Electronic Arts‘ NBA Live series, similarly to Madden, is mostly aimed at the North American market, but it’s not ignored in Europe either…

The publisher revealed what NBA Live 19‘s demo contains. It has The ONE modes, the ONE store, the Rise, Live Events (15, with multiple events per day, and there are demo events), Practice, Drills, 1v0, 1v1, and 5v5 Scrimmage. If you complete two The Rise games, NBA Play Now (Golden State Warriors and Boston Celtics), and WNBA Play Now (with female basketball players; Los Angeles Sparks and Minnesota Lynx) also unlocks, and you can also customise your player or your court.

The ONE mode offers The League and The Streets, challenges, boss battles, and you can also earn daily rewards, too. The demo won’t have Court Battles, LIVE Run, LIVE Ultimate Team (aka the gambling…), Franchise, and Online Head-to-Head. The demo’s level limit is 20. You can gain progression (customisation items, for example) and XP until then, but not anymore if you hit the limit. The full game’s limit is level 99. The demo is already available on the PlayStation Store and the Xbox Marketplace. The Live Companion app is already available on iOS and Android – it allows you to scan your face into the game for your player.

EA Tiburon’s game didn’t skip monetisation, though (although last year, players hated Electronic Arts for it in general). Last year, Take-Two’s NBA 2K18 had single-player microtransactions. Will EA Sports’ NBA Live 19 follow the example? Ryan Santos, the game’s creative director, told the answer to DualShockers:

„It’s funny because it didn’t impact how we did things because we were always creating a game that didn’t have any pay-for progression models in single player. Within The One, everything you do, everything you earn, everything you purchase in the store, it’s all through regular currency. There is no premium currency anywhere within The One.

We always said to ourselves that we wanted to stick with that and we wanted to reward players for the time that they spent with the game, so we kept down that path for NBA Live 19. So it didn’t impact what we wanted to do within The One. We never had plans to follow what our competitor does there because we’re always looking at how we can be different and offer something different to our players.”

There will be microtransactions, but not in the single-player modes. Ultimate Team will have them, just like how FIFA had it for a few years. NBA Live 19 will launch on September 7, the same day as the PlayStation 4-exclusive Spider-Man, on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Source: VG247, DualShockers