The Blueprint: NHL 09 Style - notoriouzwun's Blog

notoriouzwun's Blog

The Blueprint: NHL 09 Style

Posted on April 2, 2009 at 04:22 AM.

I was sitting around recently talking to my friends who love to play NHL 09. We are avid sports gamers who have a league every year in our favorite sports games, just like every other sports gamer out there. We tried to figure what goes through the minds of game developers.

NBA Live and FIFA tried to follow the club play of NHL 09 and to my personal opinion a failure. FIFA more so probably because i don't understand soccer as well as other sports. NHL though has brought in sports gamers who are not just the hardcore hockey fan, but also the in my circle the people who had no idea how to play hockey but found fun in the EASHL Club feature. So the question is with all the things EA has come up with, why haven't they installed this feature in what is argueably their best franchise, Madden.

Picture this...A madden club team where Skill Positions is the key. You choose a WR but the key to that is you must also play DB. You choose a TE/FB you must play a LB/Safety Position also. You get two sets of attributes, one for your defensive player and one for your offensive player. OL/DL are both controlled by the computer. This is for fair gameplay. If you want to be an all-pro wide reciever you must learn to be an all-pro defensive back. FB/TE/HB will all have to learn how to play LB and fill gaps and follow plays or get burned.

Now not only could this be a good idea for Madden but really, when is 2K gonna get in on this? Yeah they did for basketball, but there was no club teams. 2K clearly has the better basketball game, so why couldnt they have set up their own league set up instead of wasting time on this Team 2K stuff. 2K would have an excellent deal if they were to use this with baseball also. This should be the "present of gaming" there is already a precedent set here. Skys the limit for "club" teams and such, we just need to see more of it. Well, not just more of it, but more of it done correctly like NHL has done it.

That last paragraph was gonna be just that my last, but i have to throw a few more things out. With NCAA 09 having had the first true online league experience, why don't more games offer this up? Is it really that hard to do? I only as because as a kid I first dreamed about created players, then I dreamed about multiple league seasons offline, now my dream is for every game to have a full franchise online with drafts multiple teams and CPU players. NCAA was great to play with friends from all over the country, aside from the defensive gameplay, this was the second best sports gaming experience of my life.

I know that most of you care about the gameplay more and will say, "Without solid gameplay its can't be a good game". I agree and disagree. I agree that a game should be solid gameplay wise and that they should also be able to have the quality staff to implement these features that make playing the games just that more worth it.

Comments

# 1 njd.aitken @ Apr 2

Love the idea.

Especially the dual position thing so you don't just sit on the sidelines for half the game.

# 2 notoriouzwun @ Apr 2

Thanks! Even last night as I had this sitting here ready to post were discussing how much fun being able to ref games between friends would be. How the mechanics would work and how there would be a grading system on your skills based on correctness of a call and how fast you made the call after the infraction. Sometimes, you just get a full head of steam going and next thing you know you have the craziest ideas.