Developer Conference calls are always a bit weird—not because of the content but because of how they work. Basically you send in questions via email a few days before the call, and then when it’s time for the event to happen you dial in and listen. That’s pretty much it. Producers, developers, and public relations discuss the pre-sent questions while the silent media takes notes, records the call, and develops cauliflower ear unless they’re smart enough to use a speaker phone. It’s usually informative but just sitting there listening to the people talk can be annoying, particularly if they say something that you want an immediate follow-up to, but instead have to bite your tongue and quickly email the press agent. It’s like you’re a mime but no one can see you.

This happened to me during the NHL 2K8 conference call last evening. Taking the call were Ben Bishop, Producer from Visual Concepts, Scott Krager, the Project Manager from Kush Games, and Kush’s Colin O'Hara, the game’s Lead Designer. One of the first questions asked had to do with the fact that today’s sports games are just too darn realistic, and “fun” and playability have been sacrificed because of it, and what did they all think of that? The questions were sent privately so there’s really no way of knowing who sent what question—but I wanted to break the fourth wall and yell out, “Say what?!” Thankfully, Ben Bishop replied with the level of professionalism that was needed by saying, “I’m not sure I agree with that.”

It’s highly interesting and admittedly frustrating at times to just sit there and listen to the moderator read off the questions because you get a great gauge on the vast array of topics that the media feels important. The entire spectrum is covered from the hardcore hockey questions about checking, player ratings and goalie AI to questions about whether or not “…the 2K servers will be up” on Xbox Live. To answer your next question—no—I haven’t the foggiest idea what that means, either.

Most of the information from the call was covered in our recent interview with Ben Bishop from a couple of weeks ago. (check that out here ) Still, there’s plenty of info that we can use as a supplement.

The general theme of the call can be broken down into a few key areas: realism, graphics, and player differentiation. What’s cool about the NHL 2K team is that they’re all serious hockey fans—either that or they’re great at faking it. The goal behind the game is for it to be a realistic as possible while keeping a high level of playability.

Technical Doo Dads

Here are a few bullet points for those curious about some of the under the hood features:

The PS3 and Xbox 360 editions will both run at 60 frames per second, much to the delight of PS3 owners everywhere who are still suffering from 30-frame Madden illness.

The Xbox 360 edition will have the Reelmaker feature so people can share pictures and highlights from their games; it also has the ability to use custom soundtracks, while the PS3 has SIXAXIS support. Also don’t count out a Wii version in the future…(no word on a PC game, sadly.)

The graphics, according to everyone on the team, are better from top to bottom not only in the game itself but even in the menu presentation. The game has a completely new (and supposedly better) look to it.

Scott Krager went over some of the graphical improvement by highlighting the “hundreds” of new animations, higher res textures, (improved) arena lighting and player equipment (all licenses are accurate if you’re into that sort of thing) as well as real time crowd audio, totally new play by play commentary, and new replay cams. Obviously a lot of time has been put into making NHL 2K8 look a lot better, and let’s face it, with EA Sports improving its NHL series (finally) 2K Sports has to step up in this department.