EA Sports continued their promotional push for the upcoming release of NHL 16 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with the release of a brand new trailer as well as a first look at overhead gameplay.
The new trailer, which can be seen above, focuses to tweaks made to the game’s skating engine.
In NHL 15, trying to go side-to-side on the ice was nearly impossible, and it put defensive players at a massive disadvantage. With the new precision skating, EA Sports claims that playing defense is more fair than ever before.
“We put a lot of effort into the precision the skating,” NHL 16 lead producer Sean Ramjagsingh told The Hockey Writers. “We said we can do fast really well, but for you to move two feet to the left or right is extremely difficult. That’s one of the tools that we wanted to give you.
“On offense, if you’re a Steven Stamkos-like sniper and you want to create a new passing lane for yourself for that one-timer, or you’re on defense and you want to take away that passing lane, that was really important for us to improve.”
In addition to the new trailer, EA Sports released a new gameplay video that showcases some of the skating changes coming to the game. In the video below, you can see how the new defensive precision helps take players off the puck and intercept passes, a far change from the gameplay a year ago.
With these changes, EA Sports hopes to make mistakes that lead to goals more due to user-error than gameplay mechanics.
“When something goes wrong in the game, it’s more a user mistake as opposed to the game making the mistake for me,” Ramjagsingh, said. “We wanted it more responsive as well. We really, really focused on the skating, making it fun to play every position as well as making sure that you had the right amount of control that you want so that it felt, as a whole, refined.”
NHL 16 releases in North America on September 15 for Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The game launches in Europe on September 17.
