ith the release of NHL 10 hardly more than two weeks away, I had the pleasure of once again speaking with Jason Rupert, gameplay director for Electronic Arts Canada, based out of Vancouver.
How did the development process for NHL 10 differ from that of 09?
In most ways it was pretty similar, but there were a few changes in our emphasis. The biggest among these would be allowing more time for tuning and polishing the game at the end. A small change that I think makes a big difference is that we kept a much closer eye on what was going on in the NHL 09 community while developing NHL 10. For example, I kept playing NHL 09 quite actively myself into April when we hit the final crunch of the dev cycle. Knowing the sort of issues remaining after the patches puts us in a much better position to address the problems for the next year.
Another thing I'm really appreciative of this year is how great a job our production team has done of raising awareness of the features and improvements that are in the game. I couldn't begin to list everything here, but if you go to the NHL homepage you can look at the blogs and videos they've made, including a lot of gameplay footage that is broken down to explain some of the fine details that have been added.
What aspect of NHL 10 are you most excited about?
If I have to pick one it would be EASHL. I will spend more time playing that mode than any other because the team feeling is great. A lot of people played on two-man teams last year, and I don't think they knew what they were missing if they had found a good group of people to form a team with.
There are a lot of improvements in all the game modes; I finally got a chance to play some "Be a GM" the other day and was blown away by some of the cool stuff in there that I didn't get to see while I had my head buried in gameplay — so I'll probably spend some time there too.
As a developer, I'm excited by some of the things we've done to help improve our ability to support the game and ensure that the quality of the competitive online play is better — unfortunately, as much as I'd love to talk about it, I can't get into the details of this until the game is out.
In your eyes, what are the most significant game play improvements in NHL 10?
The things that are going to have the biggest impact on how the game is played in all modes are boardplay, the improvements to the goalies and the changes to passing.
Boardplay adds a new dimension to gameplay because you can hold off a checker to wait for support, or pin an opponent and prevent him from moving the puck quickly. These can be used in a lot of different ways: it makes the dump-and-chase much more effective, facilitates puck cycling, and can let a defenseman under pressure protect the puck and wait for support.
The improvements to the goalies are very extensive (more on this below). Both the CPU goalie and human goalie control have been given a major overhaul with a lot of new animations added. Goalies have much more variety in their behavior and are much less susceptible to weak and repetitive goals.
The passing changes are fairly simple, but they change the game considerably. The main difference is that the amount of assistance on the passing is a lot lower (and can be turned off completely if you like) which means you can't just blindly throw the puck around and expect to get a tape-to-tape pass. This leads to much more natural gameplay, with more loose pucks, and in general a result that looks a lot more like real hockey. In Hardcore mode the passing changes are more extreme and offer a lot more of control, including the speed of the pass that will definitely appeal to some players.
Touching on a few other things that are significantly improved, I would say that the balance in goal scoring is a lot better, as well as the CPU AI both on offense and defense.
Can you describe some of the tweaks that have been made to remove many of the smaller annoyances from NHL 09?
A lot of our time went into making all the small improvements that you can't put on the back of the box but that contribute a lot to the overall gameplay experience by removing frustrations or adding nice little nuances.
The "curve shot" is gone. The animations for those shots have been replaced completely.
The ability to one-time a loose puck is greatly improved. One of my favorite plays (as a d-man) is to skate onto a puck that's been dumped deep into my zone and one-time slap it all the way around the boards to a my winger coming back on the far boards. Of course, the main value of it is for banging home a rebound in front of the net or teeing up a point shot, both of which work a lot better in NHL 10.
Goal scoring balance and tuning to prevent easy "always" goals were extremely high priorities. The results are pretty solid. We've had some of the top NHL 09 players (like the EASHL champions from Xbox and PS3) try all their best moves and so far they've held up well. There's a lot more variability in how they play, which means that a play that works once won't necessarily be there the next time.
A poster on one of the sports gaming forums called our line change interface "the most unresponsive button in all of video gaming" and that was a pretty fair assessment. That has been fixed.
Injury tuning. NHL 09 didn't have many injuries at all in Dynasty, there's a lot more variety in the injuries for NHL 10 and the frequency is more realistic (and user customizable).
A lot more ability for customization of settings, including split human/CPU sliders. There are also four preset slider configurations that have been tuned for different gaming styles (from Casual to Hardcore).
Again there's a lot more — way too much to list here.
In our interview earlier this year, you mentioned having tuned the frequency of "random" penalties a little too high. How has this been remedied in NHL 10?
The genuinely random penalties in 09 were for cross-checking and elbowing; these have just been tuned to happen less in general and depend more on the discipline attribute. There were others that felt random because the rules for calling them weren't great. Interference, boarding, charging and hitting from behind were in that category. The interference rule has also been re-implemented and is much more realistic now. The goal was to prevent the rampant interference that existed before the second patch of NHL 09 but not have it be quite as hard to throw a hit. Boarding and hitting from behind are still there but they are also more intuitive and when you get called for it now it is well deserved.
Last year, the EASHL ran into a number of incidents that questioned the integrity of the league. How did your team tighten things up for this year?
I think the worst of those issues were addressed in the second patch last year. We've done a lot of different things to help ensure the integrity of the competition. Some examples:
The ability to pause the game during play (whether you have the puck or not) has been removed. You need to wait for a whistle now. The number of pauses has been reduced as well.
There is also a system in place to make it harder to benefit from win-trading and we will continue to police for abuse.
Matchmaking has been improved so that teams will be preferentially matched against teams with comparable ranking and number of players.
There were a number of incidents where teams were hijacked because any GM could kick other GMs off the team, to prevent this we've changed it so that the owner of the team cannot be kicked off of it.
Despite the improvements there's always a high probability that an unforeseen exploit is discovered and active monitoring and policing, and possibly patching, are often the only way to deal with that situation, though as I mentioned before we do have a few more tricks up our sleeve this year that should help us a lot in the effort to keep the competitive balance of the EASHL and Versus games on track.
One of the most requested features from fans once the EASHL took off was a form of online club practice. What are your thoughts on introducing this kind of tool to the player base?
This didn't make it in to NHL 10 but I think it is a good candidate for inclusion in a future version. For the portion of the EASHL community that plays the game as competitive sport, the ability to practice either against a CPU team or on an empty sheet of ice would allow teams to work out their strategies. As always there are a lot of different features and improvements vying for development time and it didn't make the cut this year. I'm hoping it is in for NHL 11 — I would use it myself.
Some controversy has already struck the forums regarding the introduction of new custom equipment for created players.
Many fans have feared that the only way to acquire the maximum number of attribute points is by equipping non-authentic gear, thus detracting from the experience and essentially limiting competitive players to a select few pieces in order to be effective. Can you clarify this feature and describe its impact on game play?
For each type of equipment (gloves, stick, skates and helmet) there are a variety of models that give you from zero to three boost slots. The slots can be filled in with boosts of +1, +3 or +5 to a specific attribute that is associated with that piece of equipment. Both the gear and the boosts are unlocked separately. There is also a boost pack for each player type that gives you upgraded stats using up the gloves, stick and skates (you can still use a helmet and its boost slots).
Without the boost pack you can still use the experience card points to upgrade attributes, similar to NHL 09, but with the boost pack you cannot.
Overall, a boost pack raises a skater from the low 70s to the low 80s overall. You can get to the same ballpark with individual pieces of gear combined with the experience points, the advantage of that route being that you have more fine control over how your attributes are distributed.
As for the concern that you will need to use inauthentic gear to be top rated, this was a controversial topic on the team too. The way it is set up you cannot choose any gear you like to get the most boost, but there are choices for the best (three slot) gear and some of it looks authentic.
As far as gameplay goes, with all of the equipment and experience boosts a player will be able to go from their initial rating in the low 70s to the low to mid 80s overall. This is comparable to the difference between a player with no cards and one with a Legend card in NHL 09, so there's not a great different in that regard. The effects of the attributes have been improved.
How much better is NHL 10 in terms of preventing exploits and glitches? Has improved AI made these frustrations a thing of the past?
I'm confident that all the work that went into goalies and fixing other exploits will go a long way to reducing the frustrations. The reality is that we cannot guarantee that there will be no glitches. Starcraft (still my favorite example of a well-balanced, competitive online game) still had serious exploits being patched after 11 years. We've made every effort to balance the game and eliminate glitches and I believe that it will hold up much better than NHL 09 did. Beyond that, if anything does happen, I have every expectation that the dev team will be able to commit time into supporting the game with server and title updates.
What do you anticipate to be the biggest success with NHL10, and with the series moving forward in general?
For NHL 10 I think the biggest success will be that the game offers a lot of depth in different modes to play, and the underlying gameplay has a lot of additions and polish that makes each one of them more better and continuously offering new surprised.
Going forward I see us continuing to add refinements that make a better hockey experience — more subtle behaviors, better control and AI — as well as some bigger, more revolutionary changes. I know that's pretty vague, but I can't really tip our hand more than that.
Last time we talked I said I think EASHL has enormous potential and while we've made strides forward with it I still see it as being one of the modes with the greatest potential because it brings teamwork and community to the game. There are a lot of different directions something like that can go and I think it will be exciting to explore those possibilities.
Thanks again, Jason, for taking the time to talk with us. Best of luck with the upcoming release of NHL 10.
Thanks, my pleasure.
