Fuck NFS, make burnout
Have they innovated since most wanted? That was the last one I played for more than 20 minutes.
I played every mainline nfs and thats a bit unfair. The golden era certainly started to end with Most Wanted. But they really tried to have some kind of new spin or gimmick in almost every title.
- Carbon: Autosculpt, Canyonraces, fast paced drifting
- Prostreet invented the festival racer for better or worse. Top speed runs are still insane and werent matched ever since by any game
- Shift 1 & 2 were Gran Turismo/Forza at home but atleast avaivable on PCs.
- The Run was framed as a race through the entire country and had those enviromental desasters.
- the criterion games were a weird burnout/nfs mix.
- Payback introduced offroad races and story missions
- Heats campaign with seperate incentives at day or night
I’m not saying all of these games or features were bangers. But you cant deny that NFS underwent constant changes.
which one? they made two most wanteds, seven years apart, both completely different
There was only ever one in 2005, silly. 2013 was some form of PsyOp! Mass-hypnosis! There is no 2013 Most Wanted! I refuse to believe!
(Do I need to add /j at this point?)
probably, because i happen to love the second one.
Last one i played was Shift 2, i loved them both
I loved Shift 2 so much. Quite possibly my fav NFS or at least top 3
Sad to see the franchise go. With NFS gone the big budget AAA arcade racing genre is almost dead. Forza Horizon still exists but its the same game with a different map for over a decade now. Mildly hyped for Clutch in the next year though. It could be something fresh again after a long time.
After the mild desaster of Unbound they invited tons of youtubers and tried to listen to the community. It could have gone really well for the next entry. But tbh i rather see NFS dead than suffering through yet another entire decade with only mediocre releases.
I loved Heat despite all its issues. But that was 7 years ago… And the only nfs title i really enjoyed since 2011(?).The best NFS game in recent years was the Prostreet Pepega Mod. Yeah, its a meme mod but the gameplay additions were fire and its just so much fun.
Goodbye NFS. Its probably for the better
There’s kind of fixed game-play mechanics around driving. Once you’ve perfected the experience, where do you go from there?
Thing is NFS kinda also died because they couldnt perfect the mechanics around driving in over a decade. Heat was good and enjoyable enough but far from perfect. Then Unbound straight regressed in that department. Driving physics are very hard to get right.
But even then you have track design, balancing, AI opponents, career structure, lobby systems for online play, rewarding clean drivers etc.
Especially ai drivers and a good multiplayer component are IMHO still unsolved problems.
Like Forza Horizon has pretty much the driving physics figured out since 15 years. For all intends and purposes they are near perfect for the subgenre of realism they chose to occupie. But the track design was pretty mediocre and only got a lot better with FH6 this year. Drivatars on the other hand are less engaging and more annoying they ever were. Careerstructure is still worse than the first entry in the series. Online is still a mess with huge possible improvements.
Wreckfest is a game with really good driving physics, rock solid netcode, dedicated community servers, interesting risk and reward mechanics because of the ecouraged crashing and dirty driving. But it has a narrow focus on fictional and a bit over the top folk racing. With the ground work they laid out with that engine they could have pivoted to eg rallying or touring cars to achieve pretty different gameplay. Instead we got more of the same again with Wreckfest 2 in early access with drip fed new content. Its still a good succesor with tons of improvements.
But the indie scene also shows that there is still tons of innovation possible. Inertial Drift with the two stick drifting mechanics which got copied rather midly by Screamer this year. Yelloe Taxi goes Vroom showed us that you can have a car based 3D platformer.
Idk, the original Doom with a modern engine port with mouselook still is relevant and a really good game but new FPS games with fresh mechanics release every year since then even though you mostly walk around and shoot enemies in the face with light puzzles sprinkled in.
I think the latest NFS got too much flak. They were still strong 7/10, atleast they had some semblance of progression unlike Forza Horizon
Ultimately the handling model and the way cops were implemented just making them very annoying killed it for me but yeah, I think overall it was trying to be different and did in some ways succeed. I don’t quite get all the hate tbh. I’ve had a few hours of fun, even if it’s no Underground 2.
I bought Unbound for only $5 and I feel robbed.
Ignoring the political yapping in my ear for the first like 45 minutes about “police and politicians are oppressing street racers” (that literally cause thousands in damages and definitely cause multiple fatalities every race),all of Criterion’s NFS games have bad driving models compared to Black Box, which is literally the most important part of a racing game. IMO, the gameplay peaked with Underground 2, and the story was best with Most Wanted. I didn’t like MW or Carbons driving model changes from U2, but they are miles better than anything Criterion made. Heck, even NFS The Run feels like a proper NFS game, and that game was BlackBox’s worst NFS game.
I wanted to like Unbound, and even liked its art style, but it gave me too many reasons to not like it. Uninstalled in under an hour, couldn’t get a refund because I didn’t buy it on Steam.
You forgot Undercover, which is understandable. But that game is worse than The Run.
Anything after ProStreet may as well not exist IMO. And I didn’t like ProStreet as much as previous entries. Still better than anything by Criterion though. Their racing games were fine as their own thing, BurnOut was a fun series, but they should never have been allowed to touch Need for Speed in the first place.
Thats like having Psygnosis, the Wipeout developer, work on a new Gran Turismo. Or having Treyarch make the next Battlefield. Its going to feel wrong unless the developers are skilled at replicating the previous studios feeling, or they dont have employees that feel the need to touch everything that already worked and was loved.
Ngl ea bought alot of studios in like 1990s-2000s(i think also in 2010s)
deleted by creator
