NHL 16 Trial Available Now For EA Access Subscribers, Get 10 Hours of Gamplay

[bad_philanthropy]

Any impressions of manual passing?

[HenryClay1844]

Are people enjoying this? What am I doing wrong? I have never seen a game with a bigger difference between Rooking and Pro. I simply cannot win a single faceoff in Pro like 0 for 24 in a game. I give up terrible goals and sliders seem to do nothing at all. I got so frustrated that I bumped it to Rookie, upped all the sliders and was up 7-0 before I shut if off. This is one of the worst gaming experience I've ever had.

[jyoung]

Looks like Online Versus mode definitely has the new 3 vs. 3 OT rules applied:



If a penalty occurs during 3 vs. 3, the player count goes to 4 vs. 3 on the powerplay.

[canucksss]

Quote: Originally Posted by ThaLiveKing

That's one part of the game that's annoying as hell. It's across the board in EA games though. They want you to do all the work while the CPU moves on a string!! I'm gonna put it on Super star and let you know

I cant wait for your observations, I play mainly BaGM. This comment of yours, its the same old issue. SMH

Quote: Originally Posted by ThaLiveKing

Anyone notice that the CPU is WAY TOO Aggressive? They're not even playing hockey, they're just body checking, stealing the puck and shooting at the goalie. One game, superstar difficulty (8 min periods, I usually do 10) they had 47 shots on me. and dropped 7 goals on me to my 2. It's like they're not trying to play hockey, just NHL hits out there. I've tweaked some of the sliders and game play settings and it still doesn't matter. Tuning will fix it, but man it's annoying Edit: I forgot to mention that the User CPU teammates are still useless And the CPU found ways to get breakaways off face offs which in the NHL is next to impossible

As I expected. At higher rank, its not really playing GOOD DEFENSE its GOON Defense. I saw also about the lack of penalties......... so far, I am unmoved, unfortunately. Great for those playing EASHL, but poor AGAIN for those palying BaGM offline.

Thanks for posting!

[philliesphan026]

Warning, and apologies in advance, this is a long rant about Be a GM.

As a guy who mainly plays offline Franchise, I have to say one word sums up NHL 16's effort: Uninspired.

I skipped last year's after hearing about how gutted it was, but this year just seems lifeless. I don't know why EA tries to pigeonhole some kind of Morale system into every Franchise mode, because the one here and the one in Madden (Confidence/XP system in that one) seem to be more of a nuisance (or in Madden's case, game-breaking) than anything else. Which brings me to Player/Team Meetings. It's an intriguing idea and if you've played the Football Manager games on PC you'll be familiar with the concept... But to be frank, it's embarrassing at the way this was implemented in the game. Every few weeks, 2 or 3 random players on your team will request to speak with you. So you go to the Team Morale screen and talk to them. Now I'll admit that I've only gotten through about a year (simming all games), but it seems like it's the same few issues every time. "Praise me for my good performance," "The front office are idiots/doing a good job," "The locker room atmosphere sucks," "Give me playing time," "Pity me I've been playing poorly lately." I might have missed a few but you really won't be seeing more than that, except perhaps on rare occasions.

This wouldn't be too bad if it happened a few times a season. But it doesn't, it happens much more than that. I'd say at least 5 times a month... Which also wouldn't be that bad if it was an engaging experience. But it is not. It's basically a guessing game with no accountability. Some scrub wants playing time? Tell him you'll look into it, he'll either be happy or it will have no effect for some reason. He won't call you out later on a broken promise (at least my players didn't). With each scenario that I listed above, there's 4 response options you can choose, each one a sentence long. And every time you see a player complain about playing time, for example, you'll get the same exact 4 options. There's no variety there. If you guess right, the player's morale goes up. If you guess wrong, his morale will go down. Other times, nothing happens at all. The game doesn't tell you why his morale went up or went down or didn't change, but I guess that's not important, right?

There also seems to be no rhyme or reason for some player meetings. Roberto Luongo is complaining that the locker room needs a shake-up... but why? Is it a certain player or players who are a bad influence? Is it because the team is losing? Who cares, just pick an answer and hope his morale goes up, it ultimately doesn't matter. I would complain about them wasting time on putting this into the game when other areas of Franchise need a lot more help, but it really doesn't seem like they spent much time on it at all.

Before I go into my next point, I have to say the menus actually look pretty nice. Takes a bit to get acclimated to but they are sleek and uncluttered. However, and I'm not sure if this is a problem due to it being the Access version, but the menus are very sluggish. This has been an issue for EA games for as long as I can remember. Want to go see the standings? Click the League Stats screen from the main hub. Wait a second for it to load. Once there, click the Team Stats/Standings screen. Wait a second for it to load. Oh it's on Atlantic Division by default, let me tab over to the Eastern Conference. Wait a second for it to load. Get the picture? It's not the end of the world but it gets old really quick.

Sim times are still on the slow side. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Scouting is yet another thing that follows the uninspired theme. I can't believe EA can't come up with a better system than what is in this game. First of all, there is basically no point in scouting outside of Canada, as that's where 80% of the prospects are (the other 20% split amongst the US and a half dozen European countries). All you can do is scout Forwards/Defensemen/Goalies (pick one group) from a region for a set amount of time (between one and six weeks). Rinse and repeat. This, to me, is the opposite of fun. It is busy work, much like the Player Meeting system.

Another huge issue is that the teams are way too closely rated. The worst team in the NHL is basically only 6 or so overall points worse than the best team. What's the point of a 0-100 scale if every team has a rating over 86 in Attacking/Defending/Goalkeeping? When the worst team is an 86 and the best team is a 93, where's the variance? It should go without saying that this lack of variance applies to the players as well. No wonder all the AI teams play the same and the superstars don't stand out. This invalidates a lot of what makes a franchise mode exciting.

Yes, a lot of this might be nit-picking, but when you break it down this mode is as bare-bones as it gets. Scouting and "Player Meetings" are a decent ("decent" in terms of quantity, certainly not quality) part of the package when you consider that...Ultimately, when you take a look at EA's track record with offline Franchise modes, you have to wonder if they even care at all. Considering that both Madden's, FIFA's, and NHL's current franchise modes are exponentially worse than the franchise modes found in games that were released over 10 years ago (Madden 05/NFL 2K5, and NHL 2K6, for three examples), I can't help but get frustrated... Then you take a look at something like the NBA 2K franchise, which innovates its franchise every year (horrid microtransactions/server issues aside), and it just makes me sad to see what EA has done to this game.

EA won't be getting my money for NHL 16. Not if they keep insulting Be a GM users like this. I haven't even gotten far enough to see if player contracts or Free Agency or the draft work as they should or have any bugs... Honestly, I simply lost interest before that.

[snc237]

After 2 ranked games
My take aways from the games are - still some hold over issues from last year. Some occasions your still invincible from hits (yet much improved from 15). There's still times where you can skate through everyone after winning face off at center ice and get a mini breakaway. The pass break ups are nice yet I still feel like some of the one timer goals could be better prevented but that's more so a goalie issue. The puck is Overall looser on the stick but poke check isn't as effective. Stick lift much more effective this year as you get rewarded more for being in right position. Too hard to score power play goals (that's a joke but I am 0-9 on the pp this far). Cpu poke checks a bit more but still not a real threat. Goalies let some questionable softies in the net. Goalies pretty darn good on breakaways as they react much better to what your doing. Goalies hug post really well. Cpu still lacking any good blue line defence. Manual passing is very nice.

[AdamJones113]

Phillies, that is disheartening to say the least.

(Assuming you played Live the Life in NHL 14) How much would you say that EA's Be A GM Morale system is derived from Live the Life's text-based system that affected four meters, which in turn affected ratings?

[Splitter77]

any pucks out of play?
any cpu offsides??
neutral zone pressure??

or can we still play 7 minutes without a whistle??