I wouldn’t know how to fix the series so that it’d sell. Same as burnout. The arcade open world racing game with a sterile storyline is dominated by Forza Horizon. Cop chases don’t seem to spark excitement like before the PS3 era. The last couple of NFS games, I played abit and even though they’re about street racing, didn’t feel very grungy, youthful angst and peacocking, like I’d expect street racing to be
Street racing doesn’t seem to spark excitement like the pre-PS3 era. I’m thinking every game after NFS Carbon hasn’t been able to capture any sense of mystique of street racing and that just may be that street racing isn’t culturally significant anymore. Fast and the Furious isn’t about street racing anymore
With Forza Motorsport seemingly on the way out, there’s room for a multiplatform Gran Turismo competitor. Something that’s gamepad centric rather than wheel. Seems just as hard to resonate with gamers as these other racing games though
The only way to possibly save the series is for EA to sell it off to another company but I highly doubt that they would do that. They will just let it sit till the next console releases and make a half assed game full of micro transactions and then blame the fans when it doesn’t sell good.
I am biased, but an Underground 3 (with no MTX) with a well written storyline but with lots additional open world gameplay would be a return to form for NFS.
I tried to play through Unbound and I couldn’t deal with the writing. It was “hello fellow kids” to me which I feel has been a worsening problem with video game writing since Borderlands 2. Even worse with it feels to me like video game writing really tried to moralize moral grey’s or bad behavior or make characters not just people that want to go fast, make money, feel cool, getting in trouble with the law for going an incredibly dangerous for anyone in your vicinity speed disobeying traffic signals, probably associated with organized crime and just trying to survive but in over their head because their only skills really are just cars, …, they’re actually people just trying to express themselves and find community of deep down kind and good people
Also I felt like I was playing rich/sheltered kids ideas of street racing and people that live in the night. Way too idealistic. Should be way more cutthroat, emotional burnouts just trying to go fast as their happy/thrill place. The sheltered/rich kids fantasy comes to mind when games try to make living among graffiti and gangs as like living among street art and community health organizations. It’s the digital nomad view of local (underground) cultures and the digital nomad view of the old guy in the club as a really cool dude rather than probably a bit of a creep and probably very immature and irresponsible
I think the saddest part was observing a clear wind down of Sims 4 then last second “lol JK we’re not releasing another sims game” and the entire player base seemed to release a collective sigh that some of the structural problems that have plugged TS4 are here to stay
Project Rene or whatever the hell Sims 5 was supposed to be was suffering from significant takeoff, vision, conceptual and design issues.
Every day, five or six designers would argue about if a feature was inclusive enough, a gesture was offensive, a Simlish term or phrase was close enough to a real life slur.
What they learned was that reality is actually quite cruel and biased and creating their perfect garden hedge-maze of a game removed the essence and life out of it. Sims 5 did not reflect the reality that players actually experienced or had day-to-day, and it was entirely the designer’s fault.
They had created the very thing they despised, a cookie-cutter digital suburbian barbie doll house. With multiplayer, ripe for trolling.
I think undercover was the last true NFS. Fast cars. High speed feeling. Tuning. Cops. Over the top grippy handling at times.
Then it turned into cow dung with occasional decent ones but they never got the sense of speed or the fun worlds right for me again.
I genuinely think we need a “Stop Killing Games” like movement to resurrect old games, but with a more public-domain approach.
As in remaking games like NFS, Command & Conquer, Freedom Fighter or Earth-2150 but make the assets public domain so that others can pick up & add things to the setting
I thought the same until I played Heat a couple of years ago. Heat is solid and definitely reminds you of the golden age of NFS with Underground and Most Wanted.
Love the game, but hate the soundtrack with passion. Its full of mumble rap, auto-tune and weird electronic shit, which was popuilar at time. (apologies if someone likes it). I just couldt listen to it for more than 10 min.
Hard disagree. I’m still in my starter car in Heat because the physics are 110% garbage. A stock 240 should not be able to pull off drifts like it has 800+ more hp than it has, or the fact that it forces a drift when you merely want to take a standard corner. In street tires. In a standard circuit/sprint race. Or how it’s tied to online servers, thus when the servers freak out, your single player event kicks you off. Or how there are objects that retain their lowest LOD no matter how close you are, or how long you wait. That’s just off the top of my head, it’s been a while.
I got the ‘premium’ or whatever version for $1.25 on steam a couple years ago. I played the 10 hour demo before that, reviewing it blind for a friend and then revisiting it 6 months later, each for a few hours. ‘surely, it’s been a couple years, they must have fixed it some’. Nope, not even a bit. I want my $1.25 back.
Shit, I think Unbound is a decent upgrade from Heat. And I don’t particularly like Unbound, so that’s kind of both a complement and an insult at once. The bar was so low it was touching the floor, it could have only gotten worse with DRM that opens a backdoor to my machine or something. I spent $10 for Unbound, and I don’t want my $10 back for that installment (I mean I’ll take it if they are offering but), so… Heat is baaaaad. Unbound is meh, but meh beats the hell out of baaaaad.
I agree. This style of handling is common in newer NFS games and probably what I miss the most from the older games. I particularly dislike the grip-vs-drift upgrades, especially since drift is mostly “press X to drift”.
That being said, I did find some cars fun to drive in once they’re tuned a little, and I liked that different cars could have significantly different feel, which unfortunately can’t be said about all NFS games, especially the newer ones.
An open world MMO racing game with a map that has roadworks that change the layout, on a weekly basis. Cops that do crackdowns on certain makes of cars, Carjackers trying to steal your ride, an ever evolving racing scene, weather events… give me a career mode where pushing my luck and teasing the cops too much costs me real progress. New songs in the radio every month, new events, new storylines and new arcs.
E.A could absolutely put it together and it could be great. But they would microtransaction the hell out of it, P2W, monetise the arse out of it and make it terrible. Because EA
You mean like NFS World? I was a closed beta tester. While it was a P2W system (buy powerups, etc) it wasn’t ruined by it, and if you could beat a nfs game you can do just fine in World.
I only played for the first year or so - and haven’t played the 3rd party rebirths - but World had potential. And EA killed it, like the dumbasses they are.
That’s fine; I lost interest in the series after Underground. NFS was ruined for me anyway when I learned what Rubberband AI was. (Which was also around the same time I started driving real cars, and thus began realizing just how terrible the physics are in all but the most hardcore sim racers.)
I only played them at friends. Was the races started from a menu instead of driving around in the city to find races? Or was it the car feeling and handling that was different?
Mostly the former. You got a better variety of courses rather than Paradise reusing a lot of the same pieces of something that distinctly looked like only one city, and a menu was just a quicker way to get in and out of the part of the game you wanted to play.
Ok, personally I liked going around in the city but I understand why you didn’t enjoy Paradise as much as Takedown and Revenge. Too bad that they changed the concept of the series.
Didn’t EA change Need for speed to open-world some years earlier with Underground 2? They could have kept one of the series as races started from a menu.
I mean, I would take a Burnout instead. I just wonder if it’d make sense to try that at this point with a completely different market and group of people. I guess we can see if they figure out that Skate reboot and go from there.
I think the Criterion Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted games are underrated. I get why, they’re very Burnout-y for NFS fans but don’t play just like Burnout, but man, are they sticky and precise and smooth.
The worst part of that most wanted is that its called most wanted. It’s a great game but it’s name causes it to create comparisons to the og most wanted which for most, myself included, have big nostalgia for
Yeah, I skipped over the original and when I went back to it I genuinely couldn’t see what the fuss is about.
My biggest gripe with the remake ended up being that it felt a bit weird after coming from playing a bunch of Hot Pursuit, but I ended up playing an absolute ton of MW once I got used to the way it drives.
I couldn’t tell you why they chose to reuse titles for those two games, though.
Both MW and Paradise have very quirky handling built for their open worlds, but I honestly really love both.
Paradise is such a perfect little gem of a small open world that is entirely consistent and has super clear design rules, sometimes to a fault. MW is a super smooth, compulsive expansion on that. They both hold up amazingly well today, even visually.
I just don’t want to be navigating while going 200mph. The big goofy arrow barriers are part of the Burnout experience, and Paradise not having them to keep me on track kills it for me.
Also, I embrace Takedowns, but reject Traffic Checking. This is the way. It’s all about the tiny pinpricks of light in the distance rapidly becoming metal walls of death. If you’re not in the oncoming lane, that’s not Burnout
Yeah, Paradise is built on you learning the map. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how hard doing that is fresh because man, is that map seared into my brain forever now.
Traffic checking is weird because I want to dislike it on principle coming from 3, but… yeah, I kinda really like the games that include it, too. Like, reluctantly. I see how it breaks something at the core of the Burnout idea, but also… it’s really satisfying and makes the game more pleasant to play, even if acknowledging that feels wrong.
I’m a huge (old) nfs fan, and I love HP '10 and MW '12. It’s no U2 but both are damn good games. I fired up MW not too long ago, just to cruise.
Burnout was the shit too. Mostly for Crash Mode. Paradise was cool with the open-world but them kneecapping crash for whatever the fuck they called ‘bounce your car endlessly down the street’ mode was fucking atrocious. EA selling the ‘ultimate box’ on the pc without the fucking island - and no way to get it - was bullshit, always been pissed of about that.
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I wouldn’t know how to fix the series so that it’d sell. Same as burnout. The arcade open world racing game with a sterile storyline is dominated by Forza Horizon. Cop chases don’t seem to spark excitement like before the PS3 era. The last couple of NFS games, I played abit and even though they’re about street racing, didn’t feel very grungy, youthful angst and peacocking, like I’d expect street racing to be
Street racing doesn’t seem to spark excitement like the pre-PS3 era. I’m thinking every game after NFS Carbon hasn’t been able to capture any sense of mystique of street racing and that just may be that street racing isn’t culturally significant anymore. Fast and the Furious isn’t about street racing anymore
With Forza Motorsport seemingly on the way out, there’s room for a multiplatform Gran Turismo competitor. Something that’s gamepad centric rather than wheel. Seems just as hard to resonate with gamers as these other racing games though
The only way to possibly save the series is for EA to sell it off to another company but I highly doubt that they would do that. They will just let it sit till the next console releases and make a half assed game full of micro transactions and then blame the fans when it doesn’t sell good.
Le fast and le furious
I am biased, but an Underground 3 (with no MTX) with a well written storyline but with lots additional open world gameplay would be a return to form for NFS.
I had some very good memories with Underground.
Unbound was basically Underground 3. Story wasn’t exceptional or anything, though.
I tried to play through Unbound and I couldn’t deal with the writing. It was “hello fellow kids” to me which I feel has been a worsening problem with video game writing since Borderlands 2. Even worse with it feels to me like video game writing really tried to moralize moral grey’s or bad behavior or make characters not just people that want to go fast, make money, feel cool, getting in trouble with the law for going an incredibly dangerous for anyone in your vicinity speed disobeying traffic signals, probably associated with organized crime and just trying to survive but in over their head because their only skills really are just cars, …, they’re actually people just trying to express themselves and find community of deep down kind and good people
Also I felt like I was playing rich/sheltered kids ideas of street racing and people that live in the night. Way too idealistic. Should be way more cutthroat, emotional burnouts just trying to go fast as their happy/thrill place. The sheltered/rich kids fantasy comes to mind when games try to make living among graffiti and gangs as like living among street art and community health organizations. It’s the digital nomad view of local (underground) cultures and the digital nomad view of the old guy in the club as a really cool dude rather than probably a bit of a creep and probably very immature and irresponsible
Oh I hated unbound. The music, voice acting etc was so pandering and gross. The animations were kind of neat though.
Gotta pump out more Sims DLC.
I think the saddest part was observing a clear wind down of Sims 4 then last second “lol JK we’re not releasing another sims game” and the entire player base seemed to release a collective sigh that some of the structural problems that have plugged TS4 are here to stay
Project Rene or whatever the hell Sims 5 was supposed to be was suffering from significant takeoff, vision, conceptual and design issues.
Every day, five or six designers would argue about if a feature was inclusive enough, a gesture was offensive, a Simlish term or phrase was close enough to a real life slur.
What they learned was that reality is actually quite cruel and biased and creating their perfect garden hedge-maze of a game removed the essence and life out of it. Sims 5 did not reflect the reality that players actually experienced or had day-to-day, and it was entirely the designer’s fault.
They had created the very thing they despised, a cookie-cutter digital suburbian barbie doll house. With multiplayer, ripe for trolling.
So yeah, I’m not surprised Sims 5 was cancelled.
Do you have a source for any of that rage bait so we can laugh at it?
It’s difficult to find, Project Rene is over two years old now, this is some early test demo footage:
https://youtu.be/IKn3mskT5yM
Project Rene was literally the biggest news in the Sims space a couple of years ago, it’s not hard to find info about it.
But you know what is hard to find? Anything supporting the wild story you spun to dunk on people who are trying to be decent to their fellow human
…What? Where in the world did you pull that from?
And the other projects will still end up being slop anyway
I think undercover was the last true NFS. Fast cars. High speed feeling. Tuning. Cops. Over the top grippy handling at times. Then it turned into cow dung with occasional decent ones but they never got the sense of speed or the fun worlds right for me again.
JDM: Japanese Drift Master is looking good right about now.
Oh, finally? It only took them a hundred years.
I genuinely think we need a “Stop Killing Games” like movement to resurrect old games, but with a more public-domain approach.
As in remaking games like NFS, Command & Conquer, Freedom Fighter or Earth-2150 but make the assets public domain so that others can pick up & add things to the setting
Trademarks should expire quicker I guess. That said, copyright in general is broken.
The last good NFS was Hot Pursuit and that was 15 years ago.
I thought the same until I played Heat a couple of years ago. Heat is solid and definitely reminds you of the golden age of NFS with Underground and Most Wanted.
Love the game, but hate the soundtrack with passion. Its full of mumble rap, auto-tune and weird electronic shit, which was popuilar at time. (apologies if someone likes it). I just couldt listen to it for more than 10 min.
The soundtrack is horrible. An yet, it feels like a masterpiece compared to Unbound’s soundtrack…
Wow, Im glad Unbound had such poor reviews I never bothered to buy it.
Hard disagree. I’m still in my starter car in Heat because the physics are 110% garbage. A stock 240 should not be able to pull off drifts like it has 800+ more hp than it has, or the fact that it forces a drift when you merely want to take a standard corner. In street tires. In a standard circuit/sprint race. Or how it’s tied to online servers, thus when the servers freak out, your single player event kicks you off. Or how there are objects that retain their lowest LOD no matter how close you are, or how long you wait. That’s just off the top of my head, it’s been a while.
I got the ‘premium’ or whatever version for $1.25 on steam a couple years ago. I played the 10 hour demo before that, reviewing it blind for a friend and then revisiting it 6 months later, each for a few hours. ‘surely, it’s been a couple years, they must have fixed it some’. Nope, not even a bit. I want my $1.25 back.
Shit, I think Unbound is a decent upgrade from Heat. And I don’t particularly like Unbound, so that’s kind of both a complement and an insult at once. The bar was so low it was touching the floor, it could have only gotten worse with DRM that opens a backdoor to my machine or something. I spent $10 for Unbound, and I don’t want my $10 back for that installment (I mean I’ll take it if they are offering but), so… Heat is baaaaad. Unbound is meh, but meh beats the hell out of baaaaad.
Heat is fun for like one session then all its problems and poor design are constantly in your face. It’s permanently on sale because it’s a shit game
I honestly found heats handling atrocious compared to underground, even the grippiest heat car only just barely approaches the feel.
I agree. This style of handling is common in newer NFS games and probably what I miss the most from the older games. I particularly dislike the grip-vs-drift upgrades, especially since drift is mostly “press X to drift”.
That being said, I did find some cars fun to drive in once they’re tuned a little, and I liked that different cars could have significantly different feel, which unfortunately can’t be said about all NFS games, especially the newer ones.
Agree, Heat was really fun to play together with some friends.
Fuck, my NFS : hot percent was 28 years ago.
It slapped tho.
I agree, except I feel shift 2 was a neat blip with cool features , for those who like circuit racing, which really isn’t what nfs is about though.
Shift 2 was actually pretty good, I forgot about that one.
I hate to advocate for live service but…
An open world MMO racing game with a map that has roadworks that change the layout, on a weekly basis. Cops that do crackdowns on certain makes of cars, Carjackers trying to steal your ride, an ever evolving racing scene, weather events… give me a career mode where pushing my luck and teasing the cops too much costs me real progress. New songs in the radio every month, new events, new storylines and new arcs.
E.A could absolutely put it together and it could be great. But they would microtransaction the hell out of it, P2W, monetise the arse out of it and make it terrible. Because EA
You mean like NFS World? I was a closed beta tester. While it was a P2W system (buy powerups, etc) it wasn’t ruined by it, and if you could beat a nfs game you can do just fine in World.
I only played for the first year or so - and haven’t played the 3rd party rebirths - but World had potential. And EA killed it, like the dumbasses they are.
E: word
why did that have have such a good sound space? my ears still tell me that game is magical and want us to go back.
Yes and give me realistic physics and don’t shove pointless and impossible “drifts” into everything!
I like the arcade physics, but at least keep it challenging and consistent.
I really liked Need for Speed World and discovered it 1 week before the severs were taken offline.
At least I still have Need for Speed Most Wanted III.
The community has resurrected NFS world though.
That’s fine; I lost interest in the series after Underground. NFS was ruined for me anyway when I learned what Rubberband AI was. (Which was also around the same time I started driving real cars, and thus began realizing just how terrible the physics are in all but the most hardcore sim racers.)
Then there’s BeamNG.drive
And the multiplayer mod!
Not a hardcore gamer but where do you think the dirt series fall on the realistic physics spectrum
Don’t worry, we are in the age of the Remastered. The coming 30 years are covered.
I wish they could remaster/remake The Run. Such a unique game and you can’t even play it legally anymore.
Bring back burnout
Burnout Paradise was so good, spent hundreds of hours with it. At least the last game in the series was a good one.
Paradise didn’t do it for a lot of us, and we’re still waiting for a good successor to Takedown and Revenge.
I only played them at friends. Was the races started from a menu instead of driving around in the city to find races? Or was it the car feeling and handling that was different?
Mostly the former. You got a better variety of courses rather than Paradise reusing a lot of the same pieces of something that distinctly looked like only one city, and a menu was just a quicker way to get in and out of the part of the game you wanted to play.
Ok, personally I liked going around in the city but I understand why you didn’t enjoy Paradise as much as Takedown and Revenge. Too bad that they changed the concept of the series. Didn’t EA change Need for speed to open-world some years earlier with Underground 2? They could have kept one of the series as races started from a menu.
Maaan.
I mean, I would take a Burnout instead. I just wonder if it’d make sense to try that at this point with a completely different market and group of people. I guess we can see if they figure out that Skate reboot and go from there.
Burnout Paradise city and NFS underground 2 I spent so many hours on. Loved those.
I think the Criterion Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted games are underrated. I get why, they’re very Burnout-y for NFS fans but don’t play just like Burnout, but man, are they sticky and precise and smooth.
And they still look great today, too.
The worst part of that most wanted is that its called most wanted. It’s a great game but it’s name causes it to create comparisons to the og most wanted which for most, myself included, have big nostalgia for
Yeah, I skipped over the original and when I went back to it I genuinely couldn’t see what the fuss is about.
My biggest gripe with the remake ended up being that it felt a bit weird after coming from playing a bunch of Hot Pursuit, but I ended up playing an absolute ton of MW once I got used to the way it drives.
I couldn’t tell you why they chose to reuse titles for those two games, though.
Look up videos of the MW beta. It was supposed to be a MW, just like '05. Time constraints killed that plan.
I think Hot Pursuit played more like Burnout than Burnout Paradise for me.
Although the series peaked at Burnout 3.
Both MW and Paradise have very quirky handling built for their open worlds, but I honestly really love both.
Paradise is such a perfect little gem of a small open world that is entirely consistent and has super clear design rules, sometimes to a fault. MW is a super smooth, compulsive expansion on that. They both hold up amazingly well today, even visually.
I just don’t want to be navigating while going 200mph. The big goofy arrow barriers are part of the Burnout experience, and Paradise not having them to keep me on track kills it for me.
Also, I embrace Takedowns, but reject Traffic Checking. This is the way. It’s all about the tiny pinpricks of light in the distance rapidly becoming metal walls of death. If you’re not in the oncoming lane, that’s not Burnout
Yeah, Paradise is built on you learning the map. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how hard doing that is fresh because man, is that map seared into my brain forever now.
Traffic checking is weird because I want to dislike it on principle coming from 3, but… yeah, I kinda really like the games that include it, too. Like, reluctantly. I see how it breaks something at the core of the Burnout idea, but also… it’s really satisfying and makes the game more pleasant to play, even if acknowledging that feels wrong.
Hot pursuit is like a polished high budget hypothetical burnout 2.5 remake
I’m a huge (old) nfs fan, and I love HP '10 and MW '12. It’s no U2 but both are damn good games. I fired up MW not too long ago, just to cruise.
Burnout was the shit too. Mostly for Crash Mode. Paradise was cool with the open-world but them kneecapping crash for whatever the fuck they called ‘bounce your car endlessly down the street’ mode was fucking atrocious. EA selling the ‘ultimate box’ on the pc without the fucking island - and no way to get it - was bullshit, always been pissed of about that.
Was it missing? I don’t remember that. Did all the DLC make it to the remaster? I kinda remember it did.
EDIT: Checked. The Steam page says it did.
The remaster, yes. The original, no.
Of course they do
Have they finally had the revelation that the series has been shovelware for the past decade or more?
past 2 decades