If you’re one of the hockey fans not at all happy with where NHL 23 ended up, that sentiment isn’t lost on the devs. For NHL 24, the devs over at EA Vancouver are looking to “involve the community,” and are also aware of the discussions people had about the lack of gameplay changes in last year’s version.

This was mentioned by the dev team during a roundtable Q&A which MP1st was a part of. Taking part in answering the questions were Community Manager Dustin Wade, Senior Producer Chris Haluke, and Creative Director Mike Inglehart.

Q: What are your plans for live updates like patches for gameplay throughout the year? 

Chris Haluke: That’s something that we’re going to take a really hard look at.

You know, we want to listen to our community, but we want to hear what’s going on and ultimately bring it back to the team and see if there’s things that we need to work on in terms of balance. We have this year we’ve increased patches for our own internal purposes, but that will also provide us more opportunities to put updates out into our product, out into the wild.

I know last year there were definitely some, some discussions about the lack of changes from a gameplay perspective and that’s something that we’re going to take a real hard look at. And that’s why we’re here today. We’re going to involve the community. We want to be sure that we’re in touch with everyone and we want to be sure that we’re putting out a product.

And continue to evolve on it  throughout the product’s life cycle.

That’s certainly good news, right? Let’s just hope the dev team follows through with it. NHL 24 is set to hit the ice this October 6 on the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and you can watch the latest video about it featuring this year’s World of Chel.