After like 3 or 4 games of EASHL these were my observations:
+the worst bug from nhl17 where u press the pass button and your player doesnt pass hasnt happened to me yet
+pucks bounce more and are harder to possess when loose
+no obvious goalie exploits seen yet from the new dekes. I was worried about the one hand deke, but its different than before and doesnt seem easily exploitable
+ eashl ai defenseman ai seemed better. They havent skated a puck from behind the net into the goalie yet and have handled defending the rush much better instead of holding a specific side or backing up into their own net
+new defensive skill stick controls are useful. Holding out your poke check works well to cut off passing lanes that you could not before. It seems kind of OP for blocking shots too as it must have some kind of auto-tracking with the puck.
+stamina seems to be tuned more realistically. I got noticeably tired after abusing the sprint/turbo mechanic of pressing the L stick in. I could do this all game long last year and would recover after like 10 secons and only feel slower when the cumulative stamina drop hit near the end of the period. The recovery seems much longer now. This is good as the sprint was an exploit against ai defenseman last year.
+glad the EASHL 3s mode is in NHL sized rinks, its a nice addition. Not really a fan of the arcadey version of 3s in the small rinks, but it will go over well with casuals.
+i tried a lot of deking and dont really see where you can chain moves together like they claimed in the reveal, deking seems to work the same. The new dekes added all seem to have situations they can be used in
-i need more practice but the new chop control doesnt seem to work very well. It seems to require a lot more precision with you picking an exact direction on the right stick opposed to how it used to work
-i only played the puck moving defenseman build and noticed 2 differences. Less agility, felt closer to the offensive defenseman and body checking was easier/actually possible. Last year i bounced off 99% of the hits i attempted with that build. In the beta guys fell almost everytime i hit them. The changes dont seem good for defenseman build balance. I cant imagine any of the other builds are viable at all now that puck moving d can hit. That and shooting were the only negatives.
-icing is still broken at times. We had scenarios where someone got beat to the faceoff dot and the call didnt go the right way and I had one where i dumped in from right outside the offensive blue line and was called for icing???
-goalies still dont cover the post correctly at wide angles and you see the same goals from years past where the shooting window should be closed if the shooter waits too moving past the post.
-AI now refuses to pass to you sometimes when you call for it
-presentation is worse, the new cinematic angles before faceoffs look bad
-classic camera seems slightly tilted like dynamic which is kind of annoying
-same old ai names from last year (carter, nicholls, andrews, mackenzie, stevens, irwin, etc). I was hoping to at least see more variety like last gen with different names/numbers each game