NHL 21, EA reomoved it's career mode, to Be a Pro. But the long awaited refresh of fan-favorite mode ends up like a rookie created it. It’s impressive at first but for just a season stretch, and fizzles after the very 1st season. NHL 21's EA hasn’t fixed basics of Being a Pro. It’s still about playing through the NHL career of a rookie player and improving their stats over time. That’sNHL 21, EA reomoved it's career mode, to Be a Pro. But the long awaited refresh of fan-favorite mode ends up like a rookie created it. It’s impressive at first but for just a season stretch, and fizzles after the very 1st season. NHL 21's EA hasn’t fixed basics of Being a Pro. It’s still about playing through the NHL career of a rookie player and improving their stats over time. That’s fine, but this year’s changes as significant as they appear to be just don’t go far enough in making the experience feel both new and improved in the end. The studio has now grafted narrative components of a sort in the mode, using flashy presentation elements like cutscenes and a radio show. Yet the story, such as it is, ends up being limited almost entirely to your player’s rookie season in the NHL. And the more time I spent with the mode beyond that, the more it felt like the first year was an opulent facade on a creaky building. Be a Pro’s introductory cutscene leads right into a familiar disappointment. The NHL series’ player creation suite remains essentially unchanged this year, which means that it’s still impossible for me to create a player who truly looks like my Indian self. The mode may look more like a RPG in NHL 21, with its new dialogue choices, but it’s sorely missing a more robust character creator with basic options like the ability to tweak skin tones and facial features. These new role-playing choices are designed to let you shape the kind of player you want to be and live the life of an NHL athlete off the ice, although the range of outcomes is limited. Dialogue options (albeit without voice acting) will pop up in your player’s conversations with their coach or teammates, or interviews with the press, and all of them tend to be split into the two main paths that EA has set up. You can go a team route by choosing dialogue that follows your coach’s instructions to play within the system, or you can opt for the a star's path, putting your interests ahead of the team’s. Your dialogue choices open up chances to boost your character’s skills and attributes. EA has integrated this conversation structure into Be a Pro’s existing Coach Challenge system. Instead of just getting a pop-up saying that your coach wants you to defend a lead, you’ll see an in-game cutscene of the coach calling you over to the bench and actually giving you that instruction. It’s a smart way to liven up a long-running element of the Be a Pro experience and make it feel so much more immersive. The choices work far better for the in-game challenges than the other conversations. The team/star framework makes sense in the context of hockey, which is so dominated by a team-first mentality that endless column inches have been dedicated to the idea that the sport would be more popular if the NHL could figure out how to market its stars better. And in Be a Pro games, that dichotomy fits with the ethos of the mode, where you define what kind of player you are through your performance and play style on the ice. I’d wager that most Be a Pro fans, like me, tend to play aggressively in an effort to rack up gaudy stats. The challenges now also present a more conservative option that still feels like you’re contributing to the team. But using the same system for off-ice conversations falls flat because the choices don’t end up mattering all that much. Because they’re divorced from the NHL series’ existing in-game challenges, I quickly detected how tired the dialogue choices began to feel. A common situation is a cutscene in which a teammate invites you to a group outing. The team responses might be to say that yes, you’d be happy to go, or that no, you need to rest up for the next game. But many of the star responses are worded in such a ridiculously selfish way like, literally saying, What is in it for me? Well that it’s hard to imagine an actual NHL athlete mouthing off like that. A binary system where one of the options is actively be a bad sport makes for a poor RPG setup; it’s also been done to death in sports series like I’d love to see somebody move past it. The star path is really viable only for challenges on the ice. It tends to be more risky, with tougher objectives that offer greater rewards. The team path is safer, with missions that are more easily achievable. For example my coach might ask me to maintain a lead team an objective I’d fail only if our opponents tied the game. I could also respond with a guarantee that I’ll personally score a goal to put the game out of reach star quality. The outcomes of challenges don’t impact your player’s skills. Instead, they affect three different likability ratings. The brand rating which rises when you complete star goals and the one that matters most, since it controls your number of social media followers feels immersive. In the end one season is all you need to see what NHL21's changed in 2021 for fans on Xbox One.… Expand
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