Eurogamer runs down the three that have been announced. And has a brief article on the “secret” NFS game, which sounds more like NFS games of the past.
The one I’m most interested in is Need For Speed: Shift:
Sounds a lot like a cross between GRID and Gran Turismo. Could be cool.
One of the games is being made for the Wii and DS, and another is an online-only game to launch in Asia this summer for the PC. I can’t read that and not think of NFS: Motor City Online, which I played briefly.
I knew EA wouldn’t dump a very profitable brand in Need for Speed. It’s just too bad that all those Black Box folks lost their jobs.
I’m really happy with the direction this indicates for the genre. We’re still seeing the simulation/arcade split, but we’re also seeing a lot of intermingling between the lines. And we’re seeing that internal cockpit views are making it to both kinds of games. And we’re also seeing visible damage on cars be part of both simulation and arcade racing games. This gives me hope that games like Gran Turismo won’t hold out forever. They’ll have to adapt to the times and add things like better AI and damage modeling.
Now, hopefully, the new Need For Speed games will actually be better games this time. That’s important too, otherwise these trends are meaningless.
So much for the rumor that EA was taking a break from this franchise.
It’ll be interesting to see what they do at the ‘career’ level for Shift. Many of the sim-leaning games have the problem/feature (depending on your point of view) of being completely open, goal-less, progression-less sandboxes, which doesn’t really mesh with NFS’s history.
…more on mirroring the driver experience, that athleticism of being in a wickedly-intense race, and what it really feels like to be behind the wheel.
I know they’re talking about in-cockpit g-forces (I hope) but when I read this I instantly thought of some lame “career mode” where you have to make your character exercise and stuff. Certainly willing to give the game a shot though.
Well if NfS:Shift is terrible it will only take the removal of one letter to make fun of it.
That’s a good point. It hasn’t been released yet, but I just saw a review of Race Pro where they praised the physics and the driving, but complain about a lack of anything interesting to do as part of a career mode or something like that.
Wonderful.
Because EAs recent inability to make a decent Need for Speed title proves that they can make 4 good ones simultaneously?
Diego
In my estimation Porsche Unleashed was the best in the series, although I did have some fun with Most Wanted. 'Course, I’m crazy about Porsches.
Just fuse Most Wanted 2 with Underground 3 and get it the fuck over with. I don’t want any new attempts at revolutionizing the open world driving gameplay. I don’t want some shitty hackneyed story that makes no fucking sense played by actors that have never been in anything other than one episode of a series or a sidebar in a fashion magazine.
It’s there already, it’s made, just fucking do it again with better graphics and more ways to put vinyls on my sweet ass ride, maybe introduce car damage physics and do away with “bank-the-corner” gameplay elements, and sell a bajillion fucking copies.
I loved Porsche Unleashed, but I hated that you couldn’t skip past certain challenges. I had no idea how to start a porsche from rest, drive a few yards and do a 360 degree turn, then go on to do a 180 degree turn, come back to the same spot where I did the last 360 degree turn and do another one there. It was the hardest challenge of this kind I’ve ever had to do in one of these games. Harder than getting gold medals in Gran Turismo License tests, I thought. Especially because the game never taught you how to do it.
Every once in a while I’d get lucky and do the first 360, and then do the 180, but would never be able to do the second 360. Ridiculous.
I managed to get past that one a while ago, by pure luck most likely (I think doing a Scandinavian flick helped get the back end loose sooner and made it more likely to carry it through the full 360; the usual problem was that you’d run out of momentum and stop before doing the full turn), but then it started crashing on me in both the challenges and evolution mode races. Randomly, but often enough that it was difficult to complete a single event. :( It’s one of the games that doesn’t seem to get along with Vista.
From what I understand, it didn’t work too well with XP either, at least on certain tracks. This was one game that definitely merited a wheel/pedal combo, unlike Most Wanted (played with a joystick).
Memories. Porsche Unleashed was the best one.