I LIVED for these games as a kid. They’re a shell of what they were. Luckily, i can play nfs hp2 on my ps2 all day long and live in 2002 happily !
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.
JDM: Japanese Drift Master is looking good right about now.
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
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.
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.
I had some very good memories with Underground.
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.
And the other projects will still end up being slop anyway
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.
Have they finally had the revelation that the series has been shovelware for the past decade or more?
past 2 decades
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
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:
…What? Where in the world did you pull that from?
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.
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.
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 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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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
