Nhl 10

[Scott_Arm]

Demo is up up Xbox Live. I know what I'll be doing tonight.

New features, for those that haven't been following (this is off the top of my head):

- first person fighting view
- manual passing (various degrees of pass assist, like FIFA)
- board play(pin players to boards, pass with skates etc)
- Slider presets to adjust between sim and arcade style play (casual, default, normal, hardcore), independent of difficulty settings
- some improvements to online match making
- supposedly massively improved goalie AI (1 guy working a full year just on the goalie), with greatly increased number of save animations
- I think a new injury system
- face-washing and rough play between whistles (can draw or earn penalties)
- grinding forecheck (tired players will start avoiding being hit, causing them to lose the puck)
- some new shot faking moves
- shooting from knees
- some fancy manager mode
- improved be a pro mode
- players will glove the puck down if it is going over their head, or will knock the puck to the ice

There could be more, but that is what's coming to mind. Looks like it is going to be the most significant change to the fundamental gameplay (passing, board play especially) in a very long time. I'd say it's bigger than the skill stick.

On September 10th, the game is out and I will commence to waste my life.

 

[Scott_Arm]

NHL10 demo breaks the mold of typical EA demos:
http://www.easports.com/blogs/nhl/inthecrease/post/slug/a-demo-like-none-other

-Play the 3rd period of the Stanley Cup final game.
-After creating a player for Be A pro, play a prospects game in Be A Pro to try to win over the scouts.
-Demo includes all difficulty levels and all slider presents (modes)
-Interactive tutorial shows you how to play and how to create your player.

No love for NHL, guys?

 

[jb]

I am at work but will get this ASAP. This should be an awesome game. NHL 09 was one of the best sports game I every played so looking for NHL10 to follow in the same footsteps!!!

 

[DuckThor Evil]

No love for NHL, guys?

I'll definitely pick up the full game. I don't even need to try the demo. NHL 09 was already great, even though it pushed my Elite to RROD and it seems ten is only going to get better. It would be great to play against you some day! after a bit of practice of course :smile:

 

[Scott_Arm]

What makes you think I'm that good? I think I only played 1 vs 1 twice, played only a dozen shootouts at most, and played less than 100 games in Be A Pro. I never tried a normal quick game. But I recently broke the 1000 game mark in the EASHL, which is kind of depressing. Some guys have over 3000 games, or probably more!

I'm hoping that this year, being a defensive forward will be more useful. I want to be a Mike Richards type player - good offensive skills, but responsible and gritty as hell! Hopefully the midget dangler/playmaker league of 09 is gone, and we get more varied player types.

Maybe I'll join the VHL league if the EASHL is a glitch league again.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Haha You don't need to be that good for me wanting to play against you :smile:
I certainly am not very good, maybe the RROD thing in my post gave the wrong impression. I was able to play like 5 games before it broke. I haven't played any Be a Pro games, maybe 10 games on Live... I've pretty much only played against my friends, whose skill level is not very high and I'm not dominating them in any way hehe. I would say I'm ok at it.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Be A Pro is the best way to play, by far. Then take your pro online and play in the community. Just mute all the morons.

Last years online EASHL was advertised very very poorly. I didn't even know it was in the game when I bought it. Basically I played one regular online team play game, and some guy invited me to join his club. I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was definitely the best way to experience the game online. Basically they made a "clan" system with built in match-making, and you had persistent stack tracking, for those that don't know. They had a leader board with divisions, and the winner was invited to play in a championship in Vancouver, which happened recently (PS3 vs Xbox in the finals)

 

[Scott_Arm]

Puck comes free and gets tipped very very easily compared to last year. Lose puck ducks are much more difficult to pull off. Pushing the puck ahead for a speed burst is not nearly as effective.
Passing is very manual on the normal and hardcore settings. I haven't tried default or casual. Normal will be the online setting, so I'm sticking to that. Unless you hold the pass button for a second, the passes are very slow. The manual passing makes it much harder to pull off those crazy breakout passes. You'll see poor teams get stuck in their own end a lot more often, if they aren't good at passing.
Shooting seems to be about the same, but setting up a one-timer is pretty hard because of the slower manual passing. Passing is actually going to require skill in this game.
The goalie animations look improved, and I've seen defencemen bat pucks out of the air. Too bad the demo won't let you play as the goalie.
Board play is a very cool feature. It'll take a little to get used to the controls and how it changes your positioning because you need to support your players along the boards. Already I've had some extremely aggressive forechecks, I'm just not good enough to generate scoring chances out of it.
Hitting is a lot more difficult. You have to time your hits because the hitting assist is basically gone. Pinning opponents on the boards is fairly easy though. A few times I tried to hit guys that were either bigger or stronger than more, or I timed it wrong, and I actually ended up hitting them and falling down while they kept skating.
The rough stuff after the whistle is funny. I've taken a few after the whistle penalties and drawn a couple. I've also started a fight after the whistle and the fighting is a lot more entertaining.
Overall, good stuff, but I think the guys that just dangled non-stop will be disappointed because this is more of a team game. You won't be able to dangle in and look for the one timer or breakaway anymore. Using your D is going to be a must in the offensive zone. I like it, personally.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Today is the day I descend into video game addiction again. I need to control my NHL playing a little better this year.

There is a spreadsheet goin' around with the starting attributes for the different player types online.

Speed starts at 75 for all of the forward types, so dangler will no longer have a huge point advantage for skating stats. They've actually made the sniper the best skater, but only with acceleration and agility. The playing field is more level, for sure.

Looking at the stats in general, they've balanced things out a lot better and made the defensive types a lot more useful. They dropped the offensive and defensive awareness stats, which simplifies the picture a little bit.

Unfortunately because of the new stat based equipment, I'm going to have to play the single player a bit and unlock a few upgrades before going online. It works kind of like diablo where special equipment has slots that you can assign upgrades to. The real kicker is that EA has decided to allow you to unlock them by playing, or buy them for outrageous prices. The obsessive assholes on the division 1 teams all seem to be buying the upgrades, which will probably cost them another $20. Being paranoid obsessive types they can't afford to have a competitive disadvantage and are pushing the "arms race" on everyone. Dicks. I wish the good players would have boycotted purchasing that crap. I refuse to spend money on virtual skates.

Anyway, balancing characters is going to be even more complicated this year, because on top of the stat points you earn by unlocking player cards, you also have the equipment stat boosts. You start with lower attributes this year, but the max is higher than last year. Hopefully it all works out.

I'm more of a defensive forward, so I'll either be playing as a grinder or a power forward.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Time for me to continue this one-sided conversation

So, the game is great, and the new club room and club lobby system is a massive improvement, but the new unlockable gear is a horrible horrible idea, and ruins the online game in some respects.

Right now my guy has a helmet with tribal tattoo patterns on it, which is embarrassing, but I'm not sure if it is more or less embarrassing than the flames on his skates. You see, top of the line equipment allows you to assign bonuses to your online player. For some reason they decided it would be best to make this equipment gaudy rather than have it look like actual hockey equipment - first strike. To unlock the equipment, for the most part, you have to play offline games - strike two. To unlock some of the highest attribute boosts (+5) you have to play at least 120 over three seasons in Be A Pro, and even doing that once you would not be able to unlock everything - strike three. Oh, but if you don't want to do that, you can just buy all of the equipment and boosts with Microsoft Points! Fuck you, EA Sports!

Anyway, I'm not buying that garbage. Not a chance. Hopefully my immense skill level will keep me competitive with some of the smaller +3 and +1 bonuses. I'm getting all of the easier ones as fast as I can. My other problem is this year I wanted to play both forward and goalie ... Well, skaters and goalies have different unlocks, so I'd have to play twice as much offline to be able to get bonuses for both.

I recommend creating a dangler and doing the Be A Pro prospects game on the rookie setting. Make sure you get straight As in your assessment and get drafted first overall. If you get some points you should unlock a whole slew of things. The straight As as dangler will get you a +3 speed boost, I believe, which is great because speed costs a lot of xp.

Not a fan of the fighting, but I'm a huge fan of the new goalie controls. No longer do you just position the goalie, but you use the triggers to control when you huge the post and when you drop into the butterfly. You also press Y or ..... triangle(?) .... to cover the puck. There are some great new goalie animations.

Back to the new lobby system for clubs: Any game with a clan system could use something like this. You have a club screen where you can view membership, awards, leaderboards and all of that. The biggest improvement is the lobbies. Last year your team had one private lobby. If you had 30 people on your club it was hard to organize the players into teams. You could have 6 players launch into a game at a time. Now each team has their own lobby system with 5(?) lobbies. You can view each lobby to see who is in it, and they can each launch their own games independently. It's very nice, but it takes a little too long to load up the lobby screen.


Edit: An oddity I've discovered about "boosts". There are some "boost packs" available for purchase - one for each player type. Turns out you cannot use those with your attribute bonuses. They are a quick way to boost up your guy, but your overall stats are lower than what can be achieved if you play the game and bump your attributes with exp. The other kind of boosts are different, and can be applied on top of your attributes. Those are the ones I was talking about earlier in the post, that you had to unlock by playing a certain number of games, winning games with all the teams in a particular league, scoring x number of goals, x pts per game or whatever.

So basically xp + boosts > boost packs

For each attribute in the game there are three boosts that you can unlock (+1, +3, +5). For example there is +1, +3 and +5 wrist shot power. Each piece of equipment allows 0 - 3 boosts to be assigned. The basic gear allows 0, and the unlocks range from 1-3. There are sticks, skates, gloves and helmet. Each one allows a subset of boosts to be assigned, except I think the helmet which can use any boosts. So, for example, if I had a 1 slot stick, I could assign +3 slap shot power, or +1 faceoffs. If I had a 2 slot stick, I could assign both at the same time. I haven't figured out how stacking works. I don't know if you can use +1, +3 and +5 of a single attribute at the same time. I know you can't assign a single boost to more than one item, so you can't assign +3 discipline to more than one piece of equipment to get +6, +9 etc overall.

Oh, and the way the xp systems works is this .... There are a number of player cards for you to unlock, like in last years game. You do this by playing x number of games and maintaining a performance rating of y. Each card gives you a fixed amount of experience to spend on your player. Each attribute costs a different amount of experience and the cost increases as the stat goes higher. Attributes in the 70-79 range seem to cost 2xp, and 80 will cost you 3xp, for example. I haven't worked it all out yet. Attributes range from 0 (impossible to have a 0) to 100. I'm not sure how attributes are capped, but I think they'll let you go to 99. Most characters have most of their attributes in the 70-75 range to start, with a few around 80 and a few around 65. Boosts seem like they could give a significant advantage.

 

[Scott_Arm]

There is also a web interface for viewing the club standings. You can see immense detail about each club including results, members stats, posted videos etc ...

http://www.easportsworld.com/en_US/clubs/nhl

I've played 2 games, scored 1 goal and I'm a -3 overall. Our practice club for this month isn't particularly good

I played one game as goalie, which we won handily, but I let in a late softy that impacted my save percentage a good deal. Great fun though. Goalie play is a lot better online. The goalie does not seem to drift in the net online this year, and seems to more closely match the offline experience.

Wow ... you can actually see the score sheet for each game in the results section for each club on the site, and you can see any saved videos from that game. Pretty cool. They really need to add this to FIFA.

 

[jb]

Scott,
I am right there with you on the way EA is choosing to do player ranking, xp, bosting packs, ect. I understand why they do it as it will create them some revenue. But I agree it does more to hurt on-line play then help. And hence why I typically don't play many sports games on-line unless its just with a friend.

But so far I like what they have done with the game play. I still dont care in the be the pro mode any time I go to the front of the net I get smacked around like nothing. No call. But I put a glove on the other team when they are in front of my net, its interference. They had that same issue last year.

I also dont care for the fighting. I know they have a place in hockey just not my cup of tea.

My son got the game as well so I can see some interesting matches coming up in our household....go Wings

 

[Scott_Arm]

I've gotta say, I have no scoring touch this year. I wasn't a glitcher last year, and I wasn't exactly a scoring machine, so I was about 1.2 points per game or something, playing about half my games on defense. So far I've got 5 points in 11 games, and I'm a minus . Not exactly the start I wanted

It could be that I'm playing as a power forward and the shooting stats start a little low, but I think it's more human error than anything right now. But I'm loving the hits, so everything is good. Hitting is a fine art in this one, much more difficult than last year. You can't be a tiny little guy with no checking layin' everyone out. So I'll stick with the hits and the board play and try to grind out the goals and leave the sniping to others.

One other thing I noticed yesterday is they've really made the stat system complicated. For example, both power forward and playmaker start with 75 puck control. The difference is the playmaker can buy the next 5 points for 2xp each, and the power forward buys the next 5 points for 5xp each. The amount of xp seems to increase every 5 points, and there are a number of different scales. It's going to be much more difficult to figure out how you can tailor each type, especially with the cumbersome method of reassigning points. It is very hard to compare attributes.

 

[Scott_Arm]

No glitch goals to report, which is a great thing.

About boosted equipment ... The best equipment has 3 boost slots. I've heard that you can only assign a max of +9 attribute points to any single piece of equipment. So you could put a "+5, +3, +1" combination on a stick, or a "+3, +3, +3 combination", but not something that adds up to more than +9, like a "+5, +3, +3" combination. Right now I don't have enough unlocked for a single item to check if that is actually true. Hopefully that's how it works because it'll take some of the sting off not being able to unlock all the +5s.

After a rocky start my team won 10 of their last 11 and moved into the top 50 of the casual league. My current online stats are still poor 16GP, 5G, 4A, 16 PIM, 62 hits and a -9, playing a mix of offense and defense. My last two games I got dropped part way through and when the game finished I still received the stats for the portion of the game I played. I need to get my +/- up to a +20 to unlock the +5 speed, I think.

 

[wco81]

Liked NHL08 and NHL 09 for OTP games.

Didn't really like how NHL 09 had artificially made shots go errant (wide of the goal from right above the crease) or the slap shots more floaty than NHL08 but still enjoyed it.

The reviews said despite the boards play, it was an incremental release.

Bigger issue for me was that there wasn't as many OTP games to find on the PS3 (not interested in EASHL at all because don't like using created players).

In contrast, FIFA 09 had plenty of OTP games on PS3.

Probably wait a bit for price to come down. Or maybe pick it up when Toys R Us do their annual 3 for 2 sale.

 

[wco81]

Oh yeah, heard about the equipment boosts.

If there are a lot of people using the boosts on unranked OTP games, I won't bother with the game. Seems like EA is trying to get people to bite on DLC.

Hope they alienate people with that BS. Good to hear Madden 10 sales are lower than 09 and hopefully people aren't buying the DLC for that.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Oh yeah, heard about the equipment boosts.

If there are a lot of people using the boosts on unranked OTP games, I won't bother with the game. Seems like EA is trying to get people to bite on DLC.

Hope they alienate people with that BS. Good to hear Madden 10 sales are lower than 09 and hopefully people aren't buying the DLC for that.

As far as I know the boosted equipment is only usable in created player modes, like Be A Pro, EASHL and custom OTP that uses created players. If you play OTP with NHL teams, I don't think it would be a problem.

It is definitely alienating a lot of people. I'm pretty irritated by it. So far I've been able to unlock a good amount of the easier boosts without playing too much offline (15 games or so). The best strategy is to play the prospects game on rookie difficulty with each of the different player types. If you get straight As, which is easy to do on rookie, and get drafted 1st overall, you can unlock a good amount of equipment and boosts. After that, things get a little more difficult, but there are some easy ones, especially if you have interest in playing a full season of Be A Pro anyway. I'm trying to think of some scams I can use to unlock goalie gear quickly.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Great game. The club system is really well implemented. Managed to unlock some good stuff by playing through be a pro. You can sim a game and intervene in the third period to get your games played.

Unfortunately I'm going to get rid of it. I promised myself I wouldn't play as much as I did last year, and I don't, but I'm still playing way too much.