And the other projects will still end up being slop anyway
Have they finally had the revelation that the series has been shovelware for the past decade or more?
past 2 decades
Aw that’s a shame. My kid loves NFS Heat. It’s his most favorite game.
I played it recently (after not having played any NFS in like 15 years since I’ve come to hate AAA slop), and I thought it was really fun! The driving dynamics especially, and I was surprised to see so many different cars and so much customisation possible.
Not perfect of course, the music is utter garbage (to my ears) and it could have been more polished, but I definitely didn’t expect I’d play for 30 hours. They were on the right track.
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.
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.
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.
Love the game, but hate the soundtrack with passion. Its full of mumble rap, auto-tune and weird electronic shit, which was popular at time. (apologies if someone likes it). I just couldt listen to it for more than 10 min.
Agree, Heat was really fun to play together with some friends.
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
Yes and give me realistic physics and don’t shove pointless and impossible “drifts” into everything!
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
I can’t agree more with you! Nfs hot pursuit was the best. I’m talking nfs from 1998.
Nfs 3 hot pursuit was amazing. I found out that if you drove below speed limit the cops wouldnt come after you. Was hilarious watching them go after opponents instead of me
You know there is a modern patch? You can still play this game today. Apply the modern patch by VEG. And you can play widescreen and other fixes.
People still play it today, even multiplayer see also the telegram group: https://t.me/classicnfs
Bless, what an amazing thing to learn on my day off
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.
Apparently they do -not- have a Need for Speed
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 plagued TS4 are here to stay
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.
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.
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.
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
Look up videos of the MW beta. It was supposed to be a MW, just like '05. Time constraints killed that plan.
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.
I think Hot Pursuit played more like Burnout than Burnout Paradise for me.
Although the series peaked at Burnout 3.
Hot pursuit is like a polished high budget hypothetical burnout 2.5 remake
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.
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
Yet more evidence that the next decade may not be a good time to be a fan of racing games. Feels bad.
First they cancel Dirt Rally (later known as EA WRC), now they cancel need for speed… At this point the only AAA racing games left will be Forza.
The indie and AA scene have finally started catching up to those tastes of mine that AAA left behind in the racing genre, for what it’s worth. What are you looking for?
To be fair, Kirby Air Ride is finally getting a sequel, and that may as well be the only racing game we’ll ever need ever again.
NFS 2000 Porsche Unleashed was peak NFS, its been downhill ever since.
Man I think underground 2 was so my favorite
Of course they do
Pffft, 5th, Porsche, part was the last playable anyway…
