NHL 15 Review (XB1/PS4)

[RUFFNREADY]

Quote: Originally Posted by GisherJohn24

serious question, does anyone know what EA was thinking when they released this?

$$$$ - that's what they were thinking, and always thinking! They would sell you a lemon, and patch in controllers later! EA isn't in on the front end of anything anymore; they are in the back end waiting for a riot to breakout!
I am sorry to say it but, EA is that average looking neighbourhood car dealership, with a sleazy salesman, that will sell you any eye appealing car, with no "Engine" (back seats, door handles), at major car dealership prices (New/full price). They will send you the steering wheel and brake pedal later on (in a patch)! Oh, and have a nice day; after you finish paying for it, before it leaves the lot!
SMH as I LOL

[RaychelSnr]

Quote: Originally Posted by Wiggy

Well, the PR campaign was more of an admission on their part that there was something to hide (negative stuff), which there was. That didn't directly correlate to score. Every review is in context. To say "expectations" shouldn't factor into it just doesn't hold water with me, as you're basically then talking about reviewing things in a vacuum. All genres of games are compared to their peers in the field. That is in expectation. If someone does something better, then I'm going to call a game out for not doing it as well. NHL has only itself to be compared to at present, and I'm not going to go into an isolation chamber and review a game and not acknowledge what it had done before. This is an existing brand. They don't just get to reboot and throw out everything that made the game enjoyable to so many. I agree with you that the gameplay is very good, and the presentation (mostly) delivers, but this game is about much more than those things. It only works if there are a suite of modes to enjoy it. UFC is not in that situation, as its gameplay is more pivotal since it's a one-on-one game. I expect it to have a better career mode, etc. next time out, but they nailed online play and most of the gameplay this time. Again, it is a first effort. EA MMA was five or six years before, which isn't relevant to this current franchise (made by an entirely different dev team). I agree that FIFA and Madden were more "port-ish" than NHL or UFC, but that doesn't mean that NHL should ship with scores of modes missing and basic features MIA. The whole product was mismanaged, and consumers deserve to be warned against such a cynical release. Again, I love the NHL series, but this one is missing a lot of what makes the brand great. I'm clearly not the only one to be saying this, and I'm not going to give something a pass when it's incomplete. Everyone brings some level of expectation and bias into a review, and to want tabula rasa every time is just not realistic, in my view.

To back up Glenn, again reviews are about value. NHL 15 doesn't offer a compelling value to customers who own NHL 14 or other previous hockey efforts -- it doesn't even hold compelling value over NHL 15 on previous gen consoles. It's prettier, the gameplay is slightly improved, but you are still getting less of a game than a game on older consoles. It's review theory, and there's no wrong way except inconsistency. Whereas UFC had only the THQ outings to compare itself to (and in essence compare the relative value of), NHL had two directly relevant titles within its own series to be compare to. Each game is different and the value they offer is judged differently.

It's the same thing as to why mobile games can get an 8 but not be nearly as technically efficient as a console game. We approach scores (and the words which back them up) as a value proposition to the gamer on a full 10 point scale. Right now (and for the past few years) our approach is to communicate that value with a word (Good, Great, Average, etc.) and number that correspond with each other. If a reviewer believes a game is good, then it's a 7.0 or 7.5. The .5s correspond to how exactly a game is within that. In this case, a 5.5 indicates its closer to a 6 than a 4. A .0 indicates a game is closer to the number (and category below) than above. It's a simple and linear process which we try to keep things consistent within.

[ChaseB]

I enjoyed reading the review and do not envy Glenn having to write it because it's a tough case of having to sort of look really hard at the idea of "review what the game is" not "what you want the game to be."

As a rule, I do think you should review the game as it stands, not what you hoped it would be. However, even if you don't think "hype" should play into the review process and the reviewer should live in a vacuum of sorts, past iterations have to creep into your mind here even if you were not distracted by the news leading up to launch. The past games are the past games, and switching generations doesn't mean it's a clean slate even if you want to make the argument that the game "fundamentally" changed during the console transition. At the end of the day, you still have to think about "consumers" picking up the game. And as much as you want to feel for the development team and know they want to make the best game possible, people buying the game aren't going to care -- most of them that is -- about the excuses for why XYZ are not in one of their favorite games to play.

Either way, this is something that would have really messed with me had I been tasked with writing a review of this game.

Also the 5.5 has been explained, but from an outsider, one of the perks of OS not being on Metacritic is that it seems like there would be even less pressure to feel a need to push a score closer to a 7 than a 5, which gives OS more breathing room to use 0-10 to me. Of course, it also means people coming here will at times think a 5.5 is the worst thing in the world rather than closer to a "normal" 7 but the rubric is always there to see.

[Wiggy]

Quote: Originally Posted by ChaseB

I enjoyed reading the review and do not envy Glenn having to write it because it's a tough case of having to sort of look really hard at the idea of "review what the game is" not "what you want the game to be." As a rule, I do think you should review the game as it stands, not what you hoped it would be. However, even if you don't think "hype" should play into the review process and the reviewer should live in a vacuum of sorts, past iterations have to creep into your mind here even if you were not distracted by the news leading up to launch. The past games are the past games, and switching generations doesn't mean it's a clean slate even if you want to make the argument that the game "fundamentally" changed during the console transition. At the end of the day, you still have to think about "consumers" picking up the game. And as much as you want to feel for the development team and know they want to make the best game possible, people buying the game aren't going to care -- most of them that is -- about the excuses for why XYZ are not in one of their favorite games to play. Either way, this is something that would have really messed with me had I been tasked with writing a review of this game. Also the 5.5 has been explained, but from an outsider, one of the perks of OS not being on Metacritic is that it seems like there would be even less pressure to feel a need to push a score closer to a 7 than a 5, which gives OS more breathing room to use 0-10 to me. Of course, it also means people coming here will at times think a 5.5 is the worst thing in the world rather than closer to a "normal" 7 but the rubric is always there to see.

Thanks for your comments.

Indeed, the rubric is there for folks to see. Of course, any site reviewing with a Metacritic score in mind has got all sort of other problems, so no one should be doing that. I wouldn't be writing for OS if we kow-towed to Metacritic pressure and things like that.

But just to go back to the "review the game as it is" point, that's ultimately what anyone should be trying to do, but that is going to be informed by precedent, comparison and usability. I can review the "new" Be-A-GM "as it is," but that's a proposition that is basically flawed at the outset, as it's worse than it was last year. For me to supposedly put that out of my mind when looking at it just isn't feasible. It's worse than it was. I can't just pretend I don't know that. As it is, it's a bad version of the mode -- just like Be-A-Pro, just like HUT.

I honestly think a lot of the confusion from some is because most sites DON'T use the whole scale, and a score like this is alien. Then again, lots of other outlets gave similar scores, so there's that (I had posted my reviewer impressions and had started to form a score in my mind well before other reviews were posted, FYI).

I think these are important questions to ask -- how a reviewer considers external factors, hardware transitions, PR campaigns, comparable games, etc. Still, I think the comments about reviewing the game "as is" are basically coming from folks who want to see a higher score. Well, that's not how I saw the game, so there's a disagreement on the score, basically.

Either way, glad to hear discussion on this.

[ty5oke]

Great review. I think I'll wait for the patches to come out before picking this one up.

[gopher_guy]

I'd be interested in seeing a review based SOLELY on gameplay. With the lack of game modes taken out of the equation. Personally, this is one of the more fun NHL games I've played.

Maybe the graphics jump (I'm a sucker for graphics) from 360 to XB1 is swaying my opinion, but I'm really enjoying it.

[ChaseB]

Quote: Originally Posted by gopher_guy

I'd be interested in seeing a review based SOLELY on gameplay. With the lack of game modes taken out of the equation. Personally, this is one of the more fun NHL games I've played. Maybe the graphics jump (I'm a sucker for graphics) from 360 to XB1 is swaying my opinion, but I'm really enjoying it.

I don't think anybody is saying you can't enjoy this game and appreciate what it does without also having fair issues as well. I've liked PLENTY of games that "scored low" and still understood why they were reviewed poorly -- but also still understood why I liked them. A review isn't meant to be an affront to any one person. Rather, it's one person giving a subjective look at a game that hopefully has some objective background in that he or she has played enough of the game to give an educational judgment.

It's why games/books/movies/etc. are great in that while the interactions with the mediums are different and what you get out of each can vary widely, these are still things everybody is going to feel different about because personal experiences, history, biases etc. all play into it.

Getting back to your point about a "strictly gameplay" review though, at some point I think it would just come down to what you're really after by saying something like that. Are you wanting to see a "strictly gameplay" review with a score attached at the end or just a critique/discussion/review of the gameplay with no scores attached? To put it another way, do you want to just have a deep conversation about gameplay, or do you just want to see a higher score that better jives with your experience with the game?

I think wanting a deeper dive on gameplay as just an interested reader is fair to want. If your'e saying, I want a review where person X pretends nothing else exists but the gameplay and here's X score, I think that's sort of unfair to expect from any outlet as it sort of doesn't make sense. There was a point where things were really messy with reviews everywhere -- at least at mainstream places -- where everything was being rated. For example, "Sound" would get 0-10, then "Gameplay" would get 0-10 and so on and so forth and then you still have an overall score at the end, which sometimes was an average of those other categories and sometimes was not.

Point being, I feel like numbers in general are sort of a necessary evil, but it doesn't mean you have to look for that number as validation for the game. The point of a review, at least to me, is at the end of the day provide some insights into the experiences had with the game and how/why it spoke to that person. I'm not going to get anything out of a Consumer Reports review where it just breaks down every feature and so on. (That being said, I do think there's a place for that type of "review" in the industry, it just would need to be the only way a particular publication reviews games so people knew what they were in for when they went there.)

[BMDinTDOT]

I haven't bought an EA NHL game since Sega Genesis in 1997. I loved the NHL 2K
series in the 2000's but haven't bought an NHL game since.

Every year I play the EA NHL demo or at a friends house and hated it. Hated the graphics,
hated the game play, hated the controls etc.

With that said I absolutely love the demo on my Xbox 1 and have been addicted. I love the
graphics, game play, controls, presentation and Doc Emrick as a commentator. I plan on getting
this game very soon.

I don't care that those modes are missing because I'm jumping in after a long hiatus and
I usually only play one on one online games anyways. While those modes sound interesting
I know they will be coming soon with a patch.

You can have all the modes with all the bells and whistles in the world but if you have
crappy graphics, gameplay, controls, presentation, commentary etc. like this franchise
has had for so long then none of that stuff really matters.