Welcome to March! It’s peak college basketball season and for us that is the perfect time to deliver the magic and madness of March to you with Draft Day Sports: College Basketball 2023.
If you’re new to the series, welcome to the gold standard for college basketball gaming. If you ever wanted to experience what it might be like to be a college basketball coach this is the game for you. Best of all, with a variety of options and customizations you can play how you want. Want to start off as an elite coach and take over a powerhouse? You can do it. Maybe you are up for a challenge and want to start off at a tiny school and work your way up. We got that. Feel the pressure of keeping your job, play with no pressures at all and jump around from school to school in a sandbox game world or maybe even setup your own game in Universe Mode where you control multiple coaches and schools. The opportunities are endless in DDS:CB23.
For those of you not new to the game I know what question you are asking. What’s new, right? Have I got some answers for you!
The most noticeable change this year is the all-new 2D game presentation. We’ve changed everything here to give you a more enjoyable in-game experience. Best of all you can customize everything. Create your own courts and jerseys in your favorite graphics program and bring them into the game to really make your game world come to life. This new look at things is going to make it even more exciting to watch the action while you coach your team to victory(we hope)
We have made some pretty massive changes to the game world itself too this year. We have eliminated the method of purchasing in game reports and replaced that with a more accurate and modern solution of having an in-game fictional national recruit scouting service which all teams have access to instead of using your budget for different levels of recruit information access. In today’s world even people at home who have nothing to do with a college basketball team can go online and access information about top recruits and we’ve decided to model that in the game going forward.
While changing up that part of the game was a necessary improvement we decided to take it a step further and really make your in game annual budget play a more important role. Yes your budget is still used for travelling around the country to recruit players as well as for putting together a coaching staff but now there is a brand new component which really allows you to shape your school.
Each school has an overall facilities rating – one that can be improved by asking the board at the end of a season to pump some big time money into but now you will take part of your annual budget and apply it to three specific areas of your program’s facilities in order to serve a purpose you feel is important. You can put a focus on training the players you already have to become better players, focus on keeping them in good health and in good spirits to mitigate unhappiness in your program or you can focus on the bling-blinging out some cool spaces so that recruits you bring on campus will be wowed. This allows you to tailor a plan to your specific school and really let you focus on what you feel is most important to building a successful program.
Speaking of recruits, we’ve changed things around a bit on the recruit card to provide a better look at the info including those aforementioned data points from the in-game scouting service. But to really top it off we’ve even added a section so that you can see what schools a recruit has visited and even who has offered a scholarship to them. Now you will truly know who you are competing with for that recruit of your dreams (and also which school should be your sworn enemy when they swipe one from you)
Tournaments are one of the most important and exciting parts of college basketball. Of course everyone’s goal is to get to the big dance at the end of the year but the preseason tournaments are fun too. Who doesn’t love the chance to add a trophy to the case? We’ve given you even more opportunities for that this year by expanding the preseason tournaments from 14 to 19.
Those are some pretty impressive new additions to the game and that’s only the marquee attractions. We’ve added important quality improvement touches all throughout the game too like having results from home and campus visits show up in a recruit’s notes, accessing the lineup tracking features from your depth chart screen to be more useful in making lineup decisions, making the transfer portal do a better job of dispersing talent, improving the AI in recruiting and so much more.
So if you’re ready to Experience March then get to our webstore and get a copy of Draft Day Sports: College Basketball 2023 today. If you purchase before March 10th you will be able to take advantage of our special FirstAccess program which allows you to get a discount and play beta versions as soon as you make the pre-order. For anyone who wants to see it in action first, there will be a demo available upon release as always on March 10. It’s time to get on the road to the tournament – good luck, coach!