End of Year Community Awards: Best Career Mode of 2014

The voting for various categories in the Pastapadre Community Awards continues with the Best Career Mode opening up today. Past winners have alternated between NBA 2K (2010, 2012) and The Show (2011, 2013).

It’s the only original Community Awards category that doesn’t even have three viable candidates this year. There are two standouts and those are NBA 2K15 and MLB 14: The Show. MyCareer is a completely unique story-based experience while Road to the Show offers the more traditional straight-forward Career mode path. 

MyCareer featured a brand new storyline, “mentors” voiced by actual NBA players, “badges” (formerly Signature Skills) to earn, and attributes being pooled into “buckets” to better balance skill levels. The face-scanning feature represented a great way to create more of a connection with your player (for those who were able to get it to work). While the voice acting was horrifically bad and teammate AI issues have persisted the mode was still very compelling.

Road to the Show hasn’t really evolved over the years but it’s still the most pure way to play and progress as an individual athlete. There isn’t anything off-the-field involved here. The biggest change involved replacing “goals” with performance-based rewards. Though it didn’t factor in much with MLB 14 the ability to migrate saves to MLB 15 and beyond will be appreciated by many. The concern is the mode won’t change very much largely due to that in the future.

Previously
♦Best Gameplay
♦Best Franchise Mode