@sha2un98 wrote:
I feel it is important to keep dialogue fair and open regarding this issue. I understand the devs have a lot on their plate dealing with a yearly release cycle and doing upkeep on the current iteration of NHL.
However, I feel it is also important to be critical of the game in areas it is paramount for the games survival to improve in. In this particular instance, I am specifically referencing the absolutely terrible UI that NHL 24 (and previous titles on current and last gen hardware) posseses.
As a player who has put 1000 hours into NHL 24, who plays on the playstation 5, it blows my mind that the menus can get THIS slow. The UI hangs, stutters, slows, and breaks all the time. There is almost never a time that the UI is reasonably responsive.
I am 1000% positive this has been said so many times, but it is important to me to say it again because it is absolutely imperative that NHL 25 does not have the same issue.
I want to continue playing NHL as a series, but it's so hard to when my friends are outright refusing to because we have to suffer through menu issues all the time just to enjoy some hockey together.
1000000%%% this.
EA's menus are atrocious across all of their games. They lean too heavily on remote assets that take time to load. Most of their menu QA is done in-house and those assets are loaded over a LAN connection, giving the impression of speed and fluidity. This doesn't translate to the real-world.
There's also this push to be aesthetically cohesive with the current trends. Flashy menus with lots of detail with a lot of the focus being on the user and their personal customization experience. Fortnite, COD, etc have all mastered this (somewhat) by either reducing remote assets baked into their menus, or providing infrastructure to support the speedy downloading of said assets by way of plenty of regional servers to reduce latency.
EA is comfortable pushing laggy and slow menus into the world because people are still playing their games. Sports fans are willing to drudge through the menus to get to the action. When you consider the most played game modes are online, people will sit in a party and chat with their friends or scroll on their phone while waiting for menus to transition/load/etc. So the complaints about the menus go largely uncorroborated by others because they literally are just consuming social media while the menus load, so they don't see it.
