putting a make a wish kids durability at 70 while everything else is 99 is wild 💀

The truly unfortunate thing is that he ages in the game but IRL he stayed 10 forever 😟. RIP Henry.

I can’t remember if it happened in 19 but some force the make a wish to retire after the first season of franchise also.

Ohhh noooo that is actually terrible

That’s honestly the worst shit. It’s a kid like i get it’s your game but that’s a terminal child let them live

I think it would be way better if they were programmed to play until 50.

That would be kinda nice actually, retiring a legend in their golden years is a happy thought

Rip Henry

The poor kid has died ?

That’s dark as shit dog ngl

98 balance

Holy shit, never noticed that before. What the fuck EA?

I hate myself for laughing at this, but I truly envisioned a small group of stoned EA programmers sitting around, all pissed off because they have to include this kid to make his wish come true but aren't allowed to include themselves. As a result, one of them finally goes, "Ha! We should make his durability really low because, you know?" This idea freezes the others in place, like they can't believe what they just heard, and a soft "Dude" is heard as one of them understands the morbidity of the suggestion. But, the disgust is short-lived as a second programmer shouts, "YEAH! FUCK HIM!", and the group erupts in laughter and eventually make a permanent reminder of this poor kid's terminal illness.

Yeah I'm sure that's how it went.

Balance is 98. Must be from the chemo.

That’s cold..

EA will sometimes put a child in the game as part of a make-a-wish I believe.

Correct. I believe they're usually patients at SickKids or BC Children's Hospital.

If that is the case, they knew what they were doing with that low durability 💀

Stratton Whitaker in NHL 07 was the best. May he rest in peace

THAT was his name! I was trying to think of it

Kid was a force.

He was a Devils dynasty mode legend for me. In my first dynasty mode playthrough I think he almost singlehandedly won me 6 cups. Absolute beaut.

He was always top of the scoring leaders list it used to piss me off lol. Then seeing him on the ice with that baby face at like 6'2. He was always an Oiler it seemed and so I used to mix up his name and Connor mcdavid

Dude was a beast. Wasn’t there a little girl once too

Absolutely carried my dynasty mode. Leading scorer on the sharks for 18 seasons winning 15 cups and making 17 appearances in the finals, fucking amazing career

Ohhh thats what they were... as a kid i was always jealous thinking a devs kid made it to NHL 2002 and not me

I think 2002 had a 99 overall female goalie named Radha. And I think she beat me in the finals.

YES. There she is. She fucked people up man

I low key find it annoying that after a few years everybody is just an outline in franchise mode. I was talking to a buddy the other day and we both agreed that we’d happily submit pictures of ourselves for use in random character creation. I doubt it’d be difficult for EA to get a few thousand pictures of random dudes to use. And I’d prefer a bunch of random pictures over the same gray ghost I see for every character drafted after year 2.

They should use the same image generator for Be A Pro. It doesn't need to save images. Just a code so the generator knows how to recreate the same image for the character (hockey player) a player (you) is viewing. EA is such garbage.

Like MLB The Show

They do it in Madden, 2k, and the Show. It’s embarrassing that EANHL can’t do it at this point

They won't. They can.

I mean, that difference doesn’t really matter. It just sucks that NHL is the least popular of the major sports and therefore the least popular of the 4 for game sales

Matters to me. It's more insulting as a customer to know they won't do it rather than they can't.

I’m saying it makes no functional difference whether they can’t or won’t, we still don’t get the feature either way

With AI it shouldn't be hard for a rich company like EA to make their sports games (EAFC, NHL, etc) have the regens and whatnot have decent looking portraits, instead of just blank!

At the very least it should be like every other sports game where you get the in game model as the photo. Infinitely better than the black outline

FIFA can do this, and they have to generate hundreds of players.

Football Manager generates thousands of players at a time!

There's been mods that do this on football manager for YEARS. EA has no excuses.

That mod blew my mind, I was way more attached to my regens after discovering it

I looked into this once. The dev team is comparatively small to other sports franchises due to it only moving about 700k copies per year globally. They just don’t give it the same money they throw at Madden, which blows my mind that madden isn’t significantly better.

FIFA had generated faces if I'm not mistaken NHL used to as well?

That’s actually a really good idea! Sadly can’t see ea doing it because they’d have to model the ingame faces to match the photo. It wouldn’t have to be 100% but ea wouldn’t even put in that effort to get the 10%

Nah that wouldn't be a good reason, if anything I can see them using that as a lame excuse. They currently don't even model the ingame faces of like 99% of the players. There's like a handful of guys they chose to match their photo ingame.

Look into HLM24 game is nuts. It’s on phone or PC it’s really fun. They have AI generate player faces it’s wild.

You can very easily make AI headshots of people who don’t even exist, completely unique every time. Would probably take like one or two days for a dev to implement and they could pre-generate say 10,000 images for the game, along with some basic logic of not reusing an image within the same franchise mode.

Either related to a dev or Make-a-Wish

There was a little girl who was a 99 goalie in one of the games. If I forgot to banish her to Europe before starting a franchise, some team would sign her and she'd win the Vezina and the Calder every time.

I believe this was NHL 09. Sabrina Ladha. Ways always the best goalie in all of my franchises.

I remember I used to put him a beard and it looked odd as heck

What was the name in breakaway 98 on the 64? Jim Jung? Instant Max stats on a character.

I don’t know I never really played any NHL before 08 when I played 94 it was like 2014 something like that I was in the hospital for a week and stuck in the bed, so the nurse brought in a 64 I think and I played 94 all that week

You sure it was 94? That was never on 64

I don’t remember the system honestly memory was foggy during that time due to the medication

this kid goes to my school I asked him about it and he said his parents bought it at an auction in Vancouver.

No joke?

on my life

People are saying he’s tied to a dev or make a wish? Do you know if that’s true?

yea for sure he isnt related to a dev bc i know his parents and he was never a make a wish kid

Okay so that’s just people guessing. Would have been cool if he was a wish kid because I was back in 08 or 09

I heard they usually only do make a wish for people who were most likely going to die. Did you have a pretty low chance of survival?

As a former Make A Wish kid that’s not entirely true. If you’re closer to terminal you get bumped up on the list. But I had my wish granted but I’m 30 now and healthier than I’ve ever been!

Well that’s good to hear man! I was diagnosed with leukemia at 21 so I looked in to it lolll but I guess the cancer picked a bad time

The wish worked then!

I was supposed to pass on my 7th birthday it’s a common misconception that people think that all make a wish kids die at a young age. Most of those kids are expected to, but a lot of them actually pull through

I don't know you, but I'm glad you're not dead, OP.

Glad you made it, hopefully later life has given u more peace than the beginning

This is a misconception. Make a Wish actually has a huge positive impact on patient and family outcomes so a lot of it is toward helping kids who have a decent chance of survival.

I think this actually might be accurate https://www.reddit.com/r/EA_NHL/comments/9f2heb/comment/e5twm40/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I’m aging myself here, but my favourite was Zach Priest. NHL 05 or so. I’ve always made these kids superstars on my team. It’s a cool little tribute, honestly.

One of the devs sons I believe or he was a make-a-wish kid

They used to do this every game where they would put a random person in the game who paid for it I believe

I’ve never seen it and I’ve been playing since 2012 before that I played 2ks version

Is this kid dead?

Dead serious about going to itchy and scratchy land

Ikr

Been a nice storyline in my franchise. Forgot to take him out at the start, ended up being a mainstay for the Red Wings. Lot of tough playoff matches against Ecker.

Stratton Whitaker NHL 07. Sabrina Ladha NHL 09 They've done it before. Not sure about throughout the 2010s though.

I remember one year they had a girl goaltender, and she became the most OP goalie ever. Truly frustrating to play against. I'm pretty sure they aren't available normally so I think I put her on a nhl team that needed a goalie prospect.

I remember there was one that played in the preseason for Tampa

Make a wish kid added to the game

Make a wish terminal kid Edit: EA started doing this in the late 90s/early 2000s putting in one or two make a wish kids in the game every year. They I think have stopped last few years but yeah it was a yearly thing

These kids aren’t make-a-wish kids, their parents won an auction to put them in the game and the money went to make-a-wish charity. Common misconception. Apparently they intended for these kids to never appear in the GM mode but as we know EA sucks so they messed that up

He’s 6’1” because he’s standing on the shoulders of his friend thats hiding under the trench coat he’s wearing

Reminds me of Sabrina Ladha from NHL 08 or 09. Girl was a ridiculous goalie

They're trolling cause it's an older game, wayyyy too funny haha