Now rebranded as EA Vancouver, the developer is poised to take the leap that fans were expecting at the start of this console generation.
#Nhl 17 ea sports series
NHL 16 was a positive step in this regard, bringing the series up to par with the reintroduction of key elements like the EA Sports Hockey League.
#Nhl 17 ea sports update
NHL 15 joined the ranks of sports video game infamy alongside the barely there Madden NFL 06 and Major League Baseball 2K13, which was literally a roster update disguised as a new game.Īfter that debacle, EA Canada spent the next year apologizing to its fans and clawing its way back to respectability. Developer EA Canada added some elements back in with post-launch patches, but the damage was done. Some modes and features were scaled back others were gone entirely. NHL 15 was so half-baked it was staggeringīut when EA launched NHL 15 in September 2014, hockey fans were dismayed to find a product so half-baked that it was staggering. And when EA decided to hold back the next-generation arrival of its hockey series until 2014, we were told that it was for the best: that the extra time would pay off, because the NHL developers could benefit from lessons that the other EA Sports teams had learned already. In an encouraging display, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launch titles Madden NFL 25 and FIFA 14 both matched or surpassed their last-generation counterparts when they arrived in November 2013. "We did it early enough that the game teams right now are not fighting the engine." "We definitely learned from the last transition where we didn't manage our technology well, and it's something where we took a real key focus on," said Frank Gibeau, then the president of EA Labels, in an interview with Polygon before E3 2013. EA officials insisted that this time around, the company wouldn’t make the same mistake. At the time, EA Sports executives promised that the company had learned its lessons from the prior console transition, when the publisher’s first sports games on the Xbox 360 weren’t nearly as full-featured as their previous-generation counterparts. It’s been more than three years since Electronic Arts unveiled its Ignite engine during Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal event.