So what makes this so difficult?
It has been quite a while since we have covered sports titles at Digital Foundry, but with NBA 2K21 MT the arrival of NBA 2K21 on the newest wave of consoles, we're seeing something genuinely intriguing here, with a proper generational leap in fidelity across the board. While it may not appear this way on the outside, sports games really are - from what I could tell - one of the more difficult genres to perform on.
Truncated development programs require annual entries in each series, meaning less time between each launch but more than this, these matches have to match as much as a correctly'actual' experience, often delivered using a TV-like presentation. A game like NBA 2K21 needs to take care of real people in real places performing complicated, interlinking actions. If you're off by even a hair, you are diving into the uncanny valley.
So what makes this so difficult? Well, nailing the arenas and player likenesses is a massive part of the equation but it's the motion that makes this difficult. Realistic animation, momentum, and collision of each player on the court is a massive challenge. Developer Visual Concepts - whose work on this franchise dates all of the way back to Buy NBA 2K21 MT Coins the Dreamcast era - is doing some fantastic work here.