Despite sharing a title scheme with various 2K sports games, last year's PGA Tour 2K23 was not the next in a line of annual releases. While most sports game series are released yearly, golf games are generally relegated to more spread-out entries. Last year's EA Sports PGA Tour was the first new golf game from the company since 2015. PGA Tour 2K23 was the first since 2K21 two years prior. While these games receive more infrequent entries in part due to lower demand from the player base, this release schedule has allowed for more substantial updates from entry to entry, making the releases feel more essential and less mundane than other sports games.
Annual sports titles from 2K have made the company a lot of money, but in recent years, it has garnered some of the series a fair amount of criticism. NBA 2K24's best new feature is crossplay, which has become more of a standard part of most major franchises with multiplayer functionality. Beyond that, the current gen versions of the game have replaced traditional motion capture with animations based on actual game footage, and there is a mode paying tribute to Kobe Bryant. The version on previous generation consoles has even scanter features. NBA 2K and many other annual franchises suffer from feeling extremely iterative and lacking in meaningful changes.
PGA Tour 2K's Release Schedule Makes It Stand Out
Fans returning to the series in PGA Tour 2K23 are immediately greeted with more lively menus and improved UI. These changes start in the menu system but extend into the game itself. These alterations accompany changes to how the ball moves on the grass and overhauls to gameplay. 2K23 also adds a new method for hitting the ball, a 3-click system that ups the level of precision players are capable of. New courses have been added to PGA Tour 2K23 in addition to system-level changes, meaning that even casual fans will find plenty of new things to like in the entry.
On top of new courses and an overhaul to the mechanics, the game adds Topgolf. Topgolf is an arcade-like driving range with targets for players to shoot at, founded in England in 2000 before expanding. The location in the game is based on the one in Las Vegas. In addition to this, the game features seasonal updates, crossplay, ranked online, and celebrity players like John Cena and the members of Barstool Sports. While sports games typically showcase their respective sport at the highest level, the inclusion of celebrity players and Topgolf celebrates golf as a hobby that has been adopted by many casual players as well.
More Sports Games Need Spread Out Release Dates
The more drawn-out approach to releasing new PGA Tour 2K games has made it so each entry is more meaningfully different when compared to annualized sports titles. NBA 2K24's PC Port launched in an abysmal state and landed it one of the lowest ratings on Steam. The game's over-reliance on microtransactions and relative sameness didn't help its case either. While animations are being created from actual NBA footage now, only hardcore fans seem to have really noticed the change, and the general tweaks aren't enough for most to justify the cost of entry when they already have another recent NBA 2K game.
While adopting the large sporadic gaps of the EA Sports PGA Tour series would be a bad fit for many sports franchises, PGA Tour 2K presents a model that could work for other series. Games are frequently updated nowadays, so roster changes could be carried out incrementally, and season passes could be used to drip-feed content. Adopting a model with releases every two years like that of the PGA Tour 2K series, and more substantial updates in the time between could allow for other sports titles to be more thoughtfully crafted and introduce new features. Changes like this could also help to ensure the quality of all versions of the game, preventing a repeat of NBA 2K24's PC port.
PGA Tour 2K23 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.