EA Sports has revealed the cover athletes for its upcoming ice hockey game NHL 23. Opting to feature two athletes on the cover for the latest NHL game, EA Sports has announced that Trevor Zegras of the team Anaheim Ducks and Sarah Nurse of Team Canada will be featured on the cover for NHL 23.
Sarah Nurse, well-regarded for her performance during the 2022 Beijing Olympics for helping secure the gold medal for Team Canada, will be the first female hockey player on the cover of an NHL game.
More details about NHL 23 have since been released, including the addition of women alongside the men in the Hockey Ultimate Team game mode. Members of the IIHF Women’s National Team can be recruited in the game mode to be played alongside the men.
NHL 23 will also feature cross-platform matchmaking for its multiplayer modes. However, cross-platform matchmaking will not be available at launch. Rather, it will be added as an update planned for November. The matchmaking will also be unable to work between PlayStation and Xbox players.
Adding to this, NHL 23 will also allow players who started out on the PS4 or Xbox One version of the game to transfer their progress to the appropriate next-gen consoles.
This comes with some caveats: players can only protect 20 player items and a coach in their current line-up to transfer to the new console, the older-gen content will become untradable after the transfer, and coins and items remaining in a player’s collection will be converted to Tradeable Packs of similar value on the new consoles.
In terms of gameplay, puck movement will feature new animations including desperation plays through the Last Chance Puck Movement system that adds diversity to player animations. These can be further divided intwo three categories: stumble actions, loose puck plays, and enhanced goalie AI.
NHL 23 is coming to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on October 14.
