NHL 2025’s release date is quickly approaching, which means a new season of Hockey Ultimate Team is upon us (yes, even you, person who swore they’d never touch HUT again). When comparing HUT to the Ultimate Team modes in both Madden & FC, the bar is quite low, presumably from HUT’s lack of developer & financial support when compared to other aforementioned titles.
There is a bit of hope amid the darkness, though. This marks the first year that NHL Hockey Ultimate Team will only be on the next gen consoles, the Playstation 5 & Xbox Series X and S (sadly no PC port). Meaning, perhaps the development team won’t have to put resources into making sure NHL HUT works across four consoles and that will result in a better core experience for the next gen players of NHL 2025 Hockey Ultimate Team (don’t take away my hope…that’s all I have…). Here’s a wish list of a few things I’d like to see change for the next Hockey Ultimate Team installment:
Faster Menus – Better Auction House Experience
Menu load times have been sluggish and obtuse for years. Remember back in the day when you’d be playing a game and too many characters got on the screen and then the frame rate and input delay would turn into a mashed potatoes swim fest VR experience? Well, that’s the HUT menus at times. I couldn’t tell you how many times I had to restart the game entirely just to get out of some perpetual frozen state in HUT menus or to hopefully ease some of the buffering suffering ™ (phrase trademarked by me…don’t steal that). I’m on fiber internet, by the way…
Last year, there was a bug on PS5 where comparing any card price in the auction house would result in having to back all the way out to the main menu of HUT. It took weeks to fix and drove me absolutely insane. Why can’t there be hot fixes implemented for these types of scenarios? Or, maybe, more quality control? Speaking of quality control, let’s not forget how many cards were blank, objectives would have the wrong names, objectives wouldn’t even register, et cetera. Let me be clear, these aren’t jabs at the current developers as much as they are a byproduct of the crunch that these developers are under. There’s gotta be a better way…
Call me crazy, but seeing as the auction house is an integral part to the Hockey Ultimate Team experience, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it should feel seamless for users. Easy for me to say, but even adding a mobile version for just the auction house would be a surprise and a delight. Getting a dopamine rush from deals and steals in the auction house is what mobile devices were meant for. The future is here.
Hopefully, the initial experience is crisp and speedy on both consoles.
Improved Modes – Respect Player’s Time
HUT Rush was an abomination and many of the objectives didn’t even register properly. This mode either needs to be revamped entirely or just thrown out altogether. I don’t know anyone who was excited to play this mode. If anything, it suffered the same fate as other modes; it felt like an actual job jumping through objective hoops that didn’t register half the time just to earn some rewards and be somewhat competitive. Not fun. At the very least, it should be a mode where you are guaranteed to be able to use all of the event cards to see if they are viable for your team.
Further, earning some of these new event players for “free” is way too much of a time suck. You’ll find yourself “saving time” by playing squad battles on rookie and just spamming deke objectives over and over and over again. Not ideal and not very engaging. Strangely, and a bit deceiving, some of the other objectives will show a difficulty level of “rookie” and you’ll find your team getting bodied the entire time. My guess is the sliders were turned up for some of these objectives and when you couple that with some objectives not even registering, you’re in for a bad time…looking at you, Halloween Claude Girioux.
I’m hoping this new HUT Wildcard Mode will be a boon to those who have few hours to play but still want to have a fighting chance in their respective divisions. According to EA’s press release, there is also going to be a “simplified, single-path XP progression shared across HUT.” Now, we don’t currently know all that entails, but that hopefully means a bit less time grinding and a lot more time playing fun modes. Double XP days or weekends could be huge.
Latency on PS5
Not sure what was going on with the Playstation 5 net code for Hockey Ultimate Team, but something was off. Faceoff counters didn’t always appear to be working right and we already know about the server location connections up in Canada being superior to what we were getting in the states. These two issues combined created a subpar experience for PS5 users (and users, in general, who were further away from Canada).
Meta Players, Variety, & Upgrades
Sure, you can use whoever you want for Ultimate Team (and you should for maximum funsies). I respect that. It just seems the way the game is coded heavily favors taller and heavier players, making more unique teams almost obsolete in terms of remaining competitive. I mean look at truculence on bigger players. If you put truculence on a behemoth, well, guess what, they’ll be on everyone’s lineups sending people to Valhalla for weeks and/or months to come.
Also, a lot of the newly released players from Team of the Week and the like were not even viable. For whatever reason, their stats were just too low. That’s probably attributed to how the development upgrade path is designed, but something has to give here. An 81 overall when you’re running with 85’s isn’t helpful. Note: I did a bit of research on this and it looks about three months ago there was an trade-in upgrade path for TOTW players (I typically retire every January). Definitely a step in the right direction.
There’s always going to be a meta in these types of games but I wouldn’t mind seeing more incentive for player variation, however that could be created. Maybe better rewards based on a team structure? I’m not sure how it should be implemented. All I know is if I pull another Mitch Marner card and get bodied into the stratosphere from a minor shoulder bump one more time, I’m gonna lose it.
Supposedly MLB The Show’s Ultimate Team mode similar to HUT, called Diamond Dynasty, has a way to upgrade your players. There’s no reason NHL 2025 couldn’t have some type of clever system to upgrade individual stats on players to make them more viable. Example, +3 on shooting overall once you score 10 goals, et cetera. Give us some additional reasons to grind the game and make our teams more personalized.
Gameplay Metrics – Grudge Match
Maybe I’m wrong and it’s hidden deep within the obscure depths of the HUT menus, but why can’t I see more granular gameplay metrics about my team? How am I doing this week versus last week with my points per game? How many of those games were even against people in my division? How does my third line compare to my fourth line? How many points a game do I average in Rivals versus HUT Champs? Am I even getting matched up against people near my skill level in HUT Champs? Do I lose more games when someone asks me a question for 3 seconds or if I hear a bird outside? Do all the people with HABS in their gamer handle win by inexplicable voodoo magic?!? Should I take up a more relaxing hobby?!? The answer is yes to the last three…give me a little something here.
Now, the Grudge Match System seems to be a step in the right direction. The EA press release says “the all-new Grudge Match System tracks the history of matchups between teams across all major online and offline modes and enhances the series with special X-Factors that are earned in previous matchups against rival teams.” That tells me that there possibly could be better metric tracking in HUT?!? We’re gonna let EA cook on this one.
Conclusion
The hype train is here and I have a healthy bit of skepticism mixed with a little bit of hope. Will I be done with HUT by January or can EA nail it this go around? We’ll find out soon enough because the worldwide release is on Friday, October 4, at 12:00 PM EST. You can also play up to 7 days earlier by ordering the deluxe edition.
