NHL 17 Gameplay Series Blog - Control The Ice

[RaychelSnr]

EA Sports sent us this NHL 17 gameplay blog from NHL 17 Producer, Ben Ross, as he highlights some of the new additions to gameplay this year. Some more details can be read on the official blog.

The EA SPORTS NHL team is proud to present the first look at gameplay in NHL 17. Own Every Zone with more end-to-end control with authentic goalies featuring positional awareness and reactionary save intelligence, all-new Net Battles for offensive and defensive zone play, and dozens of thrilling new goal celebrations.

Read More - NHL 17 - Control The Ice

[Dalsanto0026]

Loving the sound of these gameplay enhancements. Looking forward to seeing more gameplay.

[snc237]

Some things corrected that annoyed me last year so hopefully that A.I. Is improve in many situations, however the A.I. Needs a revamp completely apposed to revisions and tweaks.

[asu666]

I'm planning on sinking a lot of time into NHL 17.

[brandon27]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Enhancements (Blog)

In writing, a good list of improvements. Hopefully execution is good. The way things started with the news cycle on this one, I was pretty disappointed. The last few updates from Ea on this have been good though. Finally some real details, and some positive news.

[bad_philanthropy]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Enhancements (Blog)

Very thorough list of improvements. Happy to see the devs are very much aware of the glaring issues with gameplay (not regarding arcade/sim tunings).

Seeing things like the cpu now being subject to pass charging and all sorts of other user mechanics shows how far behind development of the game has been since the move to this gen. I'll give credit to the small and under-resourced dev team doing their best here.

[Al_Tito13]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Enhancements (Blog)

To me, gameplay is by far the most important thing and I have to say that NHL 17 looks really promising. From the day it was said that a better gameplay customization was in the game with 0-100 sliders, I was already pumped. After that, we got news about better stick collisions detection and a lot of new sliders available, including ones to make the puck completely loose if we wanted to. And now, this list of improvements which were needed for the most part.

Like I said, so far, it looks like NHL 17 will be great, and I can't wait to get my hands on the game, just hope I won't be disappointed.

[Diehardfan]

Sounds real promising but I don't trust them anymore. Everything looks and sounds great in the pre-release months but always seems to change when the game is in our hands.

I'll believe this stuff...when I see it first hand.

[ericromain]

There's some good nuanced improvements in there.
I hope they show some gameplay videos showing them off.

[MizzouRah]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Series Blog - Control The Ice

Agreed... I see the writing.. let's see some game play!!!

[jake19ny]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Series Blog - Control The Ice

Sounds awesome but will it translate into the gameplay? Hope so. I also saw a nice entire team celebration in the trailer perhaps a playoff win? Playoff clinch win? Or a big OT win? Looked good

[actionhank]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Series Blog - Control The Ice

I'm trying so hard not to be cynical in looking at the game, but I can remember reading about every game release and going "Finally X gets looked at...still wish it was Y, but this should be nice" only to be let down when the game released.

Morale was a huge one last year, and it ended up being next to worthless in game.

[phillyfan23]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Series Blog - Control The Ice

Sounds awesome but will it translate into the gameplay? Hope so. I also saw a nice entire team celebration in the trailer perhaps a playoff win? Playoff clinch win? Or a big OT win? Looked good

The gameplay Feature list is promising but i agree here....how will it translate in gameplay.

For example the sliders, nhl 17 will jave aliders 0-100. Nhl 16 had 0-6. On max penalty sliders for human/cpu, both teams averaged probably 2 penalties a game.

If in nhl 17 100/100 penalties yield the same thing, what good does 0-100 do? It ll just make slideritis more "acute". 100/100 penalty sliders should create penalties where a player gets called on for BREATHING on his opponent.

Same with the rest of the features will it impact the gameplay in a significantly positive manner.

I am cautiously optimistic....


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[sccavs64]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Series Blog - Control The Ice

Idk, list of improvements is really thorough....To me though, the increase of slider adjustment possibilities from 0-6 to 0-100 makes me think they're saying, "Okay this game isn't going to be great, so here's a way for you to manually make it less bad".

Cautiously optimistic as well. I think NHL would really benefit from the switch to Frostbite, so I might just wait until that happens to purchase. We'll see what the Beta brings.

[actionhank]

Re: NHL 17 Gameplay Series Blog - Control The Ice

Idk, list of improvements is really thorough....To me though, the increase of slider adjustment possibilities from 0-6 to 0-100 makes me think they're saying, "Okay this game isn't going to be great, so here's a way for you to manually make it less bad".

Cautiously optimistic as well. I think NHL would really benefit from the switch to Frostbite, so I might just wait until that happens to purchase. We'll see what the Beta brings.

I think in sports games, sliders are almost a requirement at this point. It's hard to have an in-game product that's going to appeal to everyone, while still being fun and accessible. The guy who just started watching hockey just wants to go out and score some goals. He doesn't really care about neutral zone pressure or defensive coverage on the PK.

But, the person who's been watching hockey, maybe played some, and wants a realistic experience is going to be focused on everything from lateral movement of the goalie to what forwards do in the zone on an odd-man rush.

Sliders let you tweak the game to your liking, so both of the above, and everyone in between can find their happy medium. The issue has been a combination of the AI being downright useless in some situations, and the fact that the sliders themselves were hard to understand, and didn't seem to really change that much when they were used.

If the changes make the sliders actually do more, they will be a great addition. If they take the already weak/ineffective sliders and just increase the range you have to move things for nothing to happen, it will be incredibly frustrating.