NHL 15: Living Worlds Trailer

[Steve_OS]

EA Sports released a new trailer for NHL 15, showing off the 'Living Worlds' aspect of the game. Here are some highlights:

• Each arena has been brought to life like never before.
• Lighting from the arena lights reflect off of the ice. The ice also shows incremental wear throughout the game.
• Each arena is scaled uniquely, with precise seating charts and details, including championship banners.
• 9000 individual crowd models in the arena.
• The fans have real behaviors, including banging on the glass during fights or big hits or anticipating big plays. Each fan has a different behavior, such as superfans being more active.

This aspect of the game does look darned impressive. What do you think of the in-arena details included within the game?

[TheLetterZ]

Okay, I'll be the first to say it.

They spent all this time working on the crowd (which looks amazing, by the way) but couldn't get OTP and EASHL into the game?

I realize they don't necessarily use the same development resources, but come on.

It feels like a breakdown somewhere in the planning or development process.

[Arrowhead21]

Lol, wow. You can tell it's not a developer speaking when you compare something like crowd models to the exclusion of modes. Two totally different areas of the game. The people who work on crowd models are not the people who work on mode inclusion. You even reference that in your post and continue to make the complaint, lol. Its old news! I wish people would just get over the EASHL exclusion and play on last-gen if it bugs you that much

[Hockeynut99]

Finally scoring a goal in your home area will feel awesome!

[actionhank]

Quote: Originally Posted by Arrowhead21

Lol, wow. You can tell it's not a developer speaking when you compare something like crowd models to the exclusion of modes. Two totally different areas of the game. The people who work on crowd models are not the people who work on mode inclusion. You even reference that in your post and continue to make the complaint, lol. Its old news! I wish people would just get over the EASHL exclusion and play on last-gen if it bugs you that much

He acknowledges that they don't use many of the same resources, but, that said, they all use two very important ones which are money, and time.
EA Sports is focusing on things that while nice, will be much less important after the first few games. I'm not going to notice someone taking a selfie in the crowd, and honestly, i don't care to. I want the crowd to sound like they do, and jump up and cheer or boo when they should. A guy taking a selfie is a useless little extra.
The gameplay has been stale and has yet to look like it's really changed in any of the videos. I'm glad the crowd looks nice, and it would be nice to let that soak in, if i knew that the gameplay was going to be a big step forward. Every video i've seen from EA released to the shakey videos of two guys struggling to form a play have shown me things that lean towards the Gameplay being the same thing it was last season, possibly with tiny refinements, while things like all of these little features that don't affect the overall gameplay get an entire video, and development time. Sure, the guy who animated the crowd probably has little to nothing to do with handling the AI for CPU team pressure in the neutral zone, or the way your team sets up and moves on the powerplay, but he could likely have been used to create some improved goalie animations.
It just sucks when you want the game to be good, and instead of hearing about, oh i don't know, Be a GM, defensive AI improvements, the way teams and players play differently, anything that would breathe new life into the series, we get an entire video on crowds and shiny ice. It's frustrating, and it's gotten more so this season, compounding all the other frustrating released from EA.

[hulk99]

Ahhh....this brings me back to my days on the Genesis as a kid pausing the game, going into instant replay to try and scan the crowd for cool stuff, usually being pretty disappointed considering it was the same detailed models over and over, but this is outstanding from a detail level. Nice to see they are taking advantage of some new hardware. The kid in me will be excited to see some cool stuff happening around the arenas. I just hope playing an 82 game season that all of the games "feel" different otherwise it will get old really fast. Thats the one thing that is probably difficult to achieve, a feeling of variety in every game, atmospheric variety. Presentation has a lot to do with that, but I won't know until Ive gotten about 10 or 20 games into the season, either way if the gameplay is good, I will enjoy it! I look forward to trying the demo on PS4 later today.

[TheLetterZ]

Quote: Originally Posted by Arrowhead21

Lol, wow. You can tell it's not a developer speaking when you compare something like crowd models to the exclusion of modes. Two totally different areas of the game. The people who work on crowd models are not the people who work on mode inclusion. You even reference that in your post and continue to make the complaint, lol. Its old news! I wish people would just get over the EASHL exclusion and play on last-gen if it bugs you that much

Hey, I'm a former developer!

Sure, they're different PEOPLE, but when you're hiring and laying off people at the start of a development cycle, you can choose which types of developers you have on your team and build your team accordingly.

If they hired people to work on crowds at the expense of hiring people to work on gameplay--and considering they surely had a limited budget of some sort, it seems clear they probably did--then I am correct.

[rtkiii]

Looks great...not a hockey fan but this is what should be done in all sport games....All!