If you don't like the new NBA 2K21 mode, you are a female professional basketball fan, then W will not give you much excitement.

W is the first single professional model for women's team sports in sports video games. This is not a symbolic experience, nor is it a reproduction of what NBA 2K 21 has already done for men's games. But it was a very little cost-conscious experience, and my lack of investment in player development made the goal of a single career impossible. Therefore, I cannot really warm up to this mode or suggest that others spend a lot of time trying it.

Apart from choosing one of the 10 archetypes (the minimum and maximum attributes are fixed), my only influence on player development is to play (or not) in the league. In this case, no matter which XP ("MyPoints" in this case) earns 2K21 MT or other benefits, the game will be applied automatically in a very opaque process.

In MyCareer of NBA 2K21, players can set the ideal maximum value for their attributes, and create a player based on their own specialties or favorite things. During the season, players can choose how their income is applied to the created players. I can only speculate why the WNBA's career cannot do this.

It is difficult to expand the off-court role of my players. The developer diary before the release of NBA 2K21 suggests that W players play the role pursued by real-world WNBA stars, whether it is to promote the league itself, engage in part-time performances in media or costume design, or prepare to become a coach. Well, all of this is handled in a process where the only player interaction is to choose one of three options from the cards between games. Similarly, the progress is fixed, and what it delivers is only unlockable cosmetics on a fixed schedule.

All of this means that you can enter a very limited core game loop very quickly, and this is reminiscent of the career mode I saw on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It's hard to call The W the first shot of career mode. The wonderful thing is when most of its fun comes from the game itself. At least the action and the rest of NBA 2K21 are still fun, but still fun-but that was also when I played WNBA in MyLeague last year.

It is also difficult to criticize the design of Visual Concepts, as if throwing female avatars into the larger MyCareer world is the simplest or easiest solution. WNBA should have its own professional ecosystem. Give the WNBA its own model instead of just throwing it into the competitive multiplayer world of NBA 2K21 and telling them to fend for themselves, or worse, patronize them with exaggerated attribute scores, which is more Supporting statement.

And, in fact, most NBA 2K players don't want to maintain more than one player avatar in a model that has been severely affected by microtransactions. If 2K Sports offers WNBA players as another vehicle for real money sales of virtual currency, it will be mocked. Based on the reputation of Visual Concepts, WNBA players do earn virtual currency, which will be included in the user's overall balance. Try to use this mode and you will get at least a small reward. But this is a very ironic irony, the WNBA player herself did not "spend" her income-whether it was her own progress, clothing or NBA 2K21 MT.

W joined a cross-season team management model called MyWNBA. But its menu-driven feature set is similar to MLB 2K10 or 2K11. There is nothing left to do except to get two "tasks" at the beginning of the year-one task is to trade a certain player before the deadline, and the other task (trade from the governor) to win a certain amount game. In a multi-season background simulation, my failure to deliver any one did not have much impact. The real reasons for running the team (developing players, making an offensive plan) are still as self-driven as the MyWNBA narrative.

There may be depth there, but the packaging around the mode is still just what we two generations saw in sports video games when the single-player career mode first appeared. At least in the earliest days of MyPlayer in NBA 2K, I could choose a local business that I wanted my players to recognize. Now, reach level 4 popularity in The W and your name appears on the billboard of the plumbing shop, you will get a pair of shoes.

Crucially, if there is no interest and market at all, I am not obliged to let Visual Concepts give WNBA MyCareer attention and development resources. But I think it’s not too much to require a similar training and practice package to the men’s side. Mini-games and shooting practice here can improve my players between matches, or at least make me feel that I’m guiding her development.

Is W a "good first step" for women's sports in video games? It depends on your expectations; mine takes into account the relative popularity of the WNBA after the men's competition, and Visual Concepts provides more conditions for its already packed development cycle for a year. In the end, W was still more prosaic than I expected. It is possible that not many video game players want to play women's professional basketball, but The W has not spent much effort to develop more professional basketball.