I’m there to honestly. What blows my mind is even in my most wildest assertions, I for the life of me cannot even come up with a reason these decisions were made. You could argue, “well, they’re trying to save money”. No… no…. No. They could literally just use the broadcast package from last year and it wouldn’t cost them a dime of money or any additional resources.
Let’s be honest. EA is a profit driven company. There is zero financial incentive for them to remove something that would cost them exactly zero dollars to produce this year. Removing it adds nothing to their bottom line, other than some fantasy they may have that everyone will all of a sudden drop all offline modes and start dropping money in HUT if they are just not fun to play.
My second theory is that one of these new “presentation overlays” or “team intros” (all six of them lol) caused some type of catastrophic bug to occur with the broadcast package from last year. At which point the logical thing to do would be to remove the new fluff, and not the overall broadcast package. But EA wouldn’t due this because in their warped mind they probably feel it’s best to sale “them” on something NEW even if it is incomplete, then to not have anything to sale “them” on at all.
Now let’s get back to “team intros”. There are 6 of them in the game out of 32 teams. This is absolutely crazy. Can you imagine if maddens big selling feature last year when they implemented team momentum and home field advantage only applied to 6 of the 32 teams???? People would have been completely outraged. The difference is EA knows they can stick it to the NhL fan base without as much as a whimper.
Thirdly, to all of you people claiming EA Vancouver is a small development team. They are not. EA Vancouver is also responsible for producing FiFa which is the highest selling sports title in the world. The NhL team may be small, but they have the money and resources to insure that a major back of the box selling feature not only works, but is available to all 32 teams instead of 6.To give them a pass because of a “small team” is absolutely absurd. They simply do not care and have showed each and every one of us that this year. Not only to they not care, they are willing to use underhanded tactics, and strategic wording in their marketing materials to intentionally mislead the fan base and sale us a bill of goods.
It’s just so sleazy and disgusting