NHL 17 Gameplay Trailer

[nddurst]

Quote: Originally Posted by spidertour02

It's actually difficult to animate something like that because the players are different sizes. This applies to almost any game where the gamer can customize the shape of his/her character (most RPGs) or where the same animation applies to a range of fixed characters of different heights (including sports games). A two-person high-five is easy, for example, because it only requires one point of contact (Character 1 hand to Character 2 hand) and only needs to have calculated animations for the arms bending (to compensate for the difference in size; a shorter guy has to straighten his arm more to reach farther) and the location of the hand-to-hand contact. A two-person hug can lead to some goofy and downright buggy animations between characters with a large differential in height. NHL 16 has this problem -- if you use the Rangers, you've probably seen a few awkward hugs between Rick Nash and Mats Zuccarello. The main point of contention is the placement of the hands/arms. Say that Character 1's right arm is scripted to reach around Character 2's neck, which is done with a quick calculation. If Character 1 is very short and Character 2 very tall, it could break the animation and lead to Character 1's arm partially clipping Character 2's clavicle to reach (among other buggy possibilities). One solution is to always have the shorter guy hug the taller guy around the waist, which is a safer animation with a similar calculation. Another solution is to cheat by shrinking the taller guy down to the shorter guy's size and using a fixed animation. (Check out Fable III for this. It's as clumsy as it sounds!) A third option is to simply leave the problem as-is and hope that the problem is relatively uncommon. Another possibility is to use a larger number of calculations to get a more accurate approximation of arm placement, at the likely cost of performance. Once you start getting into multi-person hugs, all hell breaks loose. It's doable, of course, but since the game would need to do a lot of calculations very quickly to place all of the hands in the correct places (with more calculations needed for a more realistic animation), the chances of bad clipping, bugs, and/or performance drops greatly increases. If NHL 17 has three-man hugs, I would immediately assume that it's a case of the dev team finding a solution to the clipping problem but having to compromise for performance by limiting it to three players. TL;DR: It's harder than you think because height is a variable rather than a constant.

This all makes total sense. But how were they able to pull it off in NHL 11?

[nddurst]

I don't care about anything besides

1) Will there be neutral zone pressure from the AI

-and-

2) Will AI defense be much, much better

Gotta have both of these, or it's a no-go. Everything else is just fluff when the core gameplay doesn't feel like real hockey.

[actionhank]

Quote: Originally Posted by nddurst

This all makes total sense. But how were they able to pull it off in NHL 11?

I completely forgot about that...

While the animations often looked goofy in that game (the spinning celebration into the goalie) the 5 man clip looked okay.

[actionhank]

Quote: Originally Posted by nddurst

I don't care about anything besides 1) Will there be neutral zone pressure from the AI -and- 2) Will AI defense be much, much better Gotta have both of these, or it's a no-go. Everything else is just fluff when the core gameplay doesn't feel like real hockey.

Someone over at the Reddit EA_NHL page showed some little gif of gamplay footage, and it looked the exact same. No sticks in lanes, no pressure on the shooters, and no one facing the puck on offense.

[spidertour02]

Quote: Originally Posted by nddurst

This all makes total sense. But how were they able to pull it off in NHL 11?

There are a few shots of it in this goal montage, so let's take a look.



@0:40

It's a fixed animation, and the results are poor. Scott and Madden try to fist-bump and completely miss, then Scott tries to pat Madden on the head and gets nothing but air. Then everybody goes in for ... something, and they all miss.

@1:00

This one doesn't look too bad, but the players are all the same size, the ideal condition for this.

@3:14

Once again, everybody is swatting at air instead of patting guys on the head or slapping hands. It looks horrendous.

There are a couple more, but they're sped up and hard to gauge. Overall, this is a great illustration of the point I made earlier -- it clearly wasn't programmed for calculated contact, but rather they made a canned animation that does work if everybody is the same size, but generally doesn't because they're not. I can easily see why they removed it.

[knich]

I will wait for actual gameplay before final prognosis. But the trailer is really sad. When you look at its trailer compared with the other EA games, NHL is miles behind. Madden has me really excited this year. I know Madden has a ton more resources as does FIFA, but this trailer looks way too much like the trailers I've seen since the move to nextgen. I really feel like NHL is still a PS3 game, and I want so badly for it to be PS4. Unfortunately, I feel I will yet again be disappointed. I have hardly played NHL 16 and it will be difficult for me to justify paying for 17 if it is just a cosmetic (likely minor) improvement from 16..that is, something that should have been a 16 patch.

[BlacknBlue]

Madden and other games also offer way more game play video and do way more with media prior to their release. The past couple of years NHL has kept its fans in the dark with a lot of aspects of their specific game.

[brianski71]

Nice to see that the Pens won the Stanley Cup and EA still can't be bothered to make their home uniforms remotely accurate.