RIZ: If you've ever followed a hockey team and thought the manager or the coach should have done things differently, NHL EHM 2005 will put you in their shoes and give you the chance to really test your abilities as a GM of a hockey team. And even if you're new to the sport of hockey but like other sports management games or strategy games, NHL EHM will give a good chance to learn about the fantastic sport of hockey while recreating a whole hockey universe for you to roam in, from the big leagues such as the NHL all the way to the semi-professional leagues in Europe and the Canadian major junior leagues.

GamersInfo: NHL EHM 2005 is the second installment of this new franchise of games. For someone who has played the previous version, what makes them need to grab it this year?

RIZ: I'd like to think the first version as a basis that we established by taking a proven sports management engine previously used by Sports Interactive in their other management games and converting it to our sport and our vision. This second installment is where we really got to have fun with the development and got to focus on adding content that would make the game world more alive and more interesting as well as reacting to the vast amounts of fan feedback we got, enhancing the game in areas that were found somewhat lacking and further developing some areas with the ideas from the community. There are a lot of good new features such as training camps and team reports as well as some completely revamped features such as the scouting system. Plus with the game already established we have been able to expand the gaming experience with some new exciting leagues.

GamersInfo: One of the interesting things about the history of this game is your story, the dream scenario of anyone who wants to break into games. Can you tell us a bit about how you came to work for Sports Interactive?

RIZ: Well...long story cut short. I was a huge hockey fan back in Finland as a kid and I never found a hockey management game that would have given me the proper chance to manage my favourite team (the New York Rangers) from season to season with all the drafting of players, older players retiring and young players developing. So I set out to develop my own game and after a few attempts I stumbled onto a soccer management game called "Championship Manager 2" by Sports Interactive. We played the game with our friends and loved it, and thought this is what we'd want to see but just change the sport to hockey. So my own game project started drawing ideas and inspiration from the SI creations and eventually when we launched the freeware Eastside Hockey Manager on the web, I got in touch with Marc Vaughan at SI. After developing the freeware for some time on the side of my university studies, I wanted to write a new better version of the game but the looming prospect of entering the working world seemed to minimize the time I had available for such a hobby….cue Marc Vaughan and SI…and I found myself with the option of moving over to London to work on a new version of EHM, with an actual dev team for the game plus all the tools and experience SI had on sports management games at my disposal. So basically it was like playing hockey on amateur level just for the love of the game and then being offered a professional contract with a big team.

GamersInfo: How has the NHL labour dispute influenced the development of this year's title?

RIZ: It hasn't had that much affect on actual development, other than the constant uncertainty on the possible need to code in new rules regarding the CBA. It has also made the research a bit trickier as players have moved all over the place as a result of all this and we've had to try and keep track of it all for research purposes. But since we can only code in last known rules that have been agreed on, we haven't had to focus much on implementing any new versions of the rules.

GamersInfo: Conversely, are you at all concerned that the lack of an NHL season will be detrimental to sales?

Duffy : Personally no. Eastside is as Riz said all about putting yourself in the shoes of the head coach so I think a lot of Hockey fans are going to be pretty frustrated right now and want their fix. Our game is the idea platform to release this frustration. It's the only way to simulate the season!

RIZ: I don't think the hardcore hockey fans have gone into hiding at all and our game might be targeting more of that group than the casual NHL fan who might have lost interest in the sport altogether because of the lack of action this season. The hardcore fans are still following hockey in different ways even though they cannot get their NHL fix this season. And since we have a wide variety of leagues covered in NHL EHM, they should feel right at home with the chance of not just controlling their NHL favorites but maybe also the team they adopted this season to fill the void.

GamersInfo: Traditionally, you base the starting rosters off a snapshot of how they were at the time of the NHL Trade Deadline. With no NHL, and many players under contract to both an NHL and a European club, or without contract at all, what will the opening day rosters look like this year?

RIZ: As I mentioned earlier, tracking down all player movement this season was a bit more difficult than normally. However, we have tried to keep to certain guidelines, keeping in mind the restrictions set by licensing, on where to place players in different situations and hopefully our chosen path will be one that gamers on both sides of the Atlantic can appreciate. And since the chances of some people not liking the starting rosters in the game because of the real life situation are higher than normal, we are hoping that the community will help in this area. There are already a couple of 3rd party editors for the game being developed and the most creative community members have already planned to do unofficial roster updates to create alternative starting rosters where needed.

GamersInfo: Last year, a number of fans were disappointed at the lack of real teams in the Russian and Finish leagues, as well as the complete absence of teams and players in the Swiss league, German league, minor-pro North American leagues and US College. What steps did you take to ensure a more complete representation of the global hockey climate this season?

RIZ: This year, we've seen some great work done by both Marc Duffy at SI as well as our good friends Andrew and Nivine at Sega to try and ensure more licenses for this version of the game than last year. They have all done some excellent work on the licensing issues and we are hoping to announce the full list of leagues soon and hopefully it will bring a few smiles for the fans of the game.

As for the college players, I'll have to note that licensing player names in this case just cannot be done. It's completely out of our and Sega's hands, because of the college eligibility issues with amateur athletes at these teams.

Duffy : Whilst we haven't made our licenses announcement yet, it would be fair to say that the situation is vastly improved over the first version. There are some limitations as Riz pointed out but it's better allround!

GamersInfo: For you as a developer, what new single aspect of the game has entertained you most?

RIZ: For this version one of my favorite features has to be the new revamped scouting system. Also the new tactical view for the play-by-play has given us a lot of memorable moments.

GamersInfo: With three titles in development (NHL EHM, Football Manager, and Out of the Park Baseball) at a developer who has traditionally only been at work on one, how has this shaped the development of NHL EHM, and how have you guys influenced the other titles?

RIZ: With multiple dev teams working in the same building, it is natural for ideas to find their way into the other projects and we've already seen a lot of exchange of ideas and features between the three games. It is really nice to see the games feed off each other when a new feature from one game gets picked up to another and maybe developed further, while another new feature goes the other way as well.

Duffy : On a day to day level, all the teams go about their business independently. What we have seen more recently is lots of friendly SI codesharing and that is definitely a good thing. We make no secret of our desire to grow Sports Interactive organically and this is certainly a good way of achieving that.

GamersInfo: Sports Interactive went to great lengths in the first edition to ensure that non-hockey fans would be able to play. This met with mixed reaction, as some hockey fans felt it was dumbed down, and some non-hockey fans still felt it was too foreign. Obviously, you cannot please everyone, but what have you done this year to address these issues?

RIZ: [I'm kind of guessing here on what part felt dumbed down, but here we go anyways, lol] Feature-wise and detail wise, the game certainly isn't dumbing down at all. What we did last year was trying to add some extra features (such as Ask Head Coach for Roster and Lines) and layer the most complicated things like tactics so that novice players could start of with the easiest layer and the more detailed layers would still be there for the more advanced users and for those novices when they learn more about the game. But I guess this feeling could have also come from the fact that some of the text in the game was more euro-oriented in styling and for that, we also have a remedy this time around. While we are trying to balance the in-game text to be as hockey specific as possible, the terms used in Europe and especially in then UK English might differ somewhat to the terms used in North America. So this year we will be including an "North American English" as one of the languages so people on both sides of the Atlantic can use which ever feels more at home.

GamersInfo: One area, compared to Football Manager, which was a bit lacking last year, was player interactions with the media. How has this evolved?

RIZ: The interaction with media has not been expanded with any actual new features for this version. These features are quite text-heavy and with our small development team we don't have the same kind of resources as FM does. But what we have done this year is tune the media involvement so that even lower league teams have more interaction with the media (albeit they might be smaller local media) whereas last year it was mainly the big name players and teams that enjoyed a high level of media interaction. Also, there are a number of new media stories such as season previews going around in the game news that are not interactive but all add to the immersion to the hockey universe.

GamersInfo: International Management was also a bit cumbersome last year. For those that love taking countries, especially obscure ones, to International glory, what will be in there for them this year?

RIZ: We've added in a host of smaller national team tournaments, so pretty much all the reasonable hockey nations have something on their yearly schedule other than just the world championships. Also the Olympic qualifications have been added in, which adds a whole new possible path to glory for the lower level national teams. And this year we have also separated the men's team and the U20 teams so you can start as a GM/coach of a junior national team and then move on to one of the men's teams later on. There are a couple of new tournaments for U20 teams as well.

GamersInfo: Players love to edit these games. How customizable will this year's edition be?

RIZ: We've tried to keep the community in mind when coding some new areas of the game this year, most importantly the new interface. The new face of NHL EHM is a lot more "skinnable" than last year and hopefully it will spark a whole bunch of new skins from the community. Even though our codebase does not allow the XML based skins like FM where you can even move items around, we've made our interface appearance fully interchangeable with custom skins and color schemes. Like last year, users can put in their own team logos, league logos, player pictures and rink graphics. New customizable things this year include context images for news items, rink boards and goal horns. As for actual editors for the game, there are no plans for an official editor since we haven't got the time or the resources for that right now, but there are a bunch of community members who are already working on editors for the new game, so there will be one out there around the time of release hopefully.

GamersInfo: What steps did you take to ensure that the same things do not occur repeatedly? For example, will Sidney Crosby go on to be the next Wayne Gretzky every time someone loads up a season?

RIZ: There are so many things in the game that have a random factor to the chain of events in the game universe, that it is hard to really say anything 100% guaranteed that would happen every single time. Sure enough, some things are more predictable and more likely to happen from one game to another, and you can be fairly sure that Crosby should have a good long NHL career in any game you start. But still, we have seen a few instances where someone like Crosby has not turned out to be a true superstar and instead has had a mediocre career at best. Players might get injured at the wrong time, end up victims of the numbers game and lose out on a few years of essential development which might turn their career path to whole new tracks.

GamersInfo: Compared to last year's title, how demanding will this years game be on system resources. Will playing it involve more or less "downtime" as you wait for the game to advance?

RIZ: We've tried to improve the optimization of the code this year as we've had time to focus on tuning things rather than writing the all basic features for the game like last year. While the database has grown substantially and the recommended specs might have gone up a little, we have still managed to squeeze in a few tweaks to make the game run faster. One of the good things about having three dev teams working on three different games at SI is that when someone comes up with a good way to optimize some code, it can usually be easily ported over to the other projects as well.

GamersInfo: Will there be any opportunity for the average fan to help in the development and test the game?

RIZ: Yes. Like last year, we are planning on an open beta demo which will allow any hockey fan to test the development version of the game and give us feedback for the final tuning of the game before release.

GamersInfo: When can we expect to see NHL EHM 2005 on shelves? Last year its release in North America was much later than Europe, what are the plans this year?

RIZ: We are hoping for a simultaneous launch this year. So hopefully it'll be on the shelves both sides of the Atlantic around the same time.