NHL 15: Breaking Down Newest Modes in Latest Installment of Game

For the first time, EA Sports' annual hockey game will be coming to the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, as NHL 15 wasn't released on the new generation of consoles a year ago. And with that release will come several exciting new features that should improve the gameplay and presentation this year. 

Unfortunately, at the moment much of the focus on the game thus far has been the fact that the PS4 and Xbox One will be missing several key features, a fact that producer Sean Ramjagsingh explained recently, via Patrick O'Rourke of the Financial Post:

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It’s mostly time and then with development on new platforms you always encounter new hurdles you didn’t plan for (technical hurdles), and it takes more time and resources to kind of overcome those. The team pushed hard until just a few weeks ago when we made the final announcement that [Online Team Play] wasn’t going to be in there for launch. The reason why we didn’t talk about it before was we were still pushing and trying to get it in for launch. We’re 100 percent commited to bringing back the EA Sports Hockey League as well and we understand  the importance of the mode and understand our fans love it. We have the foundation now to bring back the EA Sports Hockey league bigger and better than we ever did in the past. The gameplay and presentation now are there.

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Ramjagsingh also spoke on the lack of Team Mode:

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We’re still working on it. We’ll probably have an announcement on the progress of it. Technically it’s a difficult mode because there are 8-12 players being controlled at once. So we’re going through that process right now and I was playing it last week. We’re getting there with it, hopefully sooner rather than later but we’re trying to get it out as fast as we can.

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GM Connected Mode will also apparently be missing on the new consoles, a major disappointment, considering EA had a full developmental year for NHL 15. It is important to note, however, that EA has announced a slew of updates it'll be unveiling over the next year—OTP is supposedly coming in October to the PS4 and Xbox One, for example—so the developmental team is hardly resting on its laurels.

When talking about the new features in the game, it was important to mention what was going to be missing at launch. But let's now focus on how the game should be improved this year. 

For starters, there is the "Next-Gen Hockey Player." Check it out below:

It's hard to deny how good those player models look, and while graphics are never the most important feature of a game, they can often be the difference between full immersion in a gaming experience and being reminded in a rather jarring way during gameplay that you are still operating in a flawed video game environment.

Immersion doesn't look like it will be an issue for this year's NHL game, though. The game's new physics engine will also help quite a bit in that regard:

With the new physics, the gameplay really resembles actual NHL action, and adding even more realism and dynamism to the puck will make the game feel far more realistic. The FIFA team did that with the soccer ball in EA's annual soccer series last year, making it feel like its own entity rather than something that was constantly connected to a player's foot, and it completely changed the feel of the game. 

None of this matters, of course, if the players aren't also tweaked in the gameplay to reflect these changes. Fear not, for they've been upgraded out on the ice, and now puck-handling should be drastically improved:

So yes, NHL 15 on the PS4 and Xbox One should look and play better than any of the games in the series. But the overall presentation should be quite improved, too. There's the new "Overhead Gameplay," for one thing:

And a new broadcast presentation, too:

Anytime you get to involve Doc Emrick in, well, pretty much anything, it's a huge plus. The broadcast presentation on this year's game has the potential to be as strong as any other game out there. 

So what's the verdict here, folks? 

Well, it sure looks as though NHL 15 will play, look and feel better and more realistic than any other game to the series thus far. On the other hand, at least on the newest generation of consoles, the game modes offered will be pretty slim before the updates add them along. 

It's up to you to decide what you value more in a game. But at least thus far, it looks as though NHL 15 on the new consoles will leave hockey fans quite pleased with the end result.