I have been playing hockey games since the beginning of time. I started forever ago with things like NES Hockey, Wayne Gretzky hockey, 2k Hockey, and of course the ubiquitous NHL series from EA. The series has had it's ups and downs but has generally been good over the years. In 2009 they added perhaps the best feature to a hockey game ever with online team play. This mode let you and your friends play against groups of other people online. It has evolved over time to be called EASHL and added teams and playoffs and a lot of good features.
The series has had a few years where the game wasn't as good as normal. NHL 13 jumps to mind where the goalies were essentially unbeatable unless you scored off a rebound. But NHL 14 was great as was 15 and our faith was restored. My friends and I played a lot of EASHL since 2009 typically we would play each year until maybe a month before the new release. This has changed the past two years for NHL 23 and NHL 24 we have lasted until perhaps January before the game irritated us so much we quit. For those keeping score that is 8 months before the release of the next version, two years in a row.
I will attempt to break down what is wrong with the game and what EA needs to do to earn back our trust when it comes to getting this hockey game back to a game we want to play until the next version is out.
The base game is suspect. A couple of years ago they made a change to the frostbite engine and since that change the game hasn't felt right. Obviously reworking a game for a new engine is going to cause problems but it seems like they haven't fixed the wonky physics caused by the change. The first year of the change you could understand things would be iffy and you could let a few things slide. That first year what killed the game for us was after a long and arduous process of figuring out how to score and defend our team had finally found our game then in the middle of the season they dropped a tuner patch that essentially wiped out all that progress and put us back to struggling to score and defend. Given how hard it was to get to that level having all of that taken from us in a single tuner was the final straw and we tapped out.
They add new features that no one wants and add no value to competitive play. They seem to add these each year in an attempt to make the game fresh and new. This year they added three things, a couple of returning items, and the full pressure system. The first two things were broken sticks and the hip check. Broken sticks are completely random but seem to screw us at the worst possible times. They do not add any value they just add more randomness which is not what a competitive game needs. Then there is the hip check. To begin this year it was completely broken. They have since balanced it somewhat but it is still overpowered. To me if you are going to put the hip check in the game it needs to function perfectly and work like an actual hip check. Until then just don't put it in. It is just a far too effective way for players playing small to be able to separate the puck from basically anyone.
The third addition is the full pressure system. Anyone playing with this for 5 minutes could have told you this system sucks. The idea is if you keep it in the offensive zone a pressure meter builds until you get to full pressure and the defenders get penalties to skating speed, other attributes, and do not regenerate energy. The goalie also loses energy and plays more erratic. There are so many things wrong with this system. One the other team can just pass it around the outside until the pressure bar fills up. They did tune this a bit to make teams have to get hits or shots in the offensive zone to fill it up quicker and lowered the penalty to speed for the defenders but when you are under full pressure it sucks and it rewards a lot of skating around the outside in the offensive zone not really doing anything which isn't great gameplay. You already had teams doing this in previous years trying to spin off of hits to break down defense to 2 on 1s constantly using LT spam but now it is just easier to get the team to full pressure and eventually you are going to score.
The game would be made immeasurably better if they just fully removed those three additions. I am pretty sure most players would be happier with improvements to the base game rather than these gimmick additions that just make the game more annoying and do nothing to address basic issues. If nothing else add these features to offline modes and focus on making online modes as smooth and bug free as possible.
This years game was also extremely buggy. Probably the most buggy version of it I can ever remember. Being in year two of the new engine this kind of surprised me because you would figure they would be working with a more familiar base this time around. My only conclusion is that they focused resources on the new features rather than making the main game stable and complete. An example of a bug was when we upgraded to our 2nd arena in EASHL we lost our custom jerseys and could do nothing to get them back. We had to reform our club to get custom jerseys back.
So let's move on to matchmaking, luck, and smurfing. This year or last they changed the match making to not be based on divisions but based on player ranking. There are still divisions but they seem to basically mean nothing other than for the playoffs if you are D5 and up you are in one playoff and if you are in D6 and below you are in the other. That's it. So basically nearly every game is a sweatfest. Before we would match up with some easier competition and some harder competition but now it is difficult games nearly every time. This is where luck comes in. Hockey is inherently around 1/3rd luck in real life. In this game I would say it is more like 2/3rds. Goalies make saves they shouldn't on a sniper with one tee on a 2 on 1 lasered towards the top corner. Goalies don't cover pucks they should cover or kick pucks back to opponents for easy goals. Goalies let in unscreened wristers from above the top of the circle, from bad angles, and from other non-dangerous areas of the ice. Also, there are far too many instances where you will get bumped and the puck will end up in your own net. It used to happen once in a while but it is far more frequent now. In addition, hitting is very inconsistent. You can line up a guy perfectly and one time you flatten them and other times they will slide off you like teflon. This is with or without truculence small or large players. It doesn't seem to matter. Also you can't cancel a hit animation so if you wind it up you have to skate to open ice to let it go if you don't actually want to hit someone if the situation changes. This looks and feels terrible and causes the game play to be very choppy swapping from defense to offense. So no matter how well we play it feels like if we win or not is based on mostly luck. In a competitive game this is a terrible feeling. We have played well and gone 1-5 on a night and played fairly meh and gone 5-1.
As for smurfing, we had to remake our club due to that jersey bug and we did it a few weeks before the playoffs started. We weren't able to get to D5 before the playoffs started so we were like oh at least we should have a pretty easy go of it. We ran into so many teams that were using 30k ranked ringers that were either just added to these low ranking teams or the teams were setup to add these players. It was a terrible experience and far worse than previous years. Not sure what EA was trying to fix with this system but it clearly didn't work. Aside from the fact that somehow we nearly always get people who are ranked near us but when we don't we get people who are 3-5k higher consistently.
So I am not a game developer but I can tell you what I want to see in NHL 25. Focus on the base gameplay and physics. Make the game skill based not luck based to the extent to which you can do that. There will be variance but it can't be as bad as it is now. Remove unnecessary features and only add features that are 110% ready to go and not exploitable. This is a video game not a simulation do what is fun not what is 100% accurate. BTW, the glass breaking is mostly fun but also completely pointless and can kill a scoring play at the wrong time.
Finally I am begging literally any game company to create a competing product. I feel like the EA effective monopoly on NHL games has really caught up to them in terms of effort and focus with literally no one else pushing them to be better. Madden was far better when 2k was pushing them same with NHL. We desperately need that competition back. But baring that EA just needs to do better. All around.
