One-timers, according to O’Hara, are more “mature” this year. One-timers are usually a bread and butter way of scoring in videogame hockey, but this year they should be more difficult to pull off. In fact, O’Hara says that in order to succeed, you need to play hockey—and to think like a hockey player. In their office tourney, the person that won usually gets killed every year; he’s a real hockey player and plays the way a hockey player would approach the game, and this year it worked. He won.
Finally, there’s goalie AI. It has been completely revamped and both Bishop and Krager chose it as their number one favorite new “feature” of the game. They’re supposedly more aggressive and use more moves (like the butterfly). They’re also more susceptible to screens and goal scoring variety is much improved in part because of it.
One area that is a concern, even from a realism angle, is the new Superstar Move feature. I’ll have to see this one in action because while it’s cool to see stars doing “signature” moves you don’t want the game to be littered with them, either. When a star player does something spectacular, it’s cool because you don’t see it too often but if this becomes abused it can kill the “wow factor” of the move itself. We’ll have to wait and see about this one. Bishop says these are mostly used on breakaways, so hopefully that’s the case.
The Franchise
Finally, there are the franchise options, which again, are rooted in realism. From using a real salary cap, real player salaries, restricted and unrestricted free agents, the real waiver wire, player holdouts, team chemistry (via scrimmages), player development based on minor league ice team for rooks, right down the line. It sounds, at least based on what the team says that Franchise Mode has undergone a huge transformation. Let’s hope it plays as good as it sounds.
It’s always hard to make a sports game sound “new” without coming off like a company shill, especially when the previous version is still less than a year old. Kush and Visual Concepts have done just that, though. The game sounds almost completely new. It’s impossible to say if it’s going to play to the level that they claim (we hope), but it’s refreshing to hear developers discuss the game in realistic terms—openly trying to cater to hardcore hockey fans. Perhaps it’s because hockey games don’t sell as well as football games and this allows the developers to appeal to their base more than the casual gamer? Who knows? But if NHL 2K8 is the type of game that the team thinks it is – hockey fans are going to be extremely pleased with the results in a couple of weeks when it ships. - William Abner.
