I see a lot of gameplay impressions posted and I'm going to dive into gameplay and sliders in a few minutes to see if the game is playable but I'm not sure why because it looks like offline season gamers like me are screwed. I was hoping I could find a way to make BeaGM work to play a season and I'm not sure I can. Here the things I have found already most of it bad:
Good:
1) The schedule for year one seems to be the real schedule
2) The simmed games had fairly good scoring and variety
that's where the good ends
Bad:
1) You cannot set it to just one season it has a minimum of 5 seasons. Not that big of a deal you can just play the one anyway
2) You can turn off salary cap, CPU to CPU trades but that does not stop them from offering you idiotic trades. 6 games in (simmed) and the Stars offered me Horcoff for 2 no names on in the AHL. restarted a season and 6 games in (simmed again) Dallas offerd the same trade for 2 other no names....weird
3) You have to deal with constant notifications about scouts and other crap I would just assume avoid if I could play season mode
4) Not being able to control all teams is a huge problem. Forget about keeping up with the real rosters as you cannot force trades. Even set on easy I tried to get Parise from the Wild for a few minor leaguers and they wouldn't budge. This is an issue because the only way to keep the rosters realistic with the NHL season would be to trade the player to your team then send him off to his rightful new team. So you may be able to swing many trades this way but if a big name player goes to another team around the trade deadline for virtually nothing good luck making it happen. You also cannot control who the CPU teams call up and down
5) Not being able to edit players is a joke. If you trade a goalie he will wear your teams mask but wear his old colored pads. I traded for Backstrom and he wore Lundqvists mask but had the green and red on his pads still....amazing they have even more goalie gear this year and no way to use it except on a created player. On a side note there several new masks (Arizona, Dallas, Montreal, NYR, Winnipeg, and Vancouver) the rest are the same old same old.
4 and 5 may be the real deal breaker for me I could have dealt with the rest and could maybe find sliders to make the game playable but without roster control (which apparently you only get in season mode) and player edit this game may be useless to me. Rammers answers on both lead me to believe they will not be in an update but rather NHL 16
To the poster above yes it has player create
UPDATE: There is also a problem in the menus. In BeaGM when you set your settings on the first page and then move on to advanced settings it keeps resetting the first page it also does this with sliders. If you set quick settings then change advanced it resets the quick settings menu.....ugh