NBA 2K19 Sliders: Guide for a realistic experience

As with any modern sports-based video game, the goal of the game designers is to make the experience as realistic as possible. From recognizable faces to realistic interactions due to body contact, every year gets closer to the real deal.

That being said, it is possible to fine tune the settings of the game to fit the way you wish to play the game. You can make these adjustments using the ‘sliders’ to alter various elements of the game to make gameplay harder, easier or more realistic.

This guide will serve the purpose of showing you how to adjust your sliders and some recommendations on adjustments to make to alter your basketball experience accordingly.

Slider Adjustments

Before getting in to the finer details of slider settings, it would be helpful to first know how to access the sliders. Similar to other sports games, you can do so by toggling through your settings menus.

In NBA 2K19, you can make all these adjustments pre-game by going to the master “options/features” menu. Select the submenu titled “CPU / USER SLIDERS” as pictured below.

Once you’ve opened this menu, you will find that you can toggle between the computer (CPU) and user settings. This is where you can adjust the specific settings that interest you. You should also notice that there are several subcategories for you to adjust. This guide will explain each one to you.

Game Style

Under each subcategory, players can adjust the sliders based on default settings found under each game style difficulty. The difficulties for game styles can be adjusted for each subcategory, but are as follows: Rookie, Pro, All-Star, Superstar, Hall of Fame and Custom.

Slider Subcategories

Offense

This subcategory impacts the success rate of the CPU and users when they attempt offensive moves. The likelihood a pass, shot or drive might be completed can easily be raised or lowered here.

Defense

You can adjust the defensive impact of players in this subcategory. Shot-blocking, steals and contesting shots can be made more or less likely by adjusting the sliders.

While offense is where stars are born and attention is given, I sometimes feel like scoring is too easy in this game. NBA players get lots of criticism for the lack of defensive effort they put out in a game, but that is mostly due to the grind of the regular season. Once these players get to the postseason, it is quite apparent how good they actually are on defense. I prefer to turn up the effectiveness of defense so that your efforts on that end of the floor frequently pay off and make you appreciate the use of offensive sets. With the default defensive settings, players can simply isolate defenders or score at ease with a pick and roll. If the defensive settings are turned up, players are forced in to using more advanced strategies versus brute force. Make these changes to help out defenders:

Attributes

While each player has a unique set of attributes, these sliders will adjust how those individual attributes carry over to your particular game. Even though LeBron James may be the top attributed player, his skills could be altered to zero if you wanted to make a CPU team terrible in all of the attributes.

Tendencies

This subcategory will impact the way the non-user controlled players will behave during the game. From more outside shooting, to aggressive driving to the rim, the sliders can impact the way the players approach the game.

Fouls

These sliders impact the frequency of foul calls made by the refs. If you like to play aggressive basketball and get annoyed with frequent whistles, trying moving the sliders down for less frequent whistles. If you play against an opponent that likes to spam the steal button without being punished, try moving the slider up to punish cheesy defensive strategies.

Like it or not, fouls play a big role in today's NBA games. Casual fans that watch the game for entertainment often complain about the frequency of the whistle. However, more avid fans can appreciate the tendencies of the referees to call fouls and the strategies implemented to play around the whistle. As for NBA 2K19, one of my biggest problems with the game is the lack of fouls called when players use cheesy defensive strategies to force turnovers. With the ball-handling skills of NBA point guards being unparalleled, it makes little sense that so many players can steal so frequently by running into opponents and spamming the steal button. If you raise the foul call frequency, this will at least punish players that try to use this strategy. Try these settings for a more realistic experience

Movement

These sliders are all about speed and acceleration. Whether it be with or without the ball, all the players on the floor can be limited or boosted based on these sliders. This is a way to level the playing field if you are a slower team or a way to give yourself an advantage if you like to outrun your opponent.

The purpose of the movement sliders is to bring some sense of balance to the game. However, this is simply not the case in real life. If a player works hard to develop their speed and quickness, they are rewarded with easy buckets in a fast break offense. The settings from the sliders often cap the speed at which players can move with or without the ball. I suggest playing with these to make the caps less impactful in the actual game, just as the speed of someone like John Wall cannot be capped in real life NBA games. Make these adjustments to feel the real impact of speed in game: