“We really took out most of last year’s game and started from scratch.â€
Since E3, 2K Sports has been touting the same few words regarding NHL 2K9: above all else they will bring the fun back to hockey video games. This might seem like a strange announcement or PR line when NHL 2K has delivered an entertaining experience for several years running, and it’s doubtful that this is the first time you’ve heard a journalist ponder the necessity of 2K Sports’ claim. But for these developers, “entertaining” just wasn’t enough.
“This is kind of a different year for us,” said Ben Bishop, Producer of NHL 2K9. “The game was developed by a new team this year. We actually brought it to our 2K Sports headquarters here in Northern California. In doing that it really gave us the opportunity to step back and get a different perspective on things and really try to see how the series had evolved and what we could do to change things. They take a different approach to a lot of what we were doing. Getting a fresh perspective from a different development team really made a big difference.
“One of the biggest things we’re trying to do is bring the fun back to hockey video games. I’m sure you hear that term ‘fun’ a lot. I think a lot of us remember, back in the day, 10 to 15 years ago, just sitting on the couch and playing hockey video games with your buddies. It was really one of the more popular sports video games back then. That’s one of the big goals for us, to capture some of that and bring back the fun into playing hockey video games. Recently it has been, not just with our game but other hockey games out there too, have gotten too complicated, you know, the controls are just too in-depth, and I think it ended up turning people off to the game. One of our biggest things this year on the gameplay feature side was getting a new control scheme in. We wanted to focus on the basics, not having to worry about modifiers or all sorts of crazy button combinations just to play the game. We also wanted to capture the elements that make the sport of hockey fun and unique. Things like, we have a new fighting engine. We have a Zamboni. We have a user-controlled Stanley Cup celebration.”
