Electronic Arts

A collection of articles revolving around games released by Electronic Arts

Need for Speed Underground 3 Gameplay is Here!

~ James ~ 2 Comments

You can all watch the video and form your own opinions, but here’s what stood out for me:

The acting made me cringe. There’s a point where EA needed to stop shoehorning these really lame storylines into a racing game, and they’ve clearly passed it. The focus should always be on the cars. Stop trying to make an American version of Initial D, it just ain’t happening.

Hopefully that was only a taste of the visual customization. The first two Underground games were landmark achievements when it came to personalizing your ride, and later games like Carbon and Pro Street took this even further with the Autosculpt mode. When I see an option called Apply Preset Wrap, I gotta admit it’s cool how the game automatically applied the contingencies of the brands you used on your car (I think Juiced did this too), but I’m praying to god there’s a layers system like we saw in the previous Underground titles. The last thing this game needs are the same ten palette-swapped liveries on every single car. You only need to check out the showroom of NFSCars.net to see how creative people can get with just four layers and preset designs.

Is it really going to look like that? Maybe I’m just getting old, cranky, and pessimistic, but that’s a pretty big leap in graphical quality for only taking a year off. You’d think companies would stop the whole yearly development cycle ideology if this is what in-game pre-alpha footage looks like after taking an extra year to work on the game.

What was the AI doing? Are you sure it’s not pre-rendered? For an event called Drift Attack, not one AI car gets sideways. And pay attention to the HUD – I don’t know about you but that probably means he’s supposed to be sideways. Yet, there is no leaderboard that indicates what position the player is in, nor is there any indication of how the event is even scored. His rep builds up at the top of the screen, but at the conclusion of the event the viewer can’t determine what purpose that race served, why rep is important, or what place the driver finished. What’s going on here?

What retard tweets about illegal street racing? At the end of the race, the player receives what appears to be a tweet from a higher ranked competitor. , so either the police in Need for Speed Underground 3 are the world’s worst cops who dedicated all police resources to cyberbullying instead of illegal street racing, or all of those mean tweets directed at Bruce Jenner are secretly talking about some epic LA street race we all missed out on.

In that case, I want in.

In defense of Need for Speed always requiring an Internet connection…

~ James ~ 2 Comments

Untitled-2Not something people wanted to hear in regards to Need for Speed Underground 3; recently Electronic Arts confirmed that the newest installment in the popular yet misguided franchise will always require an active internet connection to play the game at all. Your average person will hate this decision; SimCity 2013 was a disaster when this format was implemented, but I’m going to tell you why this will actually benefit the upcoming racer from EA.

Need for Speed™ Rivals_20140607122806

To get the obvious out of the way, yes, the odd instance your internet goes out because Comcast sucks, you won’t be able to use the time to progress through the game on your own. It’s okay. Walk to the 7-Eleven and get some snacks. Server outages will also happen, and again, it’s okay in moderation. If there is a day-one meltdown like SimCity experienced, then yeah, y’all have the right to be pissed, but I’ve worked at jobs that have relied heavily on computer inventory systems to track all their products between stores, and even managers were able to keep their cool better than twats on message boards when the program would go down for a few minutes. For better or worse, this is the world we live in. R3E also requires an active internet connection at all times to verify content ownership, and exactly once I’ve encountered a time where I wanted to play the game and couldn’t. I whined about it, but it hasn’t been an issue since then.

And please don’t give me the “not everyone has a trustworthy internet connection” argument – 2005 was ten years ago and we’re past that now.

I sound like a hardcore EA shill right now, but it’s for good reason. I spent a lot of time last year with Need for Speed Rivals, and the online elements were implemented incredibly well, turning an average racer into something that was a hell of a lot of fun with friends.

Rarely do scripted E3 demos represent final gameplay, but this one did. Online integration in Rivals was seamless. My buddy Tyler and I both picked up the game for our PS4’s, and everything worked exactly as seen in the video above.

There was no separate online mode. Every time you booted up the game, you were dropped into a room with five other guys on the map, all off doing their own thing. Sometimes, in the middle of a race, you would see a completely different pack of AI cars and one or two other guys rip by you on the opposite side of the road.  And absolutely nothing was stopping you from jumping into a cop car and hunting someone down as they tried to progress through the game. Loading screens didn’t exist either, so the chase didn’t stop when the race ended. You could effectively be someone’s personal whenever you wanted to. Other people were also free to jump into the fray at a moments notice, and you’d gain huge XP boosts from simply playing the game like this.

Need for Speed™ Rivals_20140607144951

Each room’s play style was vastly different as well. Some rooms would see a 50/50 split of Cops and Racers that lead to huge PvP battles, while others would feature all six humans working together as Cops to tear through challenges busting the AI together, and finally there was nothing stopping six human Racers from going through the entire campaign as one big multilayer race tournament – complete with unlocks, perks, levels, and the rest of the standard stuff that comes with online-oriented games.

I still preferred being a dick to people as a cop, though.

Need for Speed™ Rivals_20140607181252

I had the game a little earlier than Tyler and was pretty far ahead when he got started, so while he went through the early races, all I had to do was pick the starter Porsche Cayman, and I could race alongside him. Even as he would drive from race to race, we could trigger outrun challenges between us to make the dull parts of Rivals really fun. It was the absolute perfect racing game for a group of friends on Skype, Teamspeak, Xbox Live, or PSN because while the physics were obviously out of this world, it was a game that was built specifically so you and your bros could ram each other in Supercars and blow shit up.

Yes, you could play Rivals offline. I don’t know why anybody would want to; it was the equivalent of playing Call of Duty with bots. The crazy cinematic moments that happened in Need for Speed Rivals were just that much more fun when real people were involved. Police chases lasted for minutes and relied on actual strategy rather than abusing basic AI tactics. Races always came down to the final corner without cheap rubber banding. Listening to pre-pubescent children scream in agony as their Mustang flew off the road from a well-timed shunt was much more hilarious than taking out yet another soulless AI driver.

Need for Speed™ Rivals_20140607145453

But Rivals still had it’s flaws. Limited customization and a relatively boring map made it really hard to spend an obsessive length of time with the game; it was impossible to become attached to your car as there wasn’t a whole lot you could do to it to make it yours, and the map itself was a modern-day McDonalds play place – two laps and you’ve memorized the whole thing. The game couldn’t go the distance even though it was an insane amount of fun.

And that’s what Need for Speed Underground 3 is looking to rectify. The rumors paint a picture of a game very similar to Rivals and Most Wanted 2012, but with more customization, a better atmosphere, and even more seamless online integration. If the tradeoff is the game requiring an active internet connection at all times, I’ll take it.

Just gotta pray the servers aren’t down for weeks at a time.

Need for Speed Underground 3 Formally Announced

~ James ~ 2 Comments

nfs

Well, after months of speculation, here it is. Electronic Arts announced Need for Speed today, the final attempt at saving the historic franchise from total destruction. It’ll be 2012’s Most Wanted with car customization on-par with the two Underground games, and apparently we’re getting a deep storyline as well.

As much as I loved the two Underground games (I still play the original on my PS3, it’s that good), EA forcing Criterion to do Need for Speed games was seriously the worst possible decision made regarding the franchise. The Burnout games are some of the best arcade racing games out there, along with the older Need for Speed titles. Instead of getting new Burnout games, where Criterion were mostly in charge, and a new Need for Speed game with its own dedicated team and gameplay style, we have Criterion on EA’s leash producing weak, watered down Paradise clones with licensed cars under the Need for Speed brand.

Nobody wins.

But in the event that it has some sort of club functionality, it’ll be another game we support here at PretendRaceCars.net alongside DiRT Rally.

Need for Speed Underground 3 is coming

~ James ~ 13 Comments

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I guess the rumors were true.

Yes, we have skipped a year with NFS games, EA was at first contemplating to shut down the franchise after many titles failed to meet expectations, now as a last ditch effort they gave us more time (and horrendous working hours) to work on the new title.

Yes, this is a Sequel to the Underground series, but to make it seem new we had to reboot it, make it more modern add some of the elements of 2012’s Most Wanted. If you don’t believe me, at this year’s VGX we will announce the game.

We are still trying to go back to the foundation of Underground by including as many import cars as possible with a healthy amount of European cars. American and Muscle cars are sadly enough almost absent besides the 2014 Ford Mustang Boss. The customization can be broken down to Body kits, wide bumper, spoilers, Rims, spinners and we also planned to include special parts for drag races and drift races, you can basically customize your car for the kind of race you want to do with it. Vinyls and paint also is much more expanded than first, the appearance of your car will matter, if you put it online people can give your car style points, the more style points the more your car is worth.

I also forgot to add, EA is now jumping on the whole framerate craze and the game will run at 60 FPS on all systems although the Ps4 and Xbone version are a pain in the ass to make it run well, the trailer we will show will look slightly better than the endgame, 900p on PS4 and 720p on Xbone, altough the Xbone version is struggling to stay at 60 and MS is pressuring us to lower the Ps4 version to 720p too, EA will probably make that call, so if they say it runs at 1080p 60 fps, it’s damage control.

Unlocks are done through the reputation you gain in the city, the higher your rep the better the unlocks, same with cars,shops, auto lots and all are visible from the beginning. We outsourced it to the devs that made NFS nitro on DS so I honestly don’t know what to expect, the console version were EA’s highest priority.

Sfan FZR puts all your old Need for Speed lap records to shame

~ James ~ 2 Comments

I don’t think the Need for Speed games of the late 90’s need any introduction; the first four entries in the long-running series eclipsed only by Gran Turismo were a staple of anyone’s gaming collection who had even a passing interest in cars. Sfan FZR on YouTube takes things to a whole new level, hot-lapping these ancient titles on what appears to be period-specific hardware.

This is your childhood on warp speed: