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After not releasing on next-gen consoles last year, EA’s popular virtual hockey franchise is finally coming to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 with NHL 15, although many of the franchise’s popular features will be missing, particularly GM Connected mode and Online Team Play.

It seems in many ways NHL 15 has become a rebuilding year for the franchise, at least as far as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of the game are concerned. While growing pains are often expected when a game makes the jump to new consoles, after two years of development, many fans of EA’s NHL series expected much more out of NHL 15.

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During a recent NHL 15 press event, featuring a motion capture demo performed by Max Pacioretty from the Montreal Canadiens and Morgan Reilly from the Toronto Maple Leafs, NHL 15 producer Sean Ramjagsingh explained why many of NHL 14’s popular features didn’t make it into NHL 15.

“It’s mostly time and then with development on new platforms you always encounter new hurdles you didn’t plan for (technical hurdles), and it takes more time and resources to kind of overcome those. The team pushed hard until just a few weeks ago when we made the final announcement that OTP wasn’t going to be in there for launch. The reason why we didn’t talk about it before was we were still pushing and trying to get it in for launch. We’re 100 per cent commited to bringing back the EA Sports Hockey League as well and we understand the importance of the mode and understand our fans love it. We have the foundation now to bring back the EA Sports Hockey league bigger and better than we ever did in the past . The gameplay and presentation now are there,” said Ramjagsingh.

In terms of Team Play, Ramjagsingh explained the feature will make its way to NHL eventually, but there is no time line for release yet. It is rumoured that the mode will only feature real NHL players and teams and won’t allow players to create their own teams/players like in past NHL games.

“We’re still working on it. We’ll probably have an announcement on the progress of it. Technically it’s a difficult mode because there are 8-12 players being controlled at once. So we’re going through that process right now and I was playing it last week. We’re getting there with it, hopefully sooner rather than later but we’re trying to get it out as fast as we can,” said Ramjagsingh.