NBA 2K26 recently revealed its first major update ahead of this year’s launch, giving fans their first look at this year’s gameplay changes. While the biggest talking point is the new player motion engine, gameplay director Mike Wang took to Twitter to answer several questions fans have about the new gameplay changes. In this back-and-forth, he revealed that NBA 2K26 is dropping a gameplay feature that’s been in the game for decades, giving NBA 2K26 a potential boost to competitive balance.
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In the gameplay reveal, the NBA 2K26 team revealed that “green or miss” will be universal across this year’s version of the game. While it’ll be a bit easier to get your timing down in team-control modes like MyTeam, that means you’ll need to master shot timing if you want your shots to fall. This could be a massive change to the NBA 2K formula, because shot-making has always had a bit of RNG involved.
If your timing was a bit off, you could still make the shot from time to time. The community refers to this as “making a white,” because the shot meter turns green when you have a perfect release and white when you’re not completely on target. One obvious question in the Q&A was “Will there still be RNG in shooting?”
Wang responded, “No. There will be no RNG in shooting. There has always been some element of RNG in every past version of NBA 2K (including 2K24). NBA 2K26 will be the first version to feature a completely pure green window. On Pro or lower difficulties, you can still ‘make whites,’ but otherwise it’s green or miss.”
As mentioned, this could be a huge change for competitive 2K. If you’re playing on lower difficulties, you won’t have to be as locked in, but in online play, you’ll need to master your shot timings if you want to have a chance. 2K has been moving toward the “green or miss” formula over the last few years in an attempt to cater to more competitive players, but this is the biggest step in that direction we’ve seen thus far.
It’ll be an interesting thing to pay attention to over the first few months of NBA 2K26. This change should please more hardcore players, but casual 2K fans might find this change too difficult if it isn’t tuned properly. Anyone hopping into The City for online games wants to see as much of a skill gap as possible; however, someone playing offline in MyNBA might not want that same gameplay challenge.
Hopefully, NBA 2K26 is able to get the mix right from the jump, though it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see several patches tweaking shooting soon after release. Thankfully, we don’t have to wait too much longer to try the game for ourselves. NBA 2K26 launches on September 7th for PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC. If you preorder the Superstar or Leave No Doubt Edition, you can jump in seven days early on August 29th.
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