With the passing of another year comes the release of yet another installment of EA’s NHL series of video games. The series may not have the reach of games like FIFA or Madden, but nevertheless EA is currently the only company producing Ice Hockey simulation games at this moment. As such, fans of ice-hockey and the NHL are eagerly anticipating the release of NHL 20, and have more than a few things to say about what they would like to see in this year’s game.
So, aside from the standard expectations of any new game (better graphics and smoother gameplay), we want to look at some of the more specific suggestions fans of the series have for EA’s upcoming game.
What we know
EA did a big reveal during the NHL awards on Wednesday 19th June. Changes include a new Battle Royale mode, new commentators with over 300 hours of commentary, new venues and an offline mode for Pond Hockey. They also announced Auston Matthews as the featured cover player. The game will be released on Xbox One and PS4, sometime on September 13th this year.
Below are the three editions that will be available for purchase:
- Base edition – $59.99
- Special Edition – $79.99
- Ultimate Edition – $99.99
As always, you will be able to play as your favourite teams including this year’s Stanley Cup champions, St. Louis Blues, who won the tournament for the very first time. Sadly, despite their victory in the 2018-19 season, sites like Oddschecker seem doubtful that they’ll be able to pull off a repeat in the 2019-20 season.
What we want
So from a quick collating of user responses on Reddit, various online articles, and personal wishes, here are the most important improvements fans want want to see in the upcoming release:
- PC version. The last game released on PC was way back in 2008. Sadly EA has announced that they won’t be bringing out a PC version this year. It’s about time EA stopped neglecting the PC market. The same goes for Nintendo fans who haven’t seen an NHL game since 2K11’s exclusive Wii release.
- Better collisions – It’s not ice hockey without hard-hitting realistic player collisions. Last year’s edition did this pretty well but there’s always room for improvement.
- More options in terms of gear and loot – Essentially we want improved player customization and ideally some vintage gear. EA seem to be answering this wish with supposedly over 2000 customization items added for the new game.
- Improved player likeness – Ideally in-game characters would look a lot more like their real world counterparts. We hope to see this in the new edition.
- Fixed matchmaking and less server issues – NHL 19 matchmaking was more than a little faulty. It’s no fun getting bucked from a game by a server issue. On top of that the annoying error is made worse by the fact that you can’t rejoin a match once kicked. EA needs to work on a solution to this and allow players to rejoin matches after suffering from a hiccup in the server. Fingers crossed for this one.
So after the announcement we have a lot more information about the upcoming game, but there’s still close to 3 months before the actual release. Hopefully EA will answer our prayers and make a truly top-notch ice hockey game that fans can enjoy until the next release.
You forgot about Presentation/commentary upgrading,which we we are getting.