It's been a long time since we have covered sports titles in Digital Foundry, but with the advent of NBA 2K Coins about the newest wave of consoles, we're seeing something genuinely fascinating here, with a proper generational leap in fidelity throughout the board. To illustrate that, we have a look at the sport mostly on PlayStation 5 and PS4 Pro, but we also spent a while with the Xbox Series consoles. While it may not seem this way on the surface, sports games really are from what I could tell - among the more difficult genres to work on. Truncated development schedules need annual entries in each show, meaning less time between every launch but more than this, these matches have to match as much as a properly'real' experience, often delivered using a TV-like demonstration. A game such as NBA 2K21 needs to deal with actual people in real locations performing complicated, interlinking actions. If you're off by even a hair, you are diving directly into the uncanny valley.

So what makes this so hard? Well, nailing down the arenas and player likenesses is a huge part of the equation but it's the motion that makes this so difficult. Developer Visual Concepts - whose work on this franchise dates all the way NBAck to the Dreamcast era - is doing some great work here. As soon as it's easy enough to spot the imperfections in the visuals, if you just allow the game clean over you, then it really starts to look unbelievably authentic in action. When shooting cylinders, it really does look like a NBAsketNBAll.NBA 2K21 includes a huge roster of players out of present NBA athletes to legends from the past. The models themselves are intricately detailed with realistic skin tightening, perspiration, and facial expressions. Players look round the courtroom and react to plays in real-time. It is not perfect, because there is a hint of the lifeless eyes' effect, but it's solid. As with last-gen versions, Buy NBA 2K21 MT uses a fabric simulation for uniforms as well - as you move around the court, the cloth flows and reacts realistically.