So… to me it seems like the “exhaust engine” would be a good idea but it looks absolutely horribly executed
First, it fills up too quickly and it fills up arbitrarily based on zone time, not on ACTUAL pressure. If you’re winning board pins, generating shots, recovering loose pucks and genuinely hemming the other team in, that should generate “pressure” and create fatigue in the opponents.
Letting the D sit back and playing pitch from point to point until the meter fills doesn’t create pressure and shouldn’t lead to fatigue either. The idea that once the meter fills the other team magically becomes heavily hindered is silly - if they haven’t been chasing and grinding why would they be? Also if McDavid or Barzal is early on a shift and has been playing “defense” the way a cherry picking offensive talent often does, they’d still have good wheels if they managed to grab the puck. Right now it looks like once that pressure meter fills up, you’re gonna basically have to get to center and dump. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t look like a team that’s been hemmed in could break up a pass and have a guy like Barzal still manage to turn it into a breakaway the other way, which actually often happens in hockey.
Additionally, the fact that it creates a buff for 30 seconds is really silly. So if you fill the meter and keep them pinned in their own end for 45 seconds the buff actually wears off at 30? That’s the complete opposite of what would happen. What about PPs where the team manages to spend the fill 2 minutes in the offensive zone? All that tells me is that if the other team doesn’t manage to clear the puck before 30 seconds is up you’re basically guaranteed to score.
The goalie fatigue is a good idea too but just like the pressure meter, it looks like the goalies fatigue way, way too quickly. Hopefully sliders can adjust some of these things. And if they listened to the community on the bringing back hybrid controls, I really hope they listen on allowing us to turn off the pressure gauge. Some others adjustments look good. The one touch passing could add some nice goals that I previously would try to execute but the input lag on receiving a pass and firing another one would throw the play off so that it never worked out as a tic-tax-toe like real life. The hits look a bit better. Still not great, but the contact looks a bit more varied. Changes to vision control are welcome as well. And if we don’t see a lot of lacrosse goals I don’t mind it being button mapped. I only play offline so if the AI doesn’t abuse it, I certainly won’t be trying it more than maybe a couple times a season with appropriate players.
Overall, the exhaust engine’s execution looks like a FAR bigger flaw and negative than those potentially promising additions. The AI just looks lost in general as always, and the core gameplay is just stale. With no offline modes getting any updates there’s not a much for a player like myself to really hope for. Hopefully the creation zone itself has some nice improvements and they’ve unlocked some of the things we can edit on players.
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