Temperature Check: NBA 2K26, EA FC 26, and NHL 26 Drop Soon and Are on Wildly Different Paths

NBA 2K26, NHL 26, and EA FC 26 will all be out before the end of September, with NBA 2K26 early access starting at the end of August as the next tipping point. I’m still playing lots of Madden and College Football, but I also wrote about 12,000 words on Madden last week between Wednesday and Friday’s newsletters, and College Football does not have a new update yet on the horizon (but real college football does return this weekend with a Kansas State vs. Iowa State game — in Dublin, which is where college football was born (don’t look that up, just trust me that’s definitely a real knowledge bomb I just dropped on you). With that in mind, I think I should give football a little breathing room today and look ahead to what’s over the horizon.

Beyond that, if you don’t know my history, NBA 2K is easily my most played sports franchise of all-time, and EA’s NHL franchise is the game I’ve played online the most in my life. Those two series mean a lot to me and so I’m very passionate about their directions. As for EA FC, well, that has sort of been the “other” game to me a lot of times in my life as it was mostly in my rotation when I played games in person with friends (I was totally PES-pilled as a child and grew up on the PS2-era Winning Eleven/PES games so that was the game I played against the CPU most of the time). My most played FIFA games are probably one or two of the World Cup versions because of how much I played them either in college or just in general with friends when they’d come over. Regardless, I still care about EA FC a lot, especially because Konami decided to crap the bed to such a degree in the last couple years.

Just a heads up that the OS Discord is continuing to grow, and I would love to have even more of you pop in. We rolled out a new “premium” badge this week for those who are paid supporters of this newsletter, and we’re going to be doing more stuff there for both “premium” members and every member of OS in general in the weeks and months ahead so please come and chat about any and all things video games and sports with the community. If you’re new to Discord, feel free to reach out to me on there as well if you ever have any questions.

We’re also continuing to run the 30-day FREE trial here for anyone who wants to test the waters and receive the full extra newsletter on Wednesdays. Upon joining the Discord, DM either Rob S (thekernelpop) or ChaseB (chucklesbiscotti), letting us know you’ve signed up for the premium newsletter. Either one of us will add you to the extra Supporters area on Discord, and we now have that aforementioned snazzy role and badge to give you on Discord, too.

So today’s newsletter is really going to be dedicated to giving you all a heads up on what’s going on with these games, what they’re hyping, what I’m watching for, and give my general temperature check on them as we near launch. My hope is it helps you to calibrate where your excitement level should be at for these games, or if you’ve taken a couple years off from a series, perhaps it helps you realize whether you should have it on your radar this year or not.

We’ll go in order of release date, so let’s start with NBA 2K26.

NBA 2K26

When it comes to an NBA 2K26 temperature check, I’m basically the dad who knows someone has touched my thermostat, and now I’m on high alert to find the culprit.

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