NHL 25 Official Franchise Trailer | Deep Dive

Well, color me interested. Let’s see what they did 

Please, please let us fully edit players, I am sick of simulating entire seasons just to see how players will look because I don't want to take all the time to build teams, just to see a group of clones/ grey balding old looking men celebrate with the cup. My teams are always 70% face scanned players, which does look nice I can say.

I'll be cautiously optimistic for what they will do with it. For me no matter what they add or how flashy they make it look it, will come down to the substance that is added and if they finally take the time to fix the bugs/glitches that have been in Franchise mode going back to NHL 21, at least.

 This a list of some of the ones I know of off the top of my head

-AI teams not being able to handle their own RFA's properly - by signing UFA's and then leaving the player on the team. This can be unrealistic and even cause good players who would get some sort of deal even if its only a one year deal to not play or force me to trade for them so they are not sitting out the year. 

- To them not being able to handle the amount of contracts per team within the salary cap where as some teams could have as little as 24 out of 50 in NHL 24.

- To them using a forward on defense cause they don't have the same functions as a user controlled team to call up players or proper ones. Two instances here is having players in reserve and then slotting one of them in (forward), cause they don't have an extra defense men called up to using a 45 overall prospect goalie in an NHL regular season game (id guess cause they were med elite potential) instead of leaving them to grow in a lower level league and bringing  up the actual backup (78-80 overall) potential goalie they had on the AHL team. 

Honestly, the list can go on but I'll hope that they address this along with making meaningful changes to the mode (some of which has been missing from the game that existed in prior NHL titles by EA).

Thank you for listening with the projected goalies widget! 

I am a huge fan of the additional control, but I really hate the conversation engine. If it’s around 10 times faster than it was in previous years it might not be so bad, though. Menu speed is going to be more essential than ever this year. 

Okay, now that I’ve read the blog post:

• can we edit attributes within a franchise?
• I take it we can’t edit the position and HAVE to go through the conversation engine?
• will players start retiring at a more realistic time instead on 90% of them playing into their 40’s?
• will the expansion draft allow for more than one team?
• will we be able to add expansion teams midway through a franchise and not only at the start?

Great questions. 

Overall, I was impressed. The deep dive was actually a deep dive video, so thank you for that. I love that we can see awards from previous years, as well as game stats for other team games. I also love the addition of other contract negotiation terms. I like that we can get various team and player rewards for hitting certain goals, as this was desperately needed. I also like that we can move around draft picks to mimic the actual real life trades. They did not mention banner raising being brought back, and so that is kind of disappointing. There is more that I guess we shall wait until we start playing to find out about, but I am pleased that some of our concerns and feedback was brought in with Franchise Mode. I am still really hopeful that we will be able to host multiple expansion drafts throughout our franchise career, though with no mention of it, I do think this is a doubtful addition

I'll see if I can find some answers and talk about them.  Aljo won't be around til Sunday.

 I may have missed it, but what about injuries?  Any stats on type of injury, length of injury time, overall health of players?