NHL 25 Preview - Awake the AI and Inject Some Creativity

In what is now year two of a plan to get the EA NHL series unstuck from its place in the sports game hierarchy, EA NHL developers outlined the high-level additions for NHL 25 in a virtual preview event this week. They signaled that AI, skating, and more diverse animations will be pillars for this year’s gameplay.

I say that the series is in year two of trying to get “unstuck” because it felt like last year’s additions of icon passing, a reintroduction of old things like hip checking, and developing the Exhaust Engine to highlight dominate time on attack were ways to bring back some of the chaos that was a hallmark of some of the best years for the series in a post-NHL 07 world.

Not all of those things ended up hitting high notes, but a bunch of the underlying issues that undercut some of those things involved the AI. Whether that was your AI opponents, teammates, or goalies, there was still a feeling that every game played out the same way. This is not a new problem for the franchise (or many sports games), but it’s a real problem. One of the best selling points for EA Sports College Football 25 is that every game can feel different. Your opponents play different, they surprise you with tactics mid-game, they adjust to what you’re doing (for the most part), and it creates an environment where you want to play just “one more game” before the end of the night.

That is a not a feeling I have had playing the AI in an EA NHL game in I don’t even know how long. At its peak years back, I booted up to play 6-on-6 with friends and had the time of my life, but no AI was involved in those situations. And this isn’t me trying to hype what was promised at this virtual event because there were no grand promises made — it was a straight-forward presentation by Chris Haluke (senior producer) and Mike Inglehart (senior game design director) — but the point is that I think everyone is desperate for AI to make a leap in many sports games.

What Does Improved AI Look Like?

For now, we didn’t get tons of specific examples of how the AI will change. That is a red flag to me to some extent, but this also wasn’t an extensive deep dive, it was more an introduction with a roadmap for more to come in the weeks ahead. The way the AI improvements were framed were as, well, awareness improvements.

The best way to explain the upgrades was through the explanation of the plays. On top of there being “refreshed” plays and strategies, there was an admission that AI players were routinely out of position in a lot of these strategies. This is part of why the game is so stagnant to me, and even if we just get teams to use different strategies, that should add a lot to the game.

On top of that, the other big point was to explain that AI will play off your actions better. So if you skate into a soft spot on the ice, they will react to that better and try to get into a passing lane. On the other side of things, your AI opponents may now be more aggressive looking for home-run stretch passes and the like.

Again, it’s not clear if this will apply to defense as well — one of the major letdowns in the game is how the AI acts on the penalty kill — but I would hope an overhauling of the AI hits on multiple areas of the game. Special teams have not been nearly as fun as they should be in EA NHL for many years, and there’s not an area where AI upgrades would be highlighted more than in those spots.

Next-Gen Vision Control

The presentation actually kicked off showcasing the upgraded “Vision Control” as it played into the cover athlete announcement. The Hughes brothers will be together on the cover of the Deluxe Edition of the game (Quinn Hughes will be on the standard edition Canada/world cover, and then Jack Hughes will be on the US standard edition cover — sorry Luke Hughes no solo cover for you).

But what “next-gen” Vision Control seems to be is basically a more nuanced way to skate on both offense and defense on and off the puck. I assume it’s taking the place of the old Vision Control you would trigger with L2/LT, and now there’s new tether points that kick in when you use these controls. When you have the puck and hold L2 in the offensive zone, you’ll always be tethered to the goal and can make more exact cuts and skating motions based around the net as your focus point. On defense, you will always turn to the puck when holding L2. When you’re off the puck on offense, I imagine the puck carrier/puck is your point of reference.

The idea is to be able to now do things like walk the blue line with the puck while still being locked on to the goal. We witnessed some examples of the more subtle movements where skaters would use the inside edge of their skates to fit through a tighter window of the defense and slip into position to shoot/pass. It’s 100 percent noticeable, it’s just a question of how it actually feels in your hands.

I hope it also puts more of a focus on the different types of skaters. Some have higher top-end speeds, others are more known for their raw agility, and then others are known more for that lateral quickness on their skates, walking the blue line in a way that allows them to quickly get an open lane. You need to be able to skate in today’s NHL, but there are different ways players reach that required level of skill on their skates. To their credit, EA did say this would factor into how the system works.

The main attributes that feed into the new vision control are agility and acceleration. Players that rank higher in these categories will be able to shift direction and use the feature with more effectiveness.

Mike Inglehart (Senior Game Design Director)

It’s also worth noting (and I’ll mention it more in the next section) that this should also change how off-puck interactions go down. Since everyone will now be more squared to the puck, it’s going to mean body positioning takes on more of a focus in things like EASHL and so on.

This allows you to skate with your body open and ready to box out a defender to receive a pass or slide into a position ready to unleash our new skill-based one timers.

Reactive Actions And Skill-Based One Timers

Capping off the gameplay part of the presentation was a focus on reactive actions and skill-based one timers. To me, reactive actions were sold as a way to make the players animate in a more realistic fashion and also help to minimize some of those awkward moments where players just ram into each other in a big mess of physics.

The best example I saw of the new reactive actions involved a defender being beat while in his defensive zone, but he was able to do one of those panic turns and get his stick back down on the ice to try and block a pass/shot. The player with the puck then did another little cutback with Vision Control and left that defender for dead. It was this very unique (but realistic) interaction within a tight window, something this series has struggled to mimic over the years.

In general, I think we’ll just need to see how much of the “mess” these new animation clean up when players try to get by each other, and then also see how much they add to the little battles that play out all over the ice in a real game of hockey.

With skill-based one timers, it’s a simple idea to try and create a little more skill gap between players. Openness and position on the ice will trigger these moments where a player is ready for a pass, and then if you “perfect” the timing on the shot attempt you get a boost to shot velocity and there is added goalie fatigue. There will be little on-ice identifiers that make it clear who is ready for these sorts of one-timers, and I assume it’s a visual aid you can choose to turn off if you want to.

Graphical Upgrades And Miscellaneous Notes

Another notable point to come out of this preview event was that NHL 25 will only be on current-gen consoles. No PC version is planned for this year, and the PS4 and Xbox One have been removed from the equation. We have started to see a couple sports games go this route (College Football 25 being one of them), and it’s been four years since the PS5 launched, so we’re getting to that point where old-gen consoles just need to be left behind.

I’m not sure if the new graphical upgrades (Sapien Technology) were the reason behind finally leaving behind the old consoles, but you can definitely tell the differences with ’25 when zoomed-in shots of players are used. It seems like it’s the same sort of tech from Battlefield, which means it also has a little Uncanny Valley situation going on for me. I find that the beards and hair are so realistic and you can see so many individual threads of fur, that it makes everything else look a little fake.

Beyond the graphics, the development team did answer some questions (and they’re still answering more submitted ones over the next 24 hours on a password-protected site, so I’ll update this article if I see other interesting enough answers). One of the answered questions involved what tweaks will be coming to the “pressure system” this year:

Bottom Line

Without getting to play the game, there’s only so much I can talk about to this point. However, I do continue to think the developers are trying to tackle the right sort of problems on the ice. Whether the execution is there remains to be seen, but trying to revitalize and refresh stagnant gameplay is not an easy task when it’s been this hardened through the years. Folks begin to expect the world when things don’t evolve enough from year to year, and so you start to play this catch-up game that can be hard to win.

For now, at least as it relates to gameplay, I’ll remain cautiously optimistic and open-minded as we get into the swing of things during preview season.

NHL 25 launches on October 4. You can play the game seven days early for 10 hours with EA Play, and the Deluxe Edition will grant you access seven days early as well, plus a host of other goodies for HUT and World of Chel.