism. An example, Mike Wang was throwing the ball away on cherry pick passes. That's not something they wanted to fix. Okay, that was a weird example, Mike Wang. I can really just show you how to episode, but that take way longer, so this way's quicker. I'll leave the link in the description note to the whole 2K TV episode if you want to watch it. So this was actually the biggest point for me that I was like, oh man, Mike, come on, you're speaking my language right now. Balance is dope, you know what I'm saying? Make sure the game's not broken. But in the name of balance, a lot of times developers will ruin the fun of the game. Like when you think back to old 2Ks, like 2K 14, 15, 16, 16 was more balanced, but a lot of those games heavily unbalanced. Like there was demi-god glitches out that ass glitch here, glitch there, and none of them were addressed in the lifespan of the game. But when you're looking back, those are some of the most fun 2Ks ever. In 16, they kind of had like the perfect balance and fun, but in 15, 14 it was definitely more broken. Mike asked agent what he thought about competitive shooting. They know people complain about full whites and RNG. This is a simple question Mike already knew the answer to. LD2K was like, Mike, do you have any questions for agent? And Mike just sat there for about cool 20 seconds and they cut all that 20 seconds out. And I was just thinking to myself like, man, Mike, you know, you don't have to ask no questions, man. I know you didn't come here with a question for me. I'm not the one working on 2K 21. But he asked me a question about like competitive versus casual and I was like, oh my God, oh Mike, I made 20 videos about the topic, but here I go explaining it 21st time. All right, so you want to have a ranked, unranked, fully fledged ranked, unranked mode, just like every other game. Now, yo, so I'm used to this, YouTube stuff is far from industry, but 2K TV is kind of a little bit more industry. Feel what I'm going with this? So I didn't want to say in the 2K TV episode, oh man, while I'm playing Valorant, I'm addicted to the ranked, unranked mode. While I'm playing Rainbow Six or literally any other game I play has some kind of fully fledged ranked, unranked mode. I mean, even Pro-M has like a version of it when I feel like they need to work on more but just bring some more of that to the park. But he already knew that. He was just asking a question for the sake of asking a question. If you're going to have competitive sliders, you were going to ruin the fun for casual people, especially in a basketball game. There are games that are incredibly challenging that I've played like Valorant or Socom that you grow to love because of its challenge and the pursuit of getting better gets you hooked. I don't think 2K is one of those games. So just divide it up, man. Have the simple sliders for the people that just want to chill. Have the hardcore sliders for people that want to go hardcore. And you could choose which one you want to be, something you can go from chill to hardcore, back to chill, it don't have to matter. And a lot of people think when I'm talking about ranked modes, it means the competition's better. No, it means there's skill-based matchmaking. It means you're playing people at your level. So if you're getting punked over here in the unranked section, you can literally play ranked with people that are as garbage as you and probably have a better experience. Coincidentally, this was actually a topic most people were talking about on Twitter. NextGen brings everything you have in current gen version plus so much more. Now that's just like an industry. Let's get people excited about the next gen version of the game answer, so I didn't pay too much mind to it. WNBA fans will be very excited about what we bring next gen. And so hopefully that means some kind of my player integration, but it probably doesn't. But I'm not gonna get excited about WNBA news. I'm not gonna lie to you. So that's because I don't play play now and neither do a huge majority of y'all. So I don't care about that, but hopefully if there is some kind of like female my player integration, that'd be the craziest shit. So I hope that's what he means, but he didn't say that. He said WNBA. He also dropped some my team news which I'm not gonna cover because that's not my community and shit like that. So that's actually the first bit of news that we even have about 2K21. And interestingly enough, it's all next gen news which means we still know nothing about the game that's gonna release in a month's time. Now, in my experience, there's two ways to release the game. And I wanna give you guys some context here so you know what the fuck might go down. There's the games like Valorant where you kinda just surprise people. There was one or two trailers that came out before the beta dropped and everybody was excited. Millions of people flooded to play the game. It was breaking records. Beautiful thing at the top of Twitch. But companies rarely take that approach because it's risky. If your game is not good and people don't get excited about it, then your game is going to flop. So what most companies do is a traditional marketing approach. Months before the game's launched, sometimes years at E3 they'll play a trailer and there'll be another trailer the next year. And then months from then there'll be like a bit tabular game play dropped. A good example of this is, what's the game called? I actually love it. Cyberpunk, damn, I forget that. Cyberpunk has had a trailer released two years ago and then the next year. And now we've seen like an hour of story mode gameplay. And so did it slowly trickling in news and then closer to the launch you get more news and then boom, the game drops. That's usually what 2K does. Now because 2K is on a yearly cycle, it usually starts like two to two and a half months before the launch of the game. Considering the fact that we're one month away from the launch of that game, assuming that it's still launching early September, they're not doing that this year. And yeah, there's a lot different about this year because there's a whole new generation cycle. But it's crazy because we've been asked to peer the game a month ago, but then we still know nothing. And the frustrating part is the guy who's at the head tippity tippity top, the leader in charge of the stuff is Ronnie 2K. And all we're seeing from him on Twitter is tweets like this, throwing it back to mid 2000s on my stream today. I'm bringing two NBA fan favorites to place in park, Q-Ridge and Drew Goodin. We're gonna talk NBA, like, Ronnie, all right, cool, bro. You have a stream, okay? Actually what people want from you is 2K21 news, believe it or not. And you can just talk about that stuff on your stream, but you could also just tweet it or post it onto, we just need something from anywhere. It could actually be on any platform and we wouldn't care, we would still find it. The official NBA 2K21 account on Twitter was like, damn it, it's enough, it's enough. Let's give these guys some news. And then drop the loading screen for 2K21. I have never seen a loading screen be used as a means of content, unless it was to make fun of the fact that in 2K17, Paul George pissed the whole community off. So at this point, Ronnie's like, oh man, I'm really feeling for these guys. You know what I'm saying? The game that they all love, they just wanna hear more information about, they don't know nothing about it and they're being asked to pre-order it. Let me drop them a quick little gem, man, just a quick little gem. And Ronnie put out this tweet, the official 2K21 soundtrack is here and features some of my favorite names in the business. Which tracks and artists are you hyped about? Ronnie, come on, you know we don't care, man. You know most of us just mute it, but even the people that keep it on, they don't care. The only thing, I'll say this again, the only thing a soundtrack is good for is five years from now, when you hear one of these songs and these soundtracks is gonna give you serious 2K21 vibes. And it's gonna be like a hit of nostalgia and it's gonna feel good even if you hated the game. Like, I think in 2K13, they had the Around the World song from Daft Punk. I love Daft Punk, but every time I listen to that song, now I'm thinking about 2K13 and that's a bad feeling because that game was fucking horrible. Hi man, but if you cared, yeah, they got anywhere from NBA Brokeboy, Polo G to Denzel Curry, man, hallelujah. It's crazy how much worth they have to put in just to get the licenses to use all of this music. It's not worth it. At the end of the day, but they do it every year for tradition, you know what I'm saying? And I guess it's a selling point because it's the first thing they show. So let me give you a roadmap on previous years on what you could potentially expect. What they usually start off with is the cover and then they move into like soundtrack and I guess this year, loading screen news. At some point you might start seeing overall releases where Ronnie says if NBA players ask for their overall, we'll give them their overall and that's gonna show off some of the graphical improvements, et cetera, and plus get NBA players involved in the situation. Then what you're likely gonna see is some myGMI League news followed by some gameplay news, a lot of gameplay news, usually over the course of a week or two, and then you're likely going to see some myTeam news. And at this point, we're about a week away from the game's launch and we might if we're lucky because there are years where we literally didn't get any get some park news, right? A trailer, some kind of tidbit, et cetera. And then at that point, the prelude should already be out assuming there's a prelude. That's what's happened for the past four years just to let you know how to shit your rock. But there's nothing that's going on according to schedule this year, so don't hold me to that. So I'm gonna end the video like this. Ronnie2K, guys down there, 2K publishing team marketing stuff, guys. Yeah, we kind of just want to know about the game that you guys are trying to get as hyped about because it's kind of difficult to get hyped about a game that you have zero information about. My biggest fear is that there's actually very little improvements on the current Gen 1 because they're saving them all for the next Gen 1 so they're just gonna put this half-ass attempt together as if everyone's gonna be able to get the next Gen systems on launch. That's my biggest fear. That is what happened when they made the jump from 2K13 to 2K14, but I'm hoping that's not what happens here and there's no real point in speculating further because I would just be guessing. There's no point in guessing. Hey, so I'm gonna end on that note, man. LD2K, thank you, man, for inviting me on to 2KTV. Leave the link in the description to that episode if you guys want. Also leave the link in the description to my second channel. Also, if you guys are new to this channel, you haven't already unpissed, you haven't subscribed, so help alleviate some of that pissed-off-ness that I have and subscribe to the channel. I'll catch you guys in the next video. I'm out.