Requesting a refund after less than 30 minutes of playing.
Dear EA,
I'm a longtime fan of your NHL franchise and today is the first time ever I'm going to be requesting a refund for a game. I purchased NHL25 about an hour ago and I've already decided that it's unplayable. The franchise mode is virtually the only one I play. The fun part for me is being able to jump right in, maybe adjusting a few settings first, then start making changes to my team immediately. It's a game we're talking about here after all, not a full-on simulator that will handcuff what you can do. As much as I appreciate the effort that went into making the changes for NHL25's franchise mode, it's simply not fun anymore and along with the UI changes makes the experience painful. The big pain points for me -- and I'm sure there would be more if I kept playing -- are the inability to disable trade/move clauses and the UI.
I actually like that the trade/move clauses were added. I was happy to try it out until I saw how it works: Sit through conversations with players trying to get them to waive. Realistic, sort of, sure -- I guess -- but conversing with a bunch of scripted actions isn't fun, and it eats up too much time. It's a nice idea but if the feature is going to be forced on me, there's got to at least be a way to streamline this. Again, I want to move fast and get to the fun stuff most of the time. Anyway, after dealing with it for 3 players, I decided that I'll just disable it since I liked the idea but just didn't want to deal with it for now. Unfortunately, I discovered the trade/move clause feature can't be disabled whatsoever. That's ridiculous and I can't believe the game was shipped this way. Instant deal-breaker for me.
The franchise mode UI is quite counter-intuitive IMO. Less than half the screen real estate for a small menu you have to page through with the buttons on the top of your controller -- left and right while the menu display pages up and down -- and the rest of the screen is only accessible by specific button presses. This completely goes against the natural instinct to use the cursor/joystick for things across the screen, especially if they look like you're able to as such with all the franchise screens in previous games. It's bad enough that I'll say something I never thought I would: I now prefer the previous menus where you simply paged through screens and got a big clear display of things on each one. It was sort of wasted space on some pages but it was all easily readable and intuitive. Now, it's not comfortable at all looking only at the left side of the screen or having to remember what are essentially keyboard shortcuts (buttons) for everything else. It's not something I'll ever be patient enough to get used to or event want to try to in the first place.
Thanks for the all the games in the franchise over the years but this one finally did it. I'm done. Next step is contacting Sony for a refund since I can't go through EA for purchases made on PSN.
- former faithful NHL franchise user
