Stephen Curry is a ‘Problem’ for Video Game Developers

The NBA’s reigning MVP isn’t just causing headaches for his opponents in the League—people who design video games can’t figure out Stephen Curry, either.

NBA 2K’s engineers are having a tough time keeping up with Steph’s absurd offensive repertoire, because they’ve frankly never seen anything like it.

Curry, along with James Harden and Anthony Davis, graces the cover of this year’s version of the game.

Per Forbes:

“Taking 3s off the dribble are also definitely discouraged in NBA 2K,” says Mike Wang, gameplay director of NBA 2K. “Especially after over-dribbling beforehand.” […] The formula, which also incorporates a lot of advanced metrics, has mostly worked, to the point that the last couple of 2K games have received universal praise for its balanced and realistic gameplay (these “rules” to keep digital basketball shooters in check apply to real life basketball playing, after all). I say mostly because there’s dude named Wardell Stephen Curry, whose ability to make insanely difficult 3-pointers has thrown all basketball conventional wisdom out the window.

 

“To be completely honest, we are still looking for ways to better translate his game into NBA 2K,” says Wang. “He’s a ‘rule breaker’ when it comes to jump shooting … he becomes a problem in the video game world where we’ve been trying to train our gamers [to know] that certain types of shots should be rewarded versus others.”

 

Wang says they’ve already tweaked the gameplay a bit to give digital Curry a bit more leeway in the jacking-3s department, but they still want to discourage “over-dribbling hero ball.” […] But the 2K guys are on it, says Wang: “We’re going to have to invest even more time in future iterations to really let Steph be Steph in future versions of NBA 2K.”