Stop with silly modes and fix gameplay and AI
If I wanted to play NHL94 I'd blow the ten inches of dust off of my Sega Genesis in the attic. Why would I want a current generation of hardware to play a game that is 20 years old?? Fix the core game!!! Passing is horrible. Puck physics, horrible. CPU controlled AI, horrible. For goodness sake trash the "ice tilt" coding. If you want to make the game challenging you can start by coding the AI defenders to be a little more, well...defensive, and a little less like orange pylons. This game boasts to be sim, but it is truely very very far from it. The only thing that EA has done right with the current gen of NHL games, the "skill stick". Goalies are still way to "canned" and do not adapt to different situations, and as a result wristers from the red line go in, the backdoor onetimer is a for sure miraculous save. EA has to figure out how to make better boards play offensively and defensively. Most offense in the NHL originates from the corners, yes goals are scored on the rush, but not EVERY GOAL. On the defensive side it is near impossible to stop a forward going to the net when he walks out of the corner, if you line up the perfect hit, they simply shrug it off or lose possession for a second and the puck magnitizes right back to their stick. I am just really hoping for a completely different game from the foundation up for the first next gen offering of NHL15. EA lost me during the second generation of consoles (2k was night and day better), but since their is no other NHL game on the market I've been stuck with EA since 2009. Play Now, Season, Online, and GM those are the only modes we need. I hate "Be a Pro" or "Live the Life" or whatever they call it now, why?, because it has felt broken ever since it was introduced. Just like every other mode EA introduces, they never refine them!!! They always introduce some other gimmick and leave previous mode half broken and unplayable. Sorry for the long rant, but as a die hard fan and player of the game I expect a good experience when I pay $60 to play NHL every year. I just don't want roster updates and the same old broken AI garbage that has plagued previous games.