Arriving in stores in early September, NHL 2k9 is on its way to the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii this fall with ambitions to reclaim the title as the best hockey franchise. On Friday, we had a chance to speak with Ben Bishop, the producer of NHL 2k9, about how Visual Concepts is setting out to do that over a friendly phone conversation that went into detail on playoff beards, the new fighting engine and much more.
1. What’s your position at 2k Games / Visual Concepts and what does it involve?
I’m the producer for the NHL 2k series.
2. What customization options will players have this year in terms creating their team, players and even possibly an ice rank?
We didn’t do a whole lot with customizing the rinks, but you definitely still have the full range to create a team and players. With players we’ve added in extra equipment so there’s a bigger set of sticks, skates and helmets to choose from. We have all that customization there and you can also customize the actual NHL players too. So if a player updates a stick or a skate during the season and you can change that right in the roster in the game. We also try to do that with the roster updates that we offer, but it’s definitely something that the user can jump in do on their own. With the create-a-team, we have something close to 90 to 100 logos you can choose from. You can basically pick from any players to set up your own team.
3. Will players be able to customize their own playoff beards?
There’s not that much actual customization on the beards themselves. There are different levels for how far they are in the playoffs. When you first begin in the first round you’ll have a small growth and as you progress farther in the playoffs, the longer they’ll become.
4. How much research has been done on including the playoff beards for many of the players?
Yeah, you know, we tried to take a look and it’s definitely an area we want to do more in, but we didn’t have the time to do. We were hoping to get different styles like [Sidney] Crosby not having a full beard. He only had a partial beard for awhile. So we wanted to get different stuff like that in but we didn’t really have time. We ended up with having different levels depending on how far the team is along in the playoffs.
5. What was the reasoning behind the transitioning to a new development team?
One of the big things was we were consolidating studios at 2k Sports. So a lot of the stuff that was being down at Kush Studios in Southern California came up to Visual Concepts in Northern California where I am at. We’ve been doing basketball, football and some other stuff so we wanted to get everyone together under the same roof. One of the great things that have really helped us out on NHL this year was having the bigger pool of research to pull from. You’ll see a lot of the same presentation stuff, design and interface. It’s really helped out beyond the NHL titles.
6. Has the feedback from the recently released demo on the PSN been what you were expecting?
It’s still pretty early since it came out last night so the feedback has just began trickling in. I know for a lot of people it’s frustrating that people can only play a period worth of gameplay and we’ve held back on some of the extra options. We only really wanted to give you a small taste of what the game has to offer. So far, the feedback has been pretty positive but I haven’t had time to sort through a ton of it yet.
7. Could you describe how you are managing to simplify the controls for players?
It was certainly a big goal for us. With NHL 2K8, or with hockey games in general, it became very advanced and complicated. I think it was making hard for new users and people who don’t know much about the sport to jump in play. So we tried to make it accessible for any type of player to pick up and have fun right away.
With the default scheme, you’ve got the basic buttons: shoot and pass on offense, you’ve got check on defense and the speed burst button. If you jump in, you’ll be able to at least hold your own and get used to start messing around with the other controls like dumping the puck and superstar moves; it’s all there too. We just wanted to make it easy and simple by default. We didn’t want to involve the bumpers too much like our game last year did with shooting and passing on the right and left bumpers. A lot of people had trouble adjusting to that so we wanted to stick to the face buttons and make it accessible to any type of player.
8. How do you think the Zamboni mode will go over with NHL fans?
That ties back to what you may have heard that we’ve been talking about a lot with this year’s game is trying to capture some of the elements that are traditional and specific to hockey. Playoff beards are one and I think the zamboni is definitely another one. It seemed like the perfect year to add them. During the intermission you can see the zamboni hitting the ice or you can jump in drive it yourself. It’s really a nice diversion from the game so hopefully people see it as a nice little break from the normal hockey action.
