Who Are These Men?

Electronic Arts puts out a new EA Sports NHL game every year. The franchise is certainly no NBA2K or Madden NFL, so it often comes and goes with little fanfare for those outside of video game–playing hockey devotees. NHL 27 is currently in early access, with a full release on September 11– and this year, a lot of people are talking about it. But it's not because the game is exceptionally good. It's because a lot of the faces are very, very bad.

I haven't played NHL 27 just yet, but I do get the sense that some of the screenshots people are sharing are bad angles or catching a character in a weird moment or face, because the models are moving in-game. And it's possible some won't look as bad when they're wearing helmets and speeding around on skates. But still, some of these are egregiously bad.

Unfortunately for me, a Boston Bruins fan, the Bruins have been done especially dirty by Electronic Arts' face-scanning technology. Take Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy. His mouth and jaw got brutally destroyed this past season after taking a puck straight to the face, but it doesn't look like this!

Fellow defenseman Hampus Lindholm looks like he's a made of melting clay.

I don't think they even tried with defenseman Jordan Harris.

I don't want to talk about what Electronic Arts did to star player David Pastrnak.

It made forward (and fellow writer) Mikey Eyssimont look like he's 10.

Most egregious of all is defenseman Mason Lohrei, who Electronic Arts made look… like this…

Of course, it's not only the Bruins. A ton of players look awful, scary, or like totally different humans. I had fun watching this video and trying to guess who each player is. I haven't been playing NHL video games for very long, but I can't ever remember the face scans looking this bad.

For fuck's sake, this is Cale Makar? No! It's offensive.

These are the Colorado Avalanche goalies? No!! Who are these men?

Most of these players likely did get their faces scanned by Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2024 that artificial intelligence helped the EA College Football 25 team recreate 11,000 player likenesses.

"Creating 150 unique stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses couldn’t be done without EA’s deep history of being a technology leader and by our incredibly passionate and talented teams harnessing the power of AI and machine learning to deliver truly amazing entertainment," Wilson said of EA College Football 25 in an earnings call in 2024, as reported by Kotaku. Here's his full remarks:

For those that don’t track our industry or track our sports games in particular, we typically, in any given year, will develop about 500 to 1,000 star heads inside of one of our game. And over the course of a platform generation, through the hand tooling of that, we ultimately fill out the full roster of star heads in our games. And of course, there were ebbs and flows in that.

But as we were launching College on a new generation of platforms to a new generation of fans with the world’s largest single-sport NIL deal, where image was a really important part of the process, getting 11,000 star heads into the game was a top priority for us. The reality is our teams are incredible and built workflows to facilitate that, but they were amplified and accelerated through AI and machine learning.

And we were able to take in a whole plethora of photo imagery across 11,000 players and build workflows out where AI and machine learning would generate heads and our very talented artists would be able to come in and touch up and enhance those heads versus having to go through the full head development programs. In the absence of AI we simply would not have been able to deliver College Football at the level we did, even though we’ve given the team many, many years in development.

I've reached out to EA Sports to ask about the use of AI in creating NHL 27's player faces, but didn't hear back in time for publication.

Faces aren't the only use of AI in the game, according to NHL commentator John Buccigross, who is featured in the game. Buccigross told the Chirping Zebras podcast that "[EA is] using some AI stuff now."

"They were playing me back some of my AI voice and it's like, 'Score! And the crowd gets out of their chairs!," he said. "And I was like, 'No [...], we call them seats."

So far, I haven't seen any NHL players commenting on their face scans. But I'm sure it'll show up in some content this season, given how widely the disaster has spread.