Re: NHL 21 complete mess!

I hear ya - you notice it a lot when circling with the puck and going for pokes; the ai just seems to always be able to counter. In these types of situations though I tend to launch up and immediately change players to pincer to cause a big juicy hit.

I remember seeing a fairly decent ice hockey game from an indie developer on the store last week but that'd probably be more akin to 3on3 arcade. In any case, a break will always do some good -- PS+ has been killing it lately and Game Pass is top notch

THat was another thing I have a problem with. You mentioned circling the puck and the AI always counters. I've noticed, not just in this game, other NHL titles by EA as well, that the computer is always faster than you, no matter who you use. Even if you increase every players speed the computer will always have a huge edge on you. Which makes it much harder to poke check or get in front of the computer to get the puck or stop the play.

I know these sports games are nothing more than copy/paste code from previous years and they add a couple new features and call it a brand new experience but this time around they seemed to forget to add defence and turned up the computers difficulty while spending no time on player ability. I do hope they come out with another patch and tuner soon.

@DyreLogan 

The game is not copied and pasted. There's a lot that goes into the game with each new release. Of course, it's built on top of the previous generation of games, but we don't take last year's game and change the year on it.

The computer players aren't faster, but they are excellent at conserving their energy. Humans tend to hustle when they don't need to. They also rarely let their goalie cover the puck. When you pass it out, your players just get that much more fatigued which lowers their attributes. You'll probably see a difference by covering the puck and manually choosing which lines you want to use. I play on Superstar and have had no problem keeping up with the AI players, but I'm also very careful about managing my player's fatigue.

So about fatigue... how exactly is that computed regarding the length of the game? Can you wear a team down to where in the 3rd period even though it says they have full energy it will decrease at a much more rapid pace due to taking hits and how much the player has expended energy in previous periods? It's so hard to get the details of what actually matters vs what does not like even on the attributes what all they mean etc. Shouldn't EA have the details spelled out much better somewhere?

@BillCarmody 

The previous periods aren't taken into consideration. Energy is maxed out between periods and drains as they play. Hits and hustling are the biggest contributors to fatigue.

So essentially you can't grind down a team over the course of a game. At least I know now. thanks

@BillCarmody 

Correct, but you can grind them down over the course of a period.

It’s obvious you don’t slap a sticker on the same game every year because goalie mode keeps getting worse every year