NHL 14 Available Now - Post Your Impressions Here

[RaychelSnr]

The NHL 14 early release for season ticket subscribers is available now. Be sure to share your impressions of the full retail version of the game below!

Impressions only! Q&A here.

Our review for NHL 14 is coming up next week!

[Steve_OS]

Impressions from jb1 (Had to delete the other thread)

Just played three play now games using the Pens on All-Star Harcore Sim (10 min periods) just changing a few sliders. Lowered game speed by 1, Maxed out Penalties, put pass reception ease on zero and increased fatigue effect whilst lowering recovery.

I had good variety of games beating the Flyers 4-2 in a game where they dominated but I hit 3 late goals to steal a win. Won 5-2 in Chicago in a game that I dominated before getting blown out 7-2 in Toronto which included two real softies from Fluery.

No question the game feels a lot like last years but I still enjoyed the games, the hitting feels much improved to me and I do like the fact the CPU will start fights. Still need to let you decline more fights at times I think but I do like that I have to think about who i'm hitting with incase they end up spending time in the box. James Neal ended up in 4 automatic fights in three games due to me laying people out with him including one in the Flyers game late in the third with me trailing.

Penalties seem ok, first game saw 7 (1pp for me), second game saw 6 (4pp for me) and the last game saw 7, (3pp for me). Also seemed good variety but i'll let more qualified people than me decide if we are seeing enough.

Pretty pleased with the shot totals although I do feel the CPU is a bit shot happy once they enter the zone, would be nice to see them set up a bit more. One thing that annoyed me last year (maybe due to my skill level) was that I couldn't get % of faceoffs won anywhere near 50/50, it was generally 70/30 or 30/70 depending on where I had the slider. However all three games had close face-off stats without me touching the sliders.

No need to mention presentation which feels exactly the same as last year, if not worse just because of how stale it is.

Haven't had much chance to get into Be a GM yet but it is much quicker than last year where we were stuck in quicksand most of the time. I should say I don't know how many injuries there are in real life but there seems a lot in simming of games in Be a GM, including many lasting 2-3 months. Seems the same as last year.

That's me done for the day and won't get to play again until tommorrow but overall I enjoyed it. I am concerned however about how quickly I will tire of Be a GM, I did play all 82 games last year but got bored and traded it in straight after. I don't see enough to think that will change but we'll see.

[bad_philanthropy]

No gameplay impressions yet, but one really annoying settings bug. Whenever I set the period length in my settings and save the profile it automatically defaults to 5 minutes once I try to play a play now game. So you cannot save your period length as anything for play now. It will always be 5 minutes. You can change it before you actually play the game, but it's just annoying that my setting reverts.

[mbergh22]

Quote: Originally Posted by bad_philanthropy

No gameplay impressions yet, but one really annoying settings bug. Whenever I set the period length in my settings and save the profile it automatically defaults to 5 minutes once I try to play a play now game. So you cannot save your period length as anything for play now. It will always be 5 minutes. You can change it before you actually play the game, but it's just annoying that my setting reverts.

I had that as well.

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk 4

[Qb]

Also put that in the bug/glitch thread if you could please, BP. Thanks.

[ccurtis3974]

twitch.tv/ccurtis3974

I am currently streaming early release gameplay on ps3.. game feels a lot tighter ... love it so far

[jyoung]

Incidental contact is in...kind of.

You can now trip over fallen players, and I've seen lots of new off-the-puck collision animations.

However, it still seems like you cannot collide with your own teammates, which is disappointing. They have the same old invulnerability force field around them.

I don't understand why teammate collisions are in EA NHL 3 vs 3 Arcade but not in the main NHL series.

[cake612]

Played 3 online games, I think I really like it so far. The hitting is pretty fun, I've only used the Bruins and I absolutely ran a couple guys over with Lucic and Chara and caused a couple injuries. Saw all sorts of goals, deflections, rebounds, a bullet with Chara from the point right in the upper corner. Passing seems a little more assisted than it has in the past maybe, but I didn't play a ton last year and it's been awhile.

I think the goalie play feels a lot more consistent, there didn't seem like there were any of the garbage goals of years past where it seemed like the AI would just randomly decide to let a shot go in from a poor angle with nobody in front. AI positioning feels pretty good on offense as well, guys go to the net and get open. The D-men were at the point a little more consistently than in the past which is nice when your in trouble and try and dump it back to the point in the offensive zone.

Default rosters are brutal, no Seguin trade but there's an update for online play that has it.