NHL 22’s huge update today adds national teams — women included

polygon.com:

As hockey fans well know, the United States-Canada rivalry, in the Olympics anyway, has been a rather one-sided affair. Three wins, three draws for the Yanks; a dozen victories for Team Canada.

That’s about to change in NHL22. Maybe it’ll get better for the U.S. It could also get a whole lot worse — who knows? Sean Ramjagsingh, EA Sports’ general manager for hockey and longtime NHL series producer, promised to check the game’s telemetry to see which country was in the lead after a huge patch on Thursday brings national teams to the hockey sim for the first time ever.

“Since I’ve been on the franchise, the ask from our players has been, ‘Can we get the authentic [International Ice Hockey Federation] uniforms in the [video game]?’” Ramjagsingh said. To date, the NHL game included national teams, but these were rosters of players developed from current NHL pros for whom EA Sports had a group license to use their likeness. And their sweaters were completely fictional, although the designers had fun making them up.

Getting the real-life national team uniforms would require some kind of agreement with the IIHF, the sport’s worldwide sanctioning body. Ramjagsingh said EA Vancouver figured that if it were going to open the ball on an IIHF license, it may as well go the whole way — giving the studio access to the World Championship tournament branding and complete lineups featuring non-NHL players.

With that in hand, the next step was even more apparent, and necessary, Ramjagsingh said.

“Like, what could a full, wholesale integration actually look like?” Ramjagsingh said. “We talked about bringing the women’s teams into the game for the first time, we talked about the World Juniors Championships as well, which we launched for