NHL 25 franchise is broken, and creativity is too limited.

I got the trial version of NHL 25, just the 10 hour one thinking that I'd give it a shot, give it a chance and see just what it offers to me as a franchise player. They FINALLY added NMCs and NTCs which was about 7 years overdue by my count, but here's the thing--franchise mode doesn't even WORK after the most recent update.

I'm routinely getting stats and standings displaying ridiculous stats, random players appearing at the top of scoring races one minute then having next to NOTHING the next. Rickard Rakell having a 60 goal season would be fine if it actually happened in-game, but no, it just magically changes on you. Doesn't make any sense to me, and if ONLY that was it.

The find trade feature no longer works. I'll try to find a trade for a 7th or 6th and it'll instead highlight a Top 4 Dman on my roster and use that. From what I've been told, it hasn't been broken like this all season, but I'm not the only one having this problem.

One problem that HAS persisted from last year is the sliders. I played NHL 23 on the Xbox One quite a bit, and I remember it actually feeling terrific when I got the sliders how I wanted them, and it was awesome. I played long, exciting franchise and BAP with those settings and it was amazing. I made the switch to 24, and sliders did not work, I tried everything. Genuinely, nothing I did seemed to change the sliders and every preset I made would invariably be written over by the DEFAULT sliders.

I tried 25 thinking "okay, EA has 10 hours to win me over, maybe they can". I am an about an hour and a half in, I'm looking at the clock, and this game as turned my expectations to absolute mush. NHL 23 was very far from a perfect game, and when I say that NHL 25 is making 23 on Gen 8 look like the Sistine Chapel by comparison, I am not exaggerating. Sliders in NHL 25 STILL do not work, and it is December guys. You've had 2 years almost to fix it and you haven't.

My question is, being that they've removed the slider functionality, WHY IS THE INTERFACE STILL IN THE GAME IF IT HAS NO FUNCTION??? Why would you LEAVE that **bleep** there, only for it to just not have any use tied to it? Is it to avoid the backlash of not having it there? Does EA think that I am so stupid that I won't notice when I spend 20 minutes tweaking sliders and nothing changes? Because if so, color me insulted, that **bleep** is unacceptable. I'm sorry, that's now TWO unforgivable failures. One whole mode no longer functions and an interface that's necessary to make the game feel like a simulation is rendered useless.

But maybe, maybe I'm missing the big ticket additions. Maybe they did something big in create-a-team and just nobody is talking about it? No. Nope, create-a-team still has not been touched since 2016 aside from the UI overhaul it got LAST year. There are no new logos, no changes to jersey templates, no ability to change striping materials either, that's now the 3rd consecutive year where they have not added a logo.

This is a problem for me for a pretty simple reason: the big ticket addition to NHL 23 was the expanded 48 team franchise mode, which I loved and felt was FINALLY an attempt at measuring up to FHM 8. The problem is, EA does not provide the utility to PRODUCE 16 extra "competent" teams, let alone a full 48 if somebody were to want to do such a thing.

They don't provide 48 decent looking logos for the game, and even if they did, you can't customize the jersey styles at all. At least allow us to customize the shoulders, sleeves and waist stripes independently of one another, and let us do the same with things like number placement. I could forgive the absence of some new logos or an upload feature, IF there were a utility that allowed you to make more unique feeling uniforms without completely reusing templates.

Let us take a rebook template and put an Adidas/Fanatics collar so it fits in. Let us take SOME creative liberties.

Then there's the rosters, if you want to create a player, on a created team, the ONLY way to not wind up with a duplicate in franchise mode is to put them on one of the national teams. Which means, fundamentally, you can only realistically create about 10 or so rosters before you just can't avoid having duplicate players. That's obscene. In FIFA, an EA title, their dynasty mode allows you to autogenerate rosters for a custom team.

Why can't we autogenerate a roster based on a contending status, team identity and what level they play at? Why don't we have the option to set up custom LEAGUES outside of franchise mode, so we can just use those? Then, we could start a franchise mode that's FULLY customized from top to bottom, and if we wanted to restart playing as a different team, you can just reuse that league configuration.

And use similar utilities for player creation- let us input things like a name, some measurables, his play style and a target overall and have it autogenerate the ratings, and just go through the normal appearance customization options (which could also use an update by now, once again been 8 almost 9 years guys...) to have a way quicker player creation process. And for the love of god, let us PICK OUR OWN PLACE OF BIRTH!!!

Once again, it's the 9th generation of consoles, it is a 30 GB game, why are we picking select cities and towns from a dropdown list? Give me a map, let ME pick, it's MY player. This is not hard. FHM 10 does this in a game that's maybe 1/10 the size, this is SMALL stuff that would add up to a better experience if implemented in a game that WORKS.

NHL 25, as a game, does not currently work, and even if it did, it is STILL customization hell. NHL 23 got me excited with expanded franchise mode and I was fooled enough by the potential it brought forth because I bought 23, I bought 24 expecting it to be fleshed out, it wasn't, it actually BROKE sliders. I did the 25 trial thinking they finally fleshed out the awful AI and cleaned things up: they didn't. Sliders still don't work, the customization is still really neutered for a game that claims to be fully next-gen.

What a titanic disappointment. I've played a lot of games, but I don't know if I've been so certain of a game's failure within 2 hours since what... Balan Wonderworld? This game is BAD dude, I mean just... bad. Like, ugly bad.