NHL 13 Season Ticket Impressions

[Gagnon39]

Just played my first couple of games, both on Superstar.

I played the first game with default sliders and 14 minute periods. It didn't take me long to realize that I needed to make some adjustments.

If you want a hockey simulation out of NHL 13 the very first thing you need to adjust is the acceleration. I have it down two clicks (at 1) and I turned game speed down one click (at 2).

My next game was much better. And with acceleration and speed lowered you can still definitely get going crazy fast. I had two breakaways with Patrick Kane who was absolutely flying. I scored on one of them which was awesome.

I was leading the Coyotes 5-1 in the third period with under 10 minutes remaining and they quickly scored 3 goals on me. I'm by no means trying to start a "comeback AI" post/thread because I don't believe it exists, but a couple of the goals felt rather cheap. It was especially frustrating since I held them to 19 total shots and played great positional defense. The goals they scored were from bad angles and off of rebounds. There wasn't really any thing I could do.

I scored an empty-net goal and won the game 6-4.

So far my impressions of the game are very positive. I love the feel and look of the game and speedy players make a huge difference.

Unquestionably the most disappointing thing for me is that the pass accuracy and the pass reception sliders once again seems to have absolutely no bearing on the CPU. They still make a crazy amount of super-accurate passes. And I have yet to see (ever) on NHL 12, 11 or any game including 13 a puck simply bounce off of a CPU's stick. If EA implemented this correctly they would have as close to a sim as we've ever seen.

[BenVenom]

My impressions so far, 3 games allstar/ hardcore, attribute slider to max, pass rec. ease on zero, pass acc on zero, puck control on zero. Much less tic tac passing then we saw in then demo, I would like less tape to tape passes but some hard passes r "bobbled" any many passes(including a.i.) are missed completely. Another positive is guys can just loose the puck making a deke or a turn, again I have control at zero. The biggest problem and this is huge is penalties or lack of them. 3 ten min period games and I have seen the CPU take 1 penalty and in another 1 of my a.i. Teammates took 1. This is not good and seems to b exactly like nhl12. This is with all penalty sliders maxed!

[bad_philanthropy]

For some reason we can't change a player's default jersey number in the edit player menu anymore. Kind of sucks, because in GM mode for cpu teams after guys get called back up for the regular season many default to the numbers in their player profiles. An example of this is last year Nathan Horton always defaulted to #16 after the pre-season.

[bad_philanthropy]

Found a pretty stupid error in the game. Not sure if it is like this in the default roster, but it seems that every CHL player with a Reebok helmet doesn't have a visor—which is dumb considering it's a requirement.

[poster]

I am awful and do not know what I am doing, but I had 5 total penalties in one 20 minute period. 3 PP's for me, 2 for the CPU. I was on Pro/Hardcore, and I turned the penalty sliders up all the way.

[Keirik]

It could just be me i guess but it sure feels to me that the cpu on allstar and above have a serious boost advantage. They just seem first to every puck, first to react, rebounds find them first, pinball here and there right to them every time...

It's very frustrating

[fmedges]

The line change menu beeping at me all the time is so annoying. I was hoping this would be fixed from NHL 12. I guess it wasn't.

[chris33cc]

Let me preface this with saying that I hardly play NHL online, or against the computer. I usually play only against my roommate and a few friends, but we probably logged close to a thousand games of NHL 12 in. That being said, I can easily see doubling that amount of games with NHL 13. My impressions:
-I'm loving the fact that the wall passes are working well so far.
-I love the passing. I feel much more in control of where and how hard they are going.
-Winter Classic looks beautiful.
-I did get in a couple games with the cpu and I'm certainly impressed with their tactics. Once they had a breakaway, they would utilize some dekes and a fake shot to pull my goalie out.

Here are the stats for the game I think played the best so far (I was the Wild):

New York Islanders at Minnesota Wild
Sep 7, 2012 1 2 3 SO F NYI () 0 1 0 0 1 MIN () 1 0 0 1 2 Three Stars	Team Stats Comparison NYI MIN Shots on Goal 19 20 Hits 14 12 Faceoffs Won-Lost 13 11 Penalty Minutes 0 6 Power Plays Converted 1 0 Power Play Opportunities 3 0 Time on Attack 6:04 6:31
Scoring Summary

All in all, I think this is a very promising start to one of my favorite sports franchises. I may even have to cut into my Madden time to try out the Be A GM mode...