Be a pro AI
AI BEHAVIOR is so boring. Are you guys gonna make more realistic or not? Also are you gonna remove coach interactions and change how the coach manage lines? In playoffs we Re trailing by 1 goal and h...
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@highlikefish I have to agree. No matter how "positionally sound" you play (because you just KNOW defenders are going to come in here and say, "Actually, the AI plays GREAT if you stay in position!"), it doesn't change the fact that the AI doesn't know how to make plays off the rush. Nor do they know how to dump the puck hard around. I play as a D-man in my offline BaP mode and watching my AI forwards attempt to rush the puck into the zone is comical.
Most of the time, the AI player will do a one-touch deke to the inside, launching themselves directly into the opposing team's AI defender for a turnover. I have NEVER seen the forward AI utilize simple common plays like carrying the puck into the zone on the wing, cutting back at the half-boards, and then looking for a pass. Either they enter the zone and deke into the d-men or make a drop pass to me if I'm open - and sometimes they don't even do this when I'm wide open. I find I usually have to "force" the AI to play better by calling for passes whenever I reach a soft spot in the coverage. They don't seem to have the logic to allow them to skate to open ice and look for playmaking opportunities.
Most of the time, the AI player will do a one-touch deke to the inside, launching themselves directly into the opposing team's AI defender for a turnover. I have NEVER seen the forward AI utilize simple common plays like carrying the puck into the zone on the wing, cutting back at the half-boards, and then looking for a pass. Either they enter the zone and deke into the d-men or make a drop pass to me if I'm open - and sometimes they don't even do this when I'm wide open. I find I usually have to "force" the AI to play better by calling for passes whenever I reach a soft spot in the coverage. They don't seem to have the logic to allow them to skate to open ice and look for playmaking opportunities.
Boring is a great word. Not only are we lacking real hockey strategies in this game in general. but the AI are now extremely passive defensively so it leads to a lot of plays like you highlighted where the AI just deke into themselves and the game looks like timbit hockey with unnecessary dekes, a complete lack of spatial awareness, and goals more often than not coming from seemingly benign scenarios where enough bad things happen in a row that it leads to an extremely ugly looking goal.
Been saying it for years now, this game quite literally can't take take any meaningful steps forward both in offline and 1v1 play until the AI is addressed. Even with "perfect" sliders (if that were a remote possibility from a general consensus standpoint) the game would still be underwhelming offline and would for the most part be the same online with maybe some lower success rates while playing the game the same way as now.
Even the most casual of hockey fans who might be drawn to this game after watching playoff hockey would turn this game on and wonder what in the world they're playing, because the AI are so far away from doing anything even remotely realistic in any consistent manner that it's quite literally like watching a different sport. Combine that with the default sliders they just booted the game with and they'll really be shaking their heads wondering if their eyes are deceiving them because guys are covering 15x the amount of ice in half the time as the real life game they watched and made 30x less amount of passes to achieve time and space because its practically given for free.
Now, all of the obvious fact that no sports game is perfect. I'm not silly enough to ask for that. But at least with Madden and FIFA there's a general idea of the sport being played by the AI. It's not great, but you can at least find a decent amount of plays and decisions that look "passable" if you will, even things as simple as general game speed. With NHL, it looks and feels like a video game with a hockey skin. Very routine plays like center drives on a rush are just non-existent and extremely simple coverage concepts like "don't stand on the weakside of your mark who is quite literally standing stationary in the slot" are fumbled by the AI that you can't really be drawn into this game from a hockey POV in the slightest.
FIFA has it's coverage breakdowns, don't get me wrong. But usually its with overlapping cuts, or on a blocked shot and there's a lot of moving parts, NHL just has weakside defenders standing on the outside of their mark looking at the weakside corner where there's quite literally nobody there. No passes, no shots, no blocks, quite literally nothing happening that would even remotely begin to justify a blown coverage in the slot and that just happens quite frequently. Things like that really drive away the casual audience imo because they can't relate to what they just watched IRL. I believe my hockey knowledge is quite high compared to a casual consumer so I know I'll notice things that they wouldn't, but those aren't the mistakes we're talking about here. These aren't "zone issues" or infrequent "2nd level blocking assignment issues," these are frequent misplays and the most routine of assignments and plays. I don't see FIFA defenders losing their mark in the box that often on extremely routine plays and especially not in the way NHL guys do by facing the complete wrong way of the play. I don't see Madden defenders in M2M standing outside of their mark looking towards the sideline. They're not perfect games but as a casual consumer I am certainly not seeing the level of AI blunders currently present in this series. The foundational elements of those two sports are seemingly there. NHL is not. Playing this game like you would IRL will not lead to much success if any. You don't have to play like the real sport in the slightest and in the competitive scene you probably shouldn't play like the sport in the slightest because you won't have much luck.
Need to have passable AI soon. It will help quite literally every single game mode in the game and will be much better at retaining new hockey fans as it will play much more like the experience they've just been recently exposed to.
You'd think having dynamic AI that evolves with every iteration of the game and becomes more and more lifelike would be a priority for a company making a game that contains offline modes and 1v1 modes but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's a damn shame because the AI is consistently what ruins my fun when playing this game.
@NeonSkyline21 wrote:You'd think having dynamic AI that evolves with every iteration of the game and becomes more and more lifelike would be a priority for a company making a game that contains offline modes and 1v1 modes but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's a damn shame because the AI is consistently what ruins my fun when playing this game.
Yeah, the AI advancements have been slow (and in some cases have regressed) which is definitely frustrating for those of us who watch playoff hockey, get the NHL itch, then have to watch the AI chase spots on the ice over the puck/their marks in the only hockey game on the market.
The overly passive in-zone defense paired with the incredibly static in-zone offense seen in NHL 21 and beyond basically makes the game a rather mundane game of keep away for any offline user. I have almost zero problems wasting half a period at least per possession as the entire possession is nearly uncontested. And after I ping pong the puck around the outside to my stationary AI teammates for awhile who are completely uninterested in scoring based on their body position and their desire to stand near the boards or 5 feet off to the side of the net providing neither a screen nor high danger deflection threat, they'll accidentally stumble into a scoring chance that will be easily shutdown without any sort of rebound or effort at all from the robotic goalies seen in 23 and 24. No reward, not even a scramble, not even a slight glimmer of hope that the 13-touch play I just executed finished off by a one-timer in the slot could ever even remotely have the possibility of going in. Just top-corner slapshot 1T easily gloved and held like it was a routine drill.
And while it's bad enough for offline users, it's even worse watching CPU vs CPU play. I don't enjoy doing that in any game, but I've done it in NHL just to understand the AI better in terms of strategies so I can help my own experience, and there's just not a lot to get excited about when watching. I mean, I get that hockey AI has to be an insanely hard thing to design and program, but it's those "base level" plays if you will that are just wrong in general that more than likely contribute to the AI looking/feeling a lot worse than they probably are if they had a better foundation.
I mean, no center drives, no forwards constantly screening, the defense loathing the idea of shooting before 15 passes have been made, defense walking to the middle on their backhands, forwards standing on their backhands, support forwards standing along the wall making cycling impossible, the AI just simply not wanting to headman/ring a puck when pressured in the dzone, just so many simple things that they don't do that could easily elevate the enjoyment of both playing with and watching them that are either absent or inconsistent.
Again, not saying any of this is easy. Not asking for the NHL series to be a global leader in AI modeling, on the contrary I'd like to see them less "dynamic" and more predictable with lots of "set" movements where there will naturally be more passing options for them to be "dynamic" with rather than their favorite NZ regroup of "defenseman skate board to board to board to board, to 360 pivot to cross-ice pass that's been inexplicably left open by the human's AI winger, to 180 degree escape to skating board to board, then forward, then dump into the corner that has nobody with the speed or momentum to win the puck race" that they run regularly.
The AI in 2k weren't perfect, but their "patterns" or whatever you want to call them were miles easier on the eyes than EA's. It's why NHL 2k10 was my offline hockey game up until NHL 20.
- @Limp_KidzKit Dude... you play offline games in which you control the entire team? That stuff is the most boring way to play this game IMO and I just can't do it. Sometimes I do it when my internet is out or what have you and it's just... incredibly boring. So predictable. So non-hockey-like.
The only time I play offline now is when I play be a pro but that comes with its own issues that I've discussed on here many times. It basically boils down to watching your AI teammates act like they have no brains and deke into defenders, become static in the offensive zone (like you said), not take advantage of basic hockey tactics, etc etc etc. It's soul-crushing, to be honest. So I stick to Online Versus and combat the top-100 rank exploiters and iso-ball players every day.
There ain't no winning, is there? lol.
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