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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015- ... s-a-reboot
Wesley Yin-Poole wrote:The next Need for Speed game is a reboot due out on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One autumn 2015.
EA has decided to eschew the Underground and Most Wanted sub-brands in favour of a game Swedish developer Ghost Games says gets to the roots of the long-running racing series.
The focus with this Need for Speed, which has benefited from the developer taking a year off from having to release a new game in 2014, is car customisation, authentic urban car culture and telling a story.
There's also mention of "a nocturnal open world", which executive producer Marcus Nilsson told Eurogamer in an interview, below, means Need for Speed is set from dusk to dawn.
Meanwhile, with this year's Need for Speed the series leaves behind the last generation of consoles: the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This, Nilsson said, gives the developers more "focus".
Why did you decide to do a reboot rather than another Underground or Most Wanted?
Marcus Nilsson: If you think about Need for Speed in the last couple of years it's been bouncing back and forth between studios and different creative teams. And it's seldom built upon what has been before.
So, you could say Need for Speed has lost its way... what the brand stood for. As we talked to our fans and the players, it emerged they wanted also what we wanted to build: to go back to what we call the roots of Need for Speed. They are the roots of what we think the experience needs to be. It's the Need for Speed experience that resonates the most with most people.
What does that mean for the game, exactly?
Marcus Nilsson: Having a gripping narrative, a storyline that pulls you through the game, where you really care about your car because we give you so many elements of tweaking it, building it and making it your own. And where we set you in an open world with lots of variety. It's trying to build a game that's defining the core pillars of what we think Need for Speed is.
Why did that require a full reboot rather than a sequel to Underground, Rivals or Most Wanted? What is it about this game that's different compared to what we've seen in previous games in the series?
Marcus Nilsson: It's the way we are telling that narrative, and it's about the combination of these things. Bringing back the right features together is the experience Need for Speed fans have been looking for. Going back to having a really robust and emotionally engaging story that pulls you through the game, at the same time as we give you enough variety to experience that story in slightly different ways, are the kind of features that stand out.
For many years we have not delivered on the love of cars, I think, or really gone deep into what are the right vehicles people want to have. If you look at Rivals, we had high-end cars - absolutely fantastic and cool high-end cars - but with that you leave some of the grassroot authentic car culture cars out. And this is an area we're looking into much more.
So the reason we go back and we call this a reboot is, imagine we went back into a room with a whiteboard and we said, 'okay, with all the Need for Speed games being a little bit all over the place during the last few years, what is the game we need to make going forward? And what do we want Need for Speed to stand for going forward?' This means we will get a creative direction starting with this game that we will probably follow for the next couple of years.
The press release mentions a "nocturnal open world". What is it about the open world that makes it nocturnal?
Marcus Nilsson: I actually had to define it on my iPhone to know what that word meant! The world itself is set at dusk to dawn. You saw an open world in Rivals and how we with AllDrive filled it with a lot of different things to do. We've learned a lot from that experience. We're absolutely bringing AllDrive back into this, but in an improved way, making it easier to play with your friends. We want you to go into that world and get a large selection of variety. AllDrive is obviously part of that.
The structure of the open world Rivals was ambitious, but it took too long to find a race, and having to bank your score didn't work, for me. Have you addressed this with the structure of the new game?
Marcus Nilsson: Yes, it was hard. If I was playing the game and you came in and we wanted to play together, it wasn't the easiest thing to set up a race between us. Now, you can find me much easier and travel to me and set something up.
We've been trying to list what we think are the valid bits of feedback, but also talking directly to the fans who played our game, inviting them to the studio to play early prototypes and get their input into what we do. It's the most ambitious fan program we've done so far. We have been addressing a lot of those AllDrive challenges we had.
The scoring part is interesting. The risk and reward element we built in Rivals is something I think is interesting to explore in the future, but maybe not in that exact form.
Teaser trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybZ5nchDm6o
Another free-roaming Need for Speed it is then.
