I shouldn’t be surprised

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@Jon_conn1_ wrote:

So to begin, it’s not even frustrating anymore, but laughable that you’re development team has had years to work on an actual presentation for the game and you still can not include a full presentation for a game in franchise mode. 

Every other sports game has put in actual effort to create immersion. It flat out sucks. Full stop. It must really be stressful to whoever loses the coin flip when they have to record the “presentation deep dive” and act like it’s revolutionary every year. 

But more importantly, changing lines and strategies pre-game only to have them incorrectly represented immediately on the ice is mediocre. I adjust my power play, which has a terrible user interface to begin with, only to see the player I’ve assigned to take face offs ends up god knows where, and if I pause the game and switch their position, that player gets frozen in place until the next whistle. For whatever reason you’ve made it impossible to edit lines and strategies anywhere else in the mode AGAIN. 

Also, why on earth does it make any contextual sense that after a whistle, when the CPU has full pressure, should one of my lines with 100% stamina immediately skate like they weigh 400 pounds? Why should a well rested line not be able to skate at full speed instantaneously after the faceoff just because the opposing team has full pressure? How would you justify their stamina rapidly depleting? 

I must finish this with taking accountability for being the schmuck who bought the game thinking there were actual improvements that made it worth pulling the trigger and now I wish I had that money to spend on literally anything else. 

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We’ve all been there man…all we can do is learn from our mistakes. 

You’re 100% correct and this year is worse than others. The AI is atrocious at best, checking is terrible, and the game is copy and paste from last year for franchise and be a pro players. I’m more angry at this years pathetic game than years past. Makes me think NHL 23 was actually pretty good. I’m out $70, thanks Ea.

I'm not surprised.  I was checking up on this - I have been done with EA on all of its titles since NHL 23 because that promised quite a few really big things in its advertising that weren't there - and in the case of presentation it was actually degraded significantly.  They appear to be trying to get all of their offline players to play HUT instead so they can charge you $500 instead of $70.  To be honest, if they're going that route they may as well make the game Free to Play because there is a clear, decade long pattern showing that EA is actively trying to degrade its offline modes in this game.  They don't hire the devs needed to make a good game and they seem to just want to convert a portion of offline players to HUT players and let the rest go.

I saw their trailer - they hinted at better presentation again - and, of course, everyone's complaining that the presentation is even worse.