NHL 24 interview: How EA “had to rethink and redefine” ice hockey with NHL 24

There’s a good reason NHL 24’s cover star is decorated defenceman Cale Makar. It’s not just because he’s one of the sport’s hottest prospects, or for his frankly outstanding cheekbones. It’s because this season, defense is everything.

That’s thanks to a game-changing new system called Sustained Pressure. Attacking your opponent’s goal builds pressure and temporarily boosts your attributes while draining the goalie’s energy, resulting in epic scrambles and embattled sieges at both ends of the ice. It’s a fresh meta for the game, and as NLH 24 Senior Producer Chris Haluke tells us, it’ll make you rethink how you play.

Here’s our chat in full. For hands-on impressions, check out why NHL 24 is shaping up as the best-feeling game in the series’ history in our NHL 24 preview.

GLHF: What ways are you making this appeal to audiences that might not necessarily be into ice hockey?

Haluke: Fantastic question. One of the big things that we're focusing on this year is controls and making our control scheme more intuitive and more accessible for players. And I think that that's something that will truly help new players come into the game. They can adapt the control scheme and actually get to uncover some of the skill moves that were locked before.

That it was so highly skilled that your dexterity had to be world-class in order to execute some of the moves. One of the things that [we] continually say is that it shouldn't be harder to execute a move in an NHL video game than it should on the ice. So now we actually want players to, you know, execute some of the skill moves, and we believe that with NHL 24 there's a massive opportunity for the increase in accessibility.

Have you got any examples of skill moves that even I could pull off?

The Zegras, the Michigan. That's something that would have been so incredibly difficult. And for the right reasons. We want our game to be one that is mastered, whereas now, with the control scheme, you'll be able to execute that move in a much easier way. Although, you still need skill to do that, but it will be more accessible for other players to execute.

So what is the command for the Zegras, for example?

Well, it's all mapped to the face buttons, so in order to do that, that's something that we will decide, you can decide, and you can map that yourselves.

Looking at the community, every year they’ve got demands. What was your focus on?

I would say two of the big things. Gameplay is king and gameplay is one of the areas in which we wanted to truly focus our attention. And we believe that we have done that this year between the Sustained Pressure system, goalie fatigue, icon passing, and physics-based contact. Those are all areas that the community was certainly very vocal with.

And separate from that, the inclusion of Battle Pass and World of Chel, and our constant and deliberate attempts to make that a world-class experience, that's another area on which we really focused for NHL 24.

In World of Chel, you say you've got a thousand new items. That's really exciting. Could you talk a bit about your favorite ways to customize your character?

Yeah, so this year with the Creation Zone and the improvements that we've made to Creation Zone, it's much more, I would say, responsive and you can actually get in and customize at a much faster rate than you would before. So players will be able to go in there and actually get to customize their characters. Now for me, with NHL 24, a few of the areas about which I'm really excited is that I can actually unlock, through grind currency, items that I want. Getting rid of the hockey bag and the randomness of that, so I can outfit my Ottawa Senators hockey player in Ottawa Senators authentic gear.

I'm a goalie, so I want to make sure that my goalie looks exactly how I want, and I can go into Creation Zone now and execute a flawless version of what I would like my character and my avatar to look like and it would have taken me a lot longer to do that in previous iterations of the game.

So the standout feature for me would probably be the fatigue system. If you were to pick out a headline feature, is that the headline feature for you?

Yeah, absolutely. The Sustained Pressure system is certainly the headline feature encompassing all of the other elements of gameplay that we've discussed as well. It all comes together to really shift and change the meta and the way that you play this game.

I'm gonna give many different instances where we're playing upstairs on the couches and we've had to rethink and redefine how we play the game. We can't play like we have in the past because we're constantly adjusting to the way that the game and the gameplay changes have essentially changed the meta and the way that we play overall.

What was the moment where you were playing the past games and you thought, ‘we need to change something’? Can you pinpoint the exact moment that happened?

I don't think I can pinpoint the exact moment that it happened, but it's something that we've been discussing in terms of a three-year roadmap and how we want to really focus on gameplay. Gameplay's the heart across, it spans across all of the different modes, and that's something that we do consider when we're looking at, you know, current project or future. It's what's gonna touch as many different modes as possible so that we can get a lot of value in what we're trying to do through a very short development cycle. But it was definitely early on when we wanted to focus on gameplay where we made that deliberate decision to go after sustained pressure.

Do you have any features that you've been working on for a few years and you finally got to implement in this one?

Crossplay is one that was a multi-year venture. I know we set out in NHL 23 and we were able to get part of the way where it is now with 24. We're there where we should be and I know that that was an incredible journey for the team and an incredible amount of work for them to get there.

There's no PC version. What's the reason for that?

It's not in our plan right now. It's something that, obviously we continue to explore different opportunities, but it is not in the plan for NHL 24.

Do you have any mandates from EA where they say ‘we want this feature in this game’ or are you totally free to come up with them yourself?

Great question. We are not mandated. No, we are not. We are what we would consider a smaller heartbeat title with NHL and we actually have the opportunity to take risks to make bold moves in terms of pushing the boundaries and I think that's something that this team is very accustomed to. We can be a lighthouse partner to other teams in trying to achieve innovations in different areas in which other games might not potentially have the opportunities. And that's something that our team embraces. We do want to push boundaries. We want other teams to learn from what we are doing so that they can apply that to their product and their games.

Was there a danger the sustained pressure system would gamify hockey too much?

I think that's always a risk, and that's something that I know our team is very conscious of. I know in the early iterations, it probably was overly gamified, but an incredible amount of balancing and tuning has gone into it, and we do want to remain authentic to the sport, to the feel, and we believe that where we have the product right now is in a place of authenticity, and that's something that we'll continue to chase.

If I said a sentence like, ‘NHL 24 is the X game ever,’, what would you replace X with?

The best feeling. Feels like hockey. NHL 24 feels like hockey.

NHL 24 is out October 6, 2023, for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and Xbox One.