[bigwill33]

"People" don't keep saying that the gameplay is great. One or two people keep saying that in here. They just happen to be the ones that are posting that in every single thread possible. Clearly trying to feed their own personal agendas.

If you look closely you can read in-depth details about all the flaws still plaguing the series in terms of gameplay. It is far from spectacular. And even if NHL 15 is the best it has been, that isn't saying much because to a lot of us the series has been awful for the past 5 years.

And to the question of whether or not EA can recover from this; that is relative to what is defined as "recover".

Taking 2 years of development to turn out a product that was not even a shell of what was expected and then keeping it under wraps and being as shady as possible in doing so really set things back. If the game even is able to be fully featured in the next year or two that won't take away from all the lost time.

And it could easily be said that all of the features missing were not that spectacular to begin with. There were severe issues with EASHL, Be a GM, GM Connected, and HUT to begin with. Simply putting them back into the game as they were already will not be enough in many people's minds to justify purchasing this game again. And I couldn't blame them.

Look around just these forums. These are the least used game forums on all of OS, pretty much. Yet we have people on just this site that can list pages of things that EA has removed from the game over the years that should be staples of any hockey video game. I, personally, have listed a comprehensive list of issues plaguing EASHL and overall AI with the gameplay in the series. So this game was far from being great to begin with.

So much would need to be done to even catch the series up to speed with other sports titles that it makes my head spin. And quite frankly, I don't think the current team at EA has the ability to do it with what they have shown me in the past half of a decade.

Say that last part out loud a few times, by the way. "Half of a decade. Half of a decade. Half of a decade." It has been at least that long since so much of this game was even touched. The goalies are nearly 8 years old in this game. If you knew how to score 8 years ago you can do the exact same things and be successful. Sliders don't work as they should. Tuners often break more things than they fix. The AI is downright putrid at times. Online is wonky and has disconnect issues. The producers are nowhere to be found 97% of the year until it is time to do damage control or attempt to sell games. And they are tighter than Fort Knox with allowing media or impressions of the game to be released to the public prior to launch.

Add all of this up and why would anyone have faith in EA to do right by their fans with the NHL series?