The WNBA Will Be Featured on NBA 2K20

Published on August 8, 2019

by johnadeleon

This year’s iteration of 2K (NBA 2K20) is launching soon for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC and will also be featuring the ladies of the WNBA!

Felicia Steenhouse, long time NBA 2K Producer had the following to say:

“Let’s talk about representation in sports. Sports are an important public stage. It’s a space to lift up the best of us. Right now we find ourselves in an exciting time where women are getting to take their rightful place on that stage – front and center.”

Felicia and Ann Sidenblad also said the following:

The first thing we knew we needed was to capture the athletic look and feel of all the different types of players. We looked through reference images of everyone in the WNBA and identified key aspects that we wanted to target. We ensured that the WNBA models would have all the features and functionality of the NBA models, advancing our internal tools to ensure we captured each unique player’s likeness.

WNBA hairstyles were another area that we needed to build from the ground up. A common misconception is that hairstyles come complete through the player scans, but that is not the case. For any new hairstyle, artists need to craft every strand, braid, and curl from scratch. So we spent a great deal of time cataloging all of the WNBA hairstyles and broke them down into classifications such as bun, ponytail, braids, and started to create a collection of hairstyles. So much individuality comes through a player’s hair that we try to capture it as best we can in-game.
In creating the hairstyles, we immediately knew that we needed to add hair simulation into the mix for more realistic movement of the hair. Longer hairstyles will now flow behind the player as they run down the court, have bounce and follow through with every crossover and jump shot! This is an area we have been interested in exploring already, and so it was a great opportunity to push this tech forward in our game. It’s always a challenge to add any sort of new simulation to the game as it is costly to run, and we are already squeezing every ounce we can out of performance! But, with an overhaul, our Tech Art and Engineering teams were able to refine the hair technology enough to run at the quality we expect! We’re very excited with the direction this extra movement is heading, and are looking forward to pushing it even more in the future.

You can check out more of Felicia’s and Ann’s thoughts HERE

If you follow me on Twitter (@johnadeleon), you’ll know that I’m a HUGE Breanna Stewart (a.k.a. Stewie) and Seattle Storm fan, so this is pretty dope to me! The Storm are coming off of winning the WNBA Championship along with Stewie picking up the league and Finals MVP’s. I’m a huge basketball fan in general, but being a father to a daughter, the WNBA is special to me. I want my daughter to think and also believe that she can do anything in the world, including play basketball, should she so choose and seeing these ladies BALL OUT on the court can be nothing but positive to her.

Some of the WNBA that had the opportunity to do some motion capture for the game include, Candace Parker, Breanna Stewart, Amaya Valdemoro Madariaga and Maite Cazorla.

The WNBA is officially in @NBA2K 🔥🎮 Excited to see the women's game in #NBA2K20, great things to come pic.twitter.com/4bIlUE3vjX

— Breanna Stewart (@breannastewart) August 8, 2019