Been playing these NHL games since 94, and i'm thinking that biggest mistake was remove of gm connect mode. Is there any future plans to bring it back? Before that, i don't see any reason to buy these games.
Probably not. The community has been asking for it since they removed it and EA has basically ignored them. Look under nearly everyone chel social media post and you see countless people asking about GM connected but the problem is it won't "make them money" so they dump their assets into HUT and World of Chel, ultimate team game modes have ruined sports games for anyone who's a fan of simulation/realistic games.
@nhlcriminal wrote:Been playing these NHL games since 94, and i'm thinking that biggest mistake was remove of gm connect mode. Is there any future plans to bring it back? Before that, i don't see any reason to buy these games.
I believe it will be. The additions they’re making to franchise mode this year is a strong indication of such. If you think about it, what would GM Connected benefit from the most? Customization options, especially if the user can control the number of teams and the amount of games they play against one another. To me, the franchise mode features are very important, they (in my eyes) point to the future with GM Connected. Which is something we’ve been waiting for.
I don’t have any confirmed information but just from the optics of things I believe that’s where GM Connected is going and that excites me. A lot.
No guarantees but I think it might make a return once they finally ditch old gen and sort of start fresh with their code.
They say "Absense makes the heart grow fonder"; it certainly wasn't popular before but everyone seems to want it back now
I think you might be right, but I also think roster sharing and how many changes happened during the pandemic season had a lot to do with adding customization as well.
I was (still am) really hoping that massive improvements are made to coaching, scouting and roster building before they pat themselves on the back by adding GM connected.
@Beauts90 wrote:I think you might be right, but I also think roster sharing and how many changes happened during the pandemic season had a lot to do with adding customization as well.
I was (still am) really hoping that massive improvements are made to coaching, scouting and roster building before they pat themselves on the back by adding GM connected.
@Beauts90 with GM Connected in a custom league hopefully the intelligence or lack there of can be eliminated. Ideally for franchise players of all kinds an improvement in AI decisions can be done. But if it’s give or take I’ll take GM Connected any day. It’s been far too long since we’ve had an online franchise mode.
I think we see it in the next 2 years. They gotta get crossplay working perfectly so they can really make full use of GM Connected.
It wasn't popular before because it was done very poorly and half the time was so broken you couldn't even connect to the league, let alone finish a game before getting dropped.
It was a master class in how to ensure a game modes failure.
@TTZ_Dipsy wrote:it certainly wasn't popular before but everyone seems to want it back now
It was actually so popular that the servers they used to host all of the server-side data were slowed to a crawl. People eventually stopped using the mode that was incredibly cumbersome and EA just decided, "welp, guess nobody likes it".
HUT was introduced in NHL 11. GM Connected came on board in NHL 13. IMO, the financial success of HUT combined with the incorrect assessment that nobody played GMC (which some of us KNEW was due to overloaded servers) resulted in the mode being axed.
The stagnation of BAP in '23 makes me think they're pumping resources elsewhere - likely crossplay and HUT - but we might get lucky with some kind of online mode being added to Franchise in '24. Especially once they no longer need to develop for last-gen.
