There is no question that NBA 2K23is the most inspired work in the series, or any other in all of sports video gaming. The real question is how much of its staggering depth most players will ever see.
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It only took about 20 minutes — none of that spent in a game — to amaze me. All I did was go into MyNBA Eras, which is the new historical mode/franchise simulator hybrid that allows players to rewrite history in ways I didn’t anticipate. All I wanted to do is see what happened when I kept the Kings in Kansas City (they left for Sacramento in 1985). Obviously, I knew you could prevent franchises from relocating; 2K Sports took care to mention that crowd-pleasing fact in a series of previews earlier this summer.
What I didn’t expect was everything else that happened at the offseason league meetings — mostly because I haven’t played MyNBA that much since the mode was overhauled two years ago. I overrode ownership vetoes of a 45-second shot clock and a seven-team tournament to determine draft order (neither of these were actually proposed in real life) and saw them every year from then on. Rewriting history could go as deep as taking the 1984 MVP from Larry Bird and giving it to Moses Malone.
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This is in addition to all of the standard things I could have done as the Kings’ general manager, but chose to simply automate for the sake of seeing how the not-Sacramento
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