NHL 15 Interview with Lead Producer Sean Ramjagsingh Reveals a Few More Details

You don’t get repetition. With limited animation, I have an animation for hitting you straight on and I have one for hitting you at a 45-degree angle, but if you’re somewhere in between, I need to make a choice between animations. With physics, you can change the degree of the impact by one degree and you’re going to get a different reaction every single time depending on all the variables. It really adds unlimited variety.

...Now, when the puck is shot and hits the goalie, if it hits on the pads or chest protector or glove, you get a different reaction depending on speed and variables. We’re still in the development process but we’re already seeing things that we’ve never seen happen before. We’re seeing goalies try new desperation saves because the puck hits them and starts trickling across the goal line and they need to react to that.

...Now you’re going to have a puck that will hit a goalie under the arm and then squeak through between the cloth and the equipment that we have modelled there. Before, the equipment and the body were all just one entity. By separating out the layers, now we get this behaviour where the puck reacts with the cloth and the body and/or the equipment underneath it.