NHL 24: The Downfall of HUT
Outside of game sales, Hockey Ultimate Team is the biggest money-maker for NHL 24. Previous iterations of Hockey Ultimate Team have been praised for their success in terms of competitive Gameplay, Content and Game Modes. However, NHL 24 takes an enormous step back in all three of these categories. The choices made this year highlight that changes need to be made directly at the top.
It is the responsibility of the Managers of developers to provide direction and deliver clear instructions to enhance the experience of consumers regarding gameplay. NHL 23 made strides of improvement, adding Arena Presentation, introducing a speed penalty when holding poke checks, and striking a balance in gameplay that was both challenging and fun. In NHL 24, the team decided it was important to add features that slowed players down and increase time waiting vs time playing during games. For example, the Exhaust Engine attempts to add realism to the game by reducing player energy while skating, hitting, or getting hit, or blocking shots. The realism fails because players cannot recover energy when they don’t have the puck and they cannot brace themselves for hits or establish proper defensive positioning when tired. In addition to the player Exhaust Engine, there is also a Full Pressure system, which slows down the defending team by another multiplier. When defending against Full Pressure, your players are instantly fatigued just from existing, despite even just coming off the bench and on the ice. A system with the idea that players should be rewarded for offensive possession but instead just penalizes players who are defending. Another example of how NHL 24 takes an enormous step back is the introduction of Total Control. Misleading in it’s name, Total Control adds one-button dekes to NHL 24, giving all players the instant ability to perform lacrosse dekes in every scenario, as well as removing Puck Protect in favour of One-Handed Tucks and Reverse Hits. Along with the factor of input delay, attempting a stick lift prior to possession instantly performs a One-Handed Deke and results in a turnover. Also added to NHL 24 is the introduction of charge hitting. Charge hitting is effective about 20% of the time., when it doesn’t result in a penalty, or when it doesn’t clearly miss. NHL 24 fails to enhance the experience of consumers in terms of gameplay by adding features to slow down gameplay, frustrate players with the controls, and making players watch long-winded goal celebrations instead of playing the game.
The Live Content is the lifeblood of Hockey Ultimate Team. Players receive in-game cards for things they achieve in real life, and they can also be features in special themed events. In previous years, Live Content came five days a week; if there was hockey, there was content. NHL 24 continues a trend of slowly pressing down on the neck of Hockey Ultimate Team by only releasing new content 3 days a week. This perpetuation of mediocrity also saw the removal of Community Requests, and a total botch-job on the Game Day series. Previously, Game Day cards would upgrade as a result of a players individual performance— In NHL 24, upgrades are based on the performance of a single stat line but the game day performances are based on Saturdays and Wednesdays, while the next closest content days are Tuesdays and Fridays-- three and two days later –- respectively. Hockey Ultimate Team has been a part of NHL for the past 13 years, and still, we see poor planning and implementation of player cards and upgrades. The team will release Fantasy Cards at low overalls, allowing a player to hit 99 OVR as quickly as they can score goals—and then announce in the summer that progression will be limited the next year, but do the exact same thing. Seasonal player milestones are ignored, career milestones are delayed, Live Moments, Team of the Week and Stars of the Month are all the same for NHL and too low to other leagues. The events in Hockey Ultimate Team are poorly marketed, if marketed at all. This is what is supposed to bring excitement to the game. Instead, events are re-used, the same players are featured, card art is unrelated to the event, and the ideas for creating something unique disappeared entirely. The Live Content team in NHL 24 inherited a guaranteed money-maker and is constantly proving that they can drive it straight into the ground. They do not care about other leagues, they do not care about player performances, and they do not care about the consumers.
The Game Modes are by far the most upsetting part of NHL 24’s Hockey Ultimate Team. The introduction of HUT Moments replacing HUT Challenges addresses change to HUT’s least played game mode. Additionally, requiring users to play an arcade-style mode with ridiculously mundane objectives using low overall players is an enormous step in the wrong direction. When a player scores a hat-trick and receives a Live Moments card for this. The HUT Moment makes you use their 70-80 OVR base card to complete this moment, while adding AI that does not get tired and objectives like Score Top Left or Lacrosse Goals, forcing players to play in a very specific way in order to achieve their goal. HUT Moments has the opportunity to be fun but is being mishandled and poorly designed. HUT Rush is another one of HUT’s least played game modes, while reducing the number of Points Tiers was good, the game mode did not function as intended at launch awarding zero points for goals of any kind. With the introduction of HUT Moments, HUT Rush simply does not need to exist. Squad Battles is one of the more popular game modes in Hockey Ultimate Team, allowing players to challenge AI controlled Ultimate Teams in a race to obtain 38 Wins per week. Unfortunately, Squad Battles saw no changes at all from NHL 23 to NHL 24. The leaderboard is still purely based on randomness of opponent refreshes and there are no details to see what each rank awards— as the Rank screen only shows pictures. Rivals and HUT Champions are Hockey Ultimate Teams online game modes and are the most played game modes. It would be obvious to say that improving upon these game modes would be management’s priority for NHL 24. Yet, Rivals and HUT Champions also received no changes from NHL 23 to NHL 24. The inability of management to correctly identify their priorities is a glaring indication that Hockey Ultimate Team is in the wrong hands.
To summarize, Hockey Ultimate Team in NHL 24 is a huge step backwards in terms of Gameplay, Live Content, and Game Modes. These points are emphasized by the lack of direction in all of these categories. The management team failed to deliver a quality experience for what is supposed to be NHL’s most financially profitable live-service game mode. This is also echoed by the total lack of community engagement by the developers after being promised a specific HUT Discord Channel. The individuals in charge need to step up, or step down. We, as fans of the game, deserve better. And management, whose goal should be to maximize revenues by delivering exciting, quality content has lost the faith of the community. Thank you, EA Sports NHL Team, your lack of competency and understanding of what made previous iterations of the game great has effectively killed NHL’s most profitable game mode.
