NBA 2K26 is just a week out from launch for those who preorder or purchase the early-launch editions. When it gets here, players should expect to find that what was once the community’s biggest complaint has been scrubbed out of the game, according to its gameplay lead. Earlier this week, gameplay director Mike Wang told me in a chat from NBA 2K Community Day in San Francisco that 2K26 was designed from “day one” to eliminate what players most often found had plagued the game: “RNG”–short for random number generation–or what often felt like randomized outcomes.
The community, Wang told me, “felt like they didn’t have control over the outcomes of the shot or whatever it was on the court. That’s the biggest thing we addressed. Like, from day one, one of the points of emphasis was to make sure that [for] everything in the game, there’s a skill aspect to it, or it’s completely driven by skill, so that the gamer had the ability to dictate whether they did something right or wrong.
“That’s probably most felt in shooting. Shooting is such a touchy subject. We’re doing green-or-miss [mechanics] again,” he explained, describing the way a perfectly timed shot will always go in, while a shot that misses the on-screen green timing window never will. This mechanic frustrated some players in 2K24, leading to the team creating different difficulty, or “shot timing” profiles for players to choose at will in last year’s game, but this created its own set of issues by pitting players with different profiles against one another.
