NHL 26 has hit early access, with the game fully available to players who shelled out for the Deluxe Edition. There are several improvements in this year’s game, especially in Be A Pro and Ultimate Team. The most significant upgrade, however, is all about how players can interact online.
NHL 26 Crossplay
I play a lot of EASHL Clubs in the NHL games. It’s the mode where you create a team with your friends, and each of you controls your own player. Win games, climb the leaderboard, and attain virtual glory. Until this year, if your friends played on a different console, you couldn’t play together. Your team also couldn’t play against teams based on another console — for example, teams with Xbox Series X/S players couldn’t play against PlayStation 5 players. First world problems, I know, but it created much longer wait times for games than needed. Longer than 10 minutes at times. It’s especially frustrating considering that other EA Sports games had already incorporated crossplay.
The good news is that EA Sports has announced full crossplay for NHL 26. On the game’s site, developers confirmed that NHL 26 will have crossplay in every online-enabled mode in the game at the start of early access. It’s a huge step forward for the franchise, which has the lowest player base of any of EA Sports’ big franchises. Opening up crossplay should give NHL 26 more life and enable more friends to enjoy the game together.
It’s In The Game
Crossplay will have a couple of other impacts on the game. First, for the Hockey Ultimate Team (HUT) players, the leaderboards will remain console-specific. However, the auction houses will now be combined between the Xbox and PlayStation player bases. That’s bound to have a big impact on how prices flow, but there will no longer be a difference between the consoles.
Crossplay isn’t the only addition to NHL 26. The team at EA has invested in Be A Pro, giving you more interactions and allowing you to start your career in juniors. Now, if college hockey can come along soon, I’ll be back to playing the mode a lot more. An underrated tweak to the game is in the menus, which were awfully bogged down and slow — especially in World of Chel. Gameplay is relying more on analytics, utilizing NHL Edge to make players play more like their real-life counterparts.
NHL 26’s standard edition releases September 12. While you wait to hit the ice, get all the intel on the best forwards, best defensemen, and the ultimate goaltenders to have between the pipes.
