EA Sports needs to make their career mode in the NHL video game more realistic, interactive, and rewarding for the grind.
EA Sports needs to make their career mode in the NHL video game more realistic, interactive, and rewarding for the grind.
The Be A Pro game mode in the NHL video game series is in desperate need of a full revamp. Other sports video games like NBA 2K and Fifa have a much more in-depth and interactive career mode.
EA Sports last reworked their Be A Pro series in NHL 21 and 22. Three and four years later, change is needed as the game mode has become stale and boring.
The current state of NHL Be A Pro has chel players begging developers to make it more lifelike in terms of how hard it is to make the NHL.
For example, I created a Be A Pro goalie and had an average Memorial Cup tournament. I was drafted in the second round, 41st overall by the Detroit Red Wings. I played two games in the pre-season where I went 1-1 but had an abysmal 5.00 goals-against average and an .841 save percentage.
Somehow, despite allowing 10 goals on 63 shots in two games, and producing those stats, I made Detroit’s roster for the start of the season. Additionally, my player is only 73 overall. That equates to a minor backup goalie, yet here I am, backing up in the toughest league already. It’s not realistic and takes the enjoyment of actually having to grind your way to make the show.
In NHL 24, players can determine where to start their careers down three different paths. The first is playing in the CHL’s Memorial Cup tournament. The second is beginning in Europe and playing in the Champions Hockey League Playoffs before being drafted. And the third is starting immediately in the NHL.
What happened to starting your career as a 16 or 17-year-old in one of the three CHL leagues?
If you go to the NHL Reddit page, you’ll see plenty of fans asking for this to come back, and we side with them. What’s one of the most exciting parts about the journey to the big league? It’s the grind and the experience of developing into your own player. That’s what chel fans want in Be A Pro.
The three paths they have can stay, but there should be another career path added where you can start at the beginning of say an OHL season as a 17-year-old at 60-something overall, and your performance and off-ice training impacts where you go in the draft.
That gets me to another feature that would be a fun addition. Imagine how fun it would be to actually perform your training drills. Yes, this won’t be for everyone, but Fifa has had features in their career mode where players have to complete a training drill and are given a score ranking them in a bronze, silver, or gold category considering how they did.
Right now in NHL 24, you can choose what type of training you want to do to target certain attributes. However, there’s no detail as to what training you’re doing. It’s boring. All it is is clicking buttons to get your speed or shot power up. Let us complete the training and then once we’ve finished it and obtained the score we wanted for it, we then can choose that drill to train our attributes.
There’s a lot more that can be done to fix Be A Pro, but these ideas are just two of a long list of what chel players would want to see in a revamped career mode in the upcoming NHL video game.