It's never been a better time to be a hockey gamer. As football and baseball games wallow in their frustrating exclusive rights tug of war, hockey games just keep chugging along, blossoming through direct competition. We recently had a chat with Ben Bishop from Visual Concepts to get the latest on what you can expect this year from NHL 2K8 when it hits stores September 12th.

Can you give us some more details on the new Pro Stick feature? What are the benefits to adding it from a design perspective? Why should fans be excited about it?

The Pro Stick has really changed the way the game is played. You can essentially move the puck anywhere around your player with the right analog stick, and it’s all up to you as far as what kind of shot or pass you want to make. If you want to hold the puck out in front of you or over to one side to protect it from a defender, you can do that – the possibilities are endless. With this extra layer of control also comes a whole new level of strategy that really adds to the overall depth of the game. Different types of players even have different strengths and weaknesses when handling the puck. You’ll want to get the puck into the hands of your best players, and setting up your offense and not trying to be too fancy all the time will pay off in the end.

The Pro Stick is available on defense too. Everything from sweeping your stick back and forth, to making poke checks, to laying your stick to the ice, to whacking at loose pucks can be done with the right stick. There is an unprecedented level of overall control on both sides of the puck that really gives gameplay a lasting appeal.

And finally, from a design perspective, this is really only the beginning. We have lots of additional ideas and things we wanted to do with the Pro Stick that we just didn’t have time for with 2K8. This is a system we can continue to build on though, and it will only get better in future versions of the game.

My time with NHL 2K8 was limited at E3, sadly, but I did catch a glimpse of a new speed burst/sprint method. Can you describe that a bit for us? Why the need to separate these?

At first, the sprint feature doesn’t seem like a huge addition, but it is actually quite useful in gameplay, and now it’s tough to remember playing the game without it. Using the A button (X button on PS3), you can get an extra quick burst of speed that only lasts for a short time. So if you want to put a little extra distance between your forward and a chasing defenseman on a breakaway, or if you want to make sure you beat out an opponent to the puck for an icing call, sprint serves this need perfectly. The down side is that it will significantly fatigue your player, so after one good sprint, you’ll really feel the difference and want to get a new line onto the ice sooner rather than later.

In the NHL, players kick it into a extra gear quite often when the time is right, and this is something that we have hopefully replicated in NHL 2K8. We spent a lot of time balancing the sprint mechanic and making sure it wasn’t something that could be exploited, and we wanted to make sure the level of fatigue after using it was noticeable and realistic. In the end, it really adds an interesting new twist to the gameplay experience, and most players will be paying attention to fatigue (and potentially even managing their lines) more than they ever have before.

How much attention has been given to specific areas like offensive and defensive player AI and puck physics?

We spent quite a bit of time this year on offensive and defensive AI. A good portion of that was making sure that your teammates and the CPU defenders acted accordingly and appropriately to all the new features in the game (Pro Stick, Superstar Moves, etc.). We also spent a lot of time ensuring that the CPU uses these things realistically, as well. For example, making sure the defensemen sprint back to keep in front of a forward on the rush, and having the CPU use some of the Pro Stick stickhandling moves were two of the things that were done.

Also, things like simply improving the positioning of the defenders so that you can’t stickhandle too easily through traffic, and varying the CPU’s attack style on offense (less one-timers, more wrist shots) were key areas for us to hit. You’ll also see more pucks get deflected out of play, shots that go wide and even over the net, and more realistic rebounds off the goalie’s pads. Between all the AI work and the new features that were added, NHL 2K8 really feels like a different game.

There are a lot of new animations in this year's game. Does this include the goalies as well?

Goalies were pretty much overhauled from the ground up for 2K8, and that includes hundreds of new animations. We have so many cool new saves and smothers that give the goalies the ability to make saves on pucks they simply could not have reacted to in previous years. And this has also allowed us to significantly reduce things like pucks suctioning into goalies’ gloves or pads that had occurred in the past when there was no animation available for them to make the save with.

Besides all that, the goalies’ positioning, reactions, and behavior are totally new and different too. They will come out and challenge on breakaways now, and they use the butterfly stance way more frequently, including sliding across the crease to make saves rather than stacking the pads or diving head first. Of all the new features in the game this year, goalies are probably the most dynamic, and you’ll still be seeing new things from them even after you’ve played hundreds of games.

Has the overall presentation been beefed up at all? If so, how?

Last year we added a new style of presentation with Cinemotion. This year, Cinemotion is still available as an option, but we went back to a broadcast style of presentation by default. Bob Cole and Harry Neale from Hockey Night in Canada are back calling the shots, and they spent a ton of time in studio beefing up our commentary database. Everything from new first and last names, to player and team specific lines, to adding more variety to the basic play-by-play calls was done. We also re-introduced broadcast style overlays, something that had taken a bit of a backseat with Cinemotion last year. In general, our goal this year has been to try to get as close to a standard TV broadcast as possible, with some extra crowd and goal horn presence to make you feel like you are there at the arena too.

Has any attention been given to scoring? It seemed like last year that a lot of goals, by the CPU anyway, were off of one-timers. Will we see more goal variety?

You will see a huge difference in this area. For one thing, the Pro Stick opens up a whole style of goal scoring that was not even available before. We have a slew of new Superstar Moves that are performed using button combos and allow you to try some pretty cool things on breakaways and in shootouts. Moves like Peter Forsberg’s one-hand reach, the spin-o-rama used by players like Ryan Shannon and Pierre-Marc Bouchard, and several others are available. Players will need to have high stickhandling and agility ratings to pull off some of the trickier moves, and if you try one with a scrub, you’ll more than likely lose the puck or end up falling to the ice.

On the one-timer front, we spent quite a bit of time working on the CPU offensive AI so that they rely on it less. We also enhanced our old One-Timer Difficulty option to have an Easy, Medium, and Hard setting that makes one-timers a lot more difficult to pull off and get on net, especially if you don’t set up in a realistic position to get one off. You’ll really have to concentrate to try to get your one-timers where you want them, and in many cases, you’ll see them go wide or the recipient catch the puck and then shoot if they weren’t in position to get a good shot off in the first place.