NHL25 Wishlist (hopefully some in NHL24) [ Edited ]

[NicCrosby87]

- Full presentation back (removed in NHL23)

- All NHL teams intro (instead of few teams)

- Being able to CONTROL EVERY TEAM in Franchise/Custom League or at least let us have the same league editing as in Custom League for season mode. I spend hundreds of hours on retro rosters, with as much as possible accurate appearance, contracts, gear, overall rating. But I have 32 teams… and it kills a little the magic in season mode. For Franchise, I like to play with different teams during the season. It’s offline mode anyway. Let us use it as we want. MLB and NBA have this for years. 

- Add back the « Stanley Cup playoffs » text on the ice when it’s playoffs. You already use it for Rivals and other EASHL, last Playoffs I saw it few times and even Stanley Cup Finals. 

- Three stars animation at the end of the game.
- Winter Classic mode (generic arena in the worst case). Add the actual Winter Classic arena for play now and for the 2 teams playing it in that season in season/franchise mode. + two team for future years are chosen randomly every season.

- ALL STAR GAME during Franchise and Season mode. Like back in the days, with generated lineups depending on sim. 

- Return of Stanley Cup banner rising in Franchise and Season mode

- Hat trick recap like older games. 

- Accurate gloves colours! Penguins 2015-2016 are bright yellow when they should be golden. I’m sure many other retro or current teams have this problem. Put black gloves or edit palette to Penguins gold. 
- Playoffs mode has been a mess for years! No edit lines, strategies, retired numbers option doesn’t work. Please let us compete for different trophies too. Memorial Cup, Spengler Cup, etc. 

Creation :

- Edit generated players

- Create helmet less players

- Edit players (appearance, overall ratings) once Franchise, Season mode has started

- New beards, more length instead of 0 to 4, 0 to 6-7.

- Hair colour, maybe letting us use the colour wheel since many are off or too extreme.

- Hair style, more hair style, especially for black descendants. Maybe possible to edit length would be nice.
- New goalie masks (been the same forever)

- Add new attributes such as Backhand power, accuracy, we have speed, we need speed with the puck. Offensive awareness is vague. Should be called Offensive constancy. Same for defensive. And the value of this should be higher. So instead of having to put Caufield strong, and speedy. You put 90 off and it makes him a 86 right away. 
- Add new mentality attributes for Franchise purposes, should be a loyalty, money interest and winning meter. Depending on the meters, players choose to re-sign for much less to win. 
- Edit player injury options players such as Landeskog, Nolan Patrick, Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane. Being able to add an injury without having to put the player 70 overall. Being able to decide if they are injured which body part, how long. If I play season or franchise and Eichel gets injured for 6 months in real life, I can add it so it matches reality. NBA 2K has it and it’s awesome. Durability is fine. I would add body parts along the way. Knees, ankles, elbows, fingers, back, shoulders and head. Crosby is not injury prone if not for concussion for example. 

Goalie masks models

- 1950 (Jacques Plante, early years)

- 1970-1980 (Dryden, Wregget, Cheevers)

1950-1970-1980-1990-2000’s model goalie masks, you add them in the standard mask.

Make them blank, and we can edit colours for straps, grid and the rest of the mask with the colour wheel.

The other part, is to revamp all the existing goalie masks of every league. Some have been added recently, but some are 10-11 years old. Throughout the year with patchs maybe?

I’d really like to see 3 new looking models for all NHL teams + at least one iconic goalie mask!

I’m thinking, Luongo, Brodeur already in the game, but maybe, Price, Joseph, Fleury, Giguere, etc. With actual colour and design as much as possible.

(Because of copyrights) 

- Add new « vintage » gear such as CCM HT1 helmet, Jofa 390 helmet, more wooden hockey stick, leather gloves for 50-60’s hockey, option to remove shoulder pads, classic black and white ccm skates like in 90’s hockey to match more the idea of the custom league!

Sidney Crosby’s CCM Fit Lite 80 (5K) helmet, ! The guy that was face of NHL for years and doesn’t have his proper helmet since NHL11.. so, does Tarasenko and alumnis Pronger, Briere, Sedin twins, just to name a few don’t have their actual helmet. Time to add it back..

NEW SUGGESTIONS :

• Add presets in Custom League. Such as 1950, 1960, 1970, 1990, 2000’s. Within those presets would have rules, gameplay sliders, number of teams, salary cap, etc. (that you could still manage), overall look maybe even a filter like old camera/broadcast. (NBA 2K did this in NBA2K23 and it’s genius).
• Edit existing arena, from seat colors, to the name or even change venue and decade.
  
• Edit uniform just like in created team, change the gloves colours, font, etc. for existing teams.
• Ones - Revamped Free for All from 2004’s version, different indoor/outdoor environments, arcade style of play, every player from every team is available and not just 7 players you have to unlock.
• Threes circuit —> NBA streets Vol2 type, you play against 5 different divisions - ECHL/CHL/AHL/EUR and NHL. In each you play 10 games, everytime you defeat a team, you pick a player from this team. You choose 10 teams of all teams in that category. Once this league finished, you have to pick one hero card from it. For example in CHL : A 2006 London Knights Patrick Kane with 75 ovr, younger, actual hair, facial hair, face and skills for example. The card has the authentic 2006 picture. Maybe they could go on your HUT team in the end. EUR : Victor Hedman 17 years old, with Modo, and so on. Until you need to defeat Gretzky, Lemieux, Lidstrom and Roy for example as a boss.
  
• Being able to change age (switching between custom age or real birthdate) in roster or in season/custom league mode, so your player is not 48 years old.
• Being able set default jerseys in custom league, season for retro teams for example instead of always having to pick them.
• Retired numbers for franchise/custom league an actual animation of the jersey being lifted and players looking at it. The player in suit waving. Something exciting. 
  
• Milestones should be more rewarding! If you score 500, 1000 points, etc, there are animation right now, but it’s not exciting enough. 
• Franchise, sim engine is off. I hate that every sim is really different, 90% of the time, best players and teams should be best players and teams..! I’d sim and get Columbus first in the league and having Arturi Lekhonen even with McDavid at 68 pts. Needs to be changed. We like surprises but you know…! Potential is also off! I don’t get why every players get to 90 overall within a year…

[kyl_35]

Kudos to you for getting this all typed out. I don’t think I have it in me to beg for the same stuff once again. 

[NicCrosby87]

Haha! A list I made last year, just copy and paste with few tweaks! Gameplay wise, graphics I see and feel the improvement. I personally like this game franchise, playing since NHL98. HUT killed the offline modes… but I like to think changes will be made at some point about these topics. We need to keep fighting for them, I guess. 

[bg0vzeyqov1y]

I want all of this added, so badly lol this is closer to a full price worth of a hockey game! Couple things I would liked to see added is to see silhouetted players faces like in BAP (that once could be more hardware intensive to pull off tho)

If not then add an option to edit prospects from the draft class menu. Otherwise it's either a crap shoot with game generated players or you're false simming a whole season/ false drafting and signing rookies just to get a look at them. Good way to cheese the draft tho lol

[007hockey]

@kyl_35 Only been asking for the same things, how many years in a row now? Lol

This is a fantastic list.

Perhaps it will happen in 2027 like the Mike guy says

[TasteofChicago91]

Nhl 25 wish list you mean. It is probably too late to add anything at this point 

[Forizeal]

the games out in a month dummy lol

[PhoenixRed96]

This is important. We have to make wishlists for next NHL before they start working on it so they know what our preferences are. Good idea and good job. ++

[PhoenixRed96]

I'll add a few wishes of my own to expand on this thread. The ones that spring to my mind first are..

- All Star game for Be a Pro career, where your social media popularity impacts if you get picked to play in All Star game

- All Star skills competition filled with mini games, similar to ones FIFA uses or at least used to have as a loading screen. These minigames were always fun and they could be incorporated into HUT as well as a limited time event.

- Return of Winter Classic arenas, every NHL year we could get all outdoor stadiums that are played in that specific year. Addition of these stadiums could come into game at later point every year when we get closer to these matches. This could also be used as HUT event, event challenges would take place in stadiums instead of arenas as it normally is, and stadium customization for your HUT team, etc...

- Return of real life city/arena footage before we head into play in the beginning of each match. Just like it used to be in NHL 16, 17, etc...

- Be a Pro participation in World Junior Championship, World Championship and Olympics, include real life footage of Olympics arena as with NHL teams.

- Authentic coaches for NHL teams, if you manage to get the license somehow or NHL league itself manages this.

- Team Overall based matchmaking for HUT Rivals. Skill/location based matchmaking for HUT Champions.

- More accessible/affordable player cards with higher overalls. It's almost impossible to reach 99 overall at the end of a year even if you played all year long.

- More dynamic HUT objectives. Objectives are often static and sound like "score 10,000 goals" or "win 250 matches", objectives could be easier to complete and vary during events, so more variety for these objectives and their rewards. People could easily unlock master untradeable cards if they complete all seasonal event objectives.

- Free event reward track so people can actually unlock event cards without dropping 200,000 coins on them on auction house. Unlockable through playing and completing objectives.

- New presentation with new commentators, Mike Cybulski isn't good at it. I often turn him off. On the other hand Ray Ferraro's commentary is fantastic I hope he never leaves the commentary team in NHL games. TSN/Sportsnet come to my mind when thinking of new commentary team.

- Better player face mimics and animations. Even though the stanley cup celebration was improved in the past years to feel more alive, players still look kinda dead as if they weren't mentally present. Same applies to players on the bench, I wished they moved their heads and eyes to the area of play. Not just stare into the ice in front of them like fish. They also need to get new animations so there aren't so many players with same synced bench animations.

- Let players play in warmup in Be a Pro, maybe you could use warmup as a way how to earn bonus experience for Be a Pro character

- Add full length country anthems for teams participating in World Championship matches/Juniors/Olympics in future. Just because people skip it doesn't mean we will when it's championship finals or a special game with some kind of team jubilee. (First finals appearance in state history for example)

- When speaking of presentation improve camera and player behavior so they don't make strange gestures or face grimacing when they are filmed and improve camera so it films areas which are often filmed in TV.

- Start using referee helmet cam for intermissions to increase immersion and atmosphere.

- Create an extension for VR players. If you want to play NHL in VR, people could play as a referee, skating around the rink with their joystick, looking around an arena and making calls. I agree that referee game mode might not be that interesting in the end, and that there are higher priorities to do in next installments but if you did it as a VR game mode, I think people would be in heaven, being able to visit these arenas in VR, it would be like virtual museum for some people.

- You don't have to improve textures/graphics of fans in the stands, just film them less, give them less screen time so we don't see how bad they look. Or at least improve their faces, these fans look very strange since NHL 15, sometimes they don't even look like humans but more like extraterrestrials. I get not all fans need to be sympathetic but they could have better looking faces. (IDEA - just face scan your dev team members to use them as fans in the stands, why not. Would be nice easter egg and I'm sure the team would love it)

- Make the fans audio chanting better, when it's 3v3 OT and fast action begins where the game is upside down and every few seconds the puck possession changes, odd man rushes happen, make the arena go absolutely crazy after every rush/goalie save. Fan reactions seem very static if we don't count team name chants. For example it seems a lot of times that fans don't register it when we make a fantastic offensive play or when we are on powerplay when in reality fans get most loud. 

I think I named enough for inspiration. Hopefully they decide to do some of these in the future. 

EDIT: Oh I forgot another important feature. Team practice, let people attend team practice. This could also work as a form of minigames that boost your rating in Be a Pro. Or form of challenges in HUT. 

[MlecznyDuet]

PC is my only wish