Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
Over the last few years, EA have been striving to re-ignite the culture that built their company. Genius minds creating brilliant virtual worlds to dive into and escape the monotony of their lives. EA started with two teens with a big vision – and today EA is a monolith with thousands of employees around the world.
A lot of their profits are derived from yearly updated games. In Europe FIFA trounces anything each year, while in the US Madden trounces anything else. Years ago, racing games were the best example of how to make flashy graphical leaps in console generations, and Need for Speed was top of the pile. It went into the yearly rotations EA did before getting old, tired and worn out. Especially when faced with Criterion’s Burnout series which was infinitely more fun.
A reboot a few years ago cashed in on the generation of hoodlum youths who wanted to imagine their Nissan Micra had neon and they were racing across railroad crossings in slow motion against Vin Diesel. Then the series, as it tried to re-create the same game over and over again rather then reboot the series again and again became tired, old and again trounced by Burnout.
After a break, EA returned with a proper developer who developed Need for Speed into an actual racing game. A game I didn’t like.
It’s 2010, and again the game needs a reboot. Using real developers showed the potential of the series. Not because the series can be good – with the right talent any old crap can be made good. No, what ‘Shift’ did was show EA that there is a genuine lust for a good version of the series. Handing it over to the developers who showed NFS to be crap was a great mood. Criterion created Burnout and killed NFS. Now they’re working on NFS, because of course EA bought the venerable developers.
So how do you work on NFS after you built Burnout Paradise? Well, you do the same – again. One of the failings of Paradise was that, while the racing was fun and the game itself was enjoyable, Paradise city was awful and finding races was a nightmare to do because simply driving around the city was not rewarding or enjoyable. Also the routes of races were long, winding, laborious and not exactly ‘racing game’ ish. It provided very little replay-ability outside of getting new cars, and later on bikes.
So, Criterion are masters of creating a racing title with fun, intriguing racing modes and great cars with excellent arcade-like handling. But the open world was where their last title fell down. So what could they have done, especially now that they’re part of the behemoth EA? Contact someone within EA who might know something about big, open world planning that people love, know and importantly for a racing game, can learn. You need to know when to clip the apex, when to hit the brakes hard or when to hammer down the throttle. Paradise never afforded you that knowledge because it was too big, too open and racing was too sporadic.
Shooter games are like this with open worlds. You need to know where you are. Where can you hide? Where is the enemy hiding? And how can you exploit all of these variables to win by brute force, or with tactics? One game series that does this so perfectly it makes other developers sick is Battlefield. For years level design has been a huge strong point of DICE in Sweden’s. And why bother trying to replicate it when you’re all part of the same global corporate family? Criterion have called their colleagues at DICE in to help with the open world bit of their game.
Burnout Paradise was big and often silly for a racing game. Need for Speed, however, will be four times that size. The 200 men at DICE know a thing or two about this kind of scale, and so they’re going to help the Burnout developers work things out.
“It’s been a great collaboration actually. Early on we set style guides for what we wanted to create out of this game, to offer players the ability to see a wide variety of types of environments from the deserts to the mountains to the forest to the coastal routes and so forth,” art director Henry LaBounta (formerly of George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic company) told eurogamer.
Drivability is key here. Criterion know how to make physics, design and style churn out a beautifully fun but not ludicrous driving style that gives the game finesse but without sacrificing ease of entry for new players. DICE can build a world, and so the mission for DICE was to create a world that was easily drivable and exciting in a race scenario.
Need for Speed was introduced to the world as a game where mad-hatter boy racers could pit themselves against each other, and then get chased by the cops. Through rebranding that got lost somewhere, and Criterion have gone back to the series’ beginnings to get things back on track, as it were. So not only does the game world need to be drivable, it needs to play to two types of scenario – basic racing, and evading.
The game will have a more official launch at gamescon next week, but with these two working on the title it’s bound to be brilliant. Not just as a released product, but the after-sales pitch from Criterion is always worth buying into. This makes 2010 a rather interesting year for racing fans, as for the last few years it’s been weak on that front. No F1 game is being addressed in September, while the lack of next-gen Gran Turismo (ignoring Prologue) will end at Christmas. There’ll be plenty of competition on that front, but it does seem that each game is a compliment to each other, rather then a detraction. With the online mode bound to be epic with DICE and Criterion at the helm, this could be something special for those looking for online racing action.
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