To be honest, the people who live for hockey and soccer complain just as much about FIFA and NHL as most of us do about Madden. It is just we don't notice it as much. We can pick apart Madden because most people that play it know the ins and outs of football. But then play FIFA or NHL and have very little idea about the minor details to the sport and just play it for fun.
NHL has fake real time physics, broken franchise modes, glitch goals and I am sure guys like Ravin, PP, KG will tell you NHL is far from great.
Same for FIFA. Broken manager mode, patches that fix Ultimate Team instead of gameplay, and the CPU is straight up retarded.
As I have played most EA sports games recently (never played Tiger Woods) I would not be surprised if they all run on a similar engine. They all have the same exact feel to them, with broken modes, and no real fixes. But then they make a new gimmick and sell the new one year after year.
I just look at it this way. The ratio of football to hockey fans on this site is like 100:1 if not more, so we hear nothing but what is wrong with football games. Hockey is probably the lowest sport here, so you'll know what is wrong in a basketball/baseball game before a hockey game.
NHL 09 - great step. Adding EASHL changed the way we played. It turned it from a 1v1 all the time game into something different.
NHL 10 - A little step up with the changes to EASHL and some add little things, but not as huge of a change from 08 to 09.
NHL 11 - Is broken in so many ways. For those of you who don't play, here is just a great example of it.
Krebs and I were remaking our guys for our EASHL. Now for awhile I had been playing with my players speed at 65 and I didn't feel as if my player with 99 speed was going any fast. So we first started out with krebs guy as the basis for it. I forget his guys height at the time, I believe mid-sized, and he had 87 speed and acceleratin. I jacked my guy up to 99 speed and accel and made him the same height. No difference in a foot race, with and without speed boost. Repeat with me putting my stuff down to 65 on both, again no difference. We would do this for about 20 minutes, remakings, having a 6"9' 230lbs beast vs a 5"7' 130lbs tiny guy with full boost race, and it results in a tie every single time. The only thing that gave any sort of "advantage" was me saying "1..2..3..go" over the mic.
So now when you see our EASHL team, we all are 6"9' 230lbs, speed/accel 65, Strength/Balance/Agility/Endurance (things the actually matter) all jacked up to 90+. Hitting is 95 for us all, so basically we now just bull over teams, averaging I'd say 40 hits a game, and what I would do with my 6"0' 200lbs player, I can do with my 6"9' 230lbs player. I make a sniper, so all my offence stuff is jacked to 90's, I put 90 into hitting and aggression and call it a day.
And is it any surprise this is the same year that 2kSports decided to not make NHL2k11?
And as pointed out, GM is fucked when you see guys like Eberle and Tavares sitting on the free agency list because their teams didn't make cap space for them and they end up going to other places because they can't afford the money.
