I'm a huge hockey fan in general, and I obsessively play NHL 14 on my xbox. EA just released a teaser for NHL 15, and it looks really cool. I'll be facing a big dilemma in September about whether or not to pick up a new xbox or ps4 for essentially one game.
Have you played the old games in the series? I spent tons of time on '93, '99, '01 and '03. I wonder, whether the gameplay has changed rapidly, or it still has the same issues?
I've logged tons of hours of with those too! I know it's so outdated, but nothing gets better than NHL 94 for me, I think it deserves a spot in the hall of fame personally, haha. EA has been getting better at evolving the NHL franchise each year, although there are still some issues that continue to persist. My biggest gripe with the game over the years has been the terrible ai of your teammates, it just literally never seems to improve much, despite them claiming every year that they've made drastic changes to help simulate a real life game more accurately. They've also pretty much eliminated the poke check, which has driven me crazy, because 9 times out of 10 it leads to you taking a tripping penalty. I think some of the biggest improvements to the game have been in the area of skating. In NHL 13, they introduced "true performance skating" which introduced a more realistic simulation of how players actually go from basic acceleration to top flight speed over the course of a couple of seconds. This was actually really cool, because it forced you be smart about how fast you want your player to go, if you tried to go top speed 100% of the time, you would sometimes wipe out, our not be able to turn at a very acute angle. Overall, i'm really looking to seeing what they have in store for the next gen consoles, i'm sure with more disc space to work with and better hardware, they'll hopefully address some of the issues the community has been pretty vocal about.