Welcome to the first installment of our In-Depth Series centered around the World of Chel. The goal of this series is to give you a full look at everything new in each major area of NHL® 22 through the voice of our development team. We thought this would be a great way to best explain and showcase the big and small changes we’ve made across the game. Your feedback has been instrumental in our thinking around NHL 22 so please continue to share your thoughts as we are always listening and open to your point of view.

Feel free to check out the YouTube video breaking down everything new in the World of Chel below.

You can expect more content for the following areas in video and blog form:

First Full Gameplay of NHL 22 (September 28th)
Be A Pro & Franchise Mode (October 4th)
Hockey Ultimate Team (October 6th)

Each area will be livestreamed on our official Twitch and YouTube channel so make sure you follow us there as well! But if you prefer reading through the changes you can always come back here on those dates to learn everything in written form! 

Without further ado, let's talk about the World of Chel!

First and foremost we completely revamped the overall look and feel of the World of Chel. Our goal was to create a festive and dynamic atmosphere based on everything that happens within the World of Chel? With each season, you'll be able to play NHL 22 on an immerse background which places you in festive outdoor environments!

For our EA Sports™ Hockey League players, your club arena will be your homebase, visible in the World of Chel UI whenever you play. We heard feedback that the previous UI wasn’t very immersive so whether you like skating out on the ODR in ones or threes or getting five of your friends and competing at the highest level in the EASHL, your favorite way to play will be recognized.

Now this new UI isn’t just pretty, it’s much more user friendly too. The World of Chel is a pretty large mode, there’s Ones, Threes, Drop-In, Pro-AM, as well as 3v3 and 6v6 club games. A lot of you felt there was way too much button clicking to get to all these modes. So we’re introducing what we call non-linear UI. It’s exactly what it sounds like; now, you’ll no longer have to load through multiple screens to get to your destination because each area is just a tap away once you’re in the World of Chel Hub. You can now customize your loadout, check your stats, open rewards and more, all without having to go through a mandatory flow like before. This will make mode navigation much faster than ever before.

We also wanted to make it easier to compete with your friends. That all starts with the all-new social widget. This allows you to invite your friends into a party and from there you can enter any mode seamlessly with your group of friends.

The days of multiple dressing rooms and having the entire team back out to get into any given mode is over! Now, with the click of a button, the party leader can change the mode and bring the entire group with them to the desired destination. While in a party or in the dressing room, the party leader and other group members can navigate to any area of the mode while remaining in the dressing room.

So if you’re waiting on that one person who always shows up late now you can remain grouped up and edit your loadout, check stats, open rewards and much more. This was an important quality of life feature for us to introduce and we hope it helps you spend less time navigating menus and more time scoring goals on the ice!

Now moving to the big new addition this year, we’ve heard you loud and clear you wanted more customization and freedom when creating your skater. We’re happy to say we think we delivered on something you’re going to love which is reimagined custom loadouts.

The 12 classes available remain the same but the choices you make inside of them are drastically different, and that all starts with your zone ability.

Each class has five powerful X-Factor Zone Abilities available to them which will be a major pillar in your decision making right off the bat. Maybe you’ve always played as a sniper but there’s a zone ability available in the Grinder class that better suits your playstyle - this is just one example of a situation you may run into when building your first loadout.

From there, the next step is superstar abilities; these are abilities that span across all classes. Want to be a defensive defensemen with incredible shooting? You can do that. How about a playmaker who can lay the body? You can do that! The one thing you’ll have to keep in mind with superstar abilities that you won’t have with zone abilities, is that they require certain attribute thresholds you’ll need to hit.

How will you hit those thresholds you ask? Well, do we have something to tell you! You’ll now have the full ability to edit any attribute plus or minus 5 points. Each attribute has a certain cost associated with it, so body checking costs more to upgrade compared to something like offensive awareness. You will be able to take away points from any attribute within the same category to upgrade a different one. This will give you full control of how you play out on the ice!

Like a certain attribute more than others and looking for a way to upgrade it even further? We also have boosts which are attribute bonuses with no downside! They’re small single attribute upgrades that range from +2 to +4. But like superstar abilities, they have specific attribute thresholds you must hit to apply them. Height and weight will also continue to have effects on specific attributes.

We will also be introducing new superstar abilities and boosts each season to potentially shift the meta and how you build your player from season to season.

All of this combined creates what we believe is the most extensive and creative loadout system yet and we hope you find that we delivered on your biggest request within the World of Chel.

Additional updates:

We’ve reduced the length of the Club Finals from 2 weeks to 9 days.

The ice in the Club Finals environment is now white instead of blue.

Two new matchmaking settings have been added. For public matches, you can now control the exact difference in your opponent's club size resulting in more control over the experience.

For private matches and specifically our friends who host Esports events, we’ve added a matchmaking setting to turn off the ability for players to skip replays. This will hopefully aid those broadcasts as we know players have a habit of skipping through replays even during these important events!