Twenty-one games and two decades splintered Need for Speed across demographics and racing genres. Despite its success and popularity, it still aches for definition. Need for Speed, bearing no additional title in its latest release, seeks to embody its prominent namesake.
Ecosystem doesn’t usually mean much in the context of a racing game, but a finely-tuned series of cooperative and dependent parts are what power Need for Speed’s engine. Rather than line its open world with disconnected mission markers and pop-up content, it assigns them all to one of five ways to earn reputation and then connects that reputation equal number of people. Need for Speed is you, the road, and your crew—and the freedom to shift and move between them at will.
Certain facets of current-generation games are expected. Need for Speed is gorgeous and looks like a second-generation PlayStation 4 or Xbox One game should. Ventura Bay, Need for Speed’s open-world-fan-fiction interpretation of Los Angeles, is expansive, celebrates urban diversity, and is both straight-line and corner friendly. The handling models—models, plural, we’ll get to this later—behave with remarkable feedback, effortlessly indicating what you should and shouldn’t be doing when you blow through a corner. As the premier racing title from one of planet Earth’s largest publishers, you should expect this from a Need for Speed game. What you shouldn’t expect (because it is insane) are glorious full-motion video (FMV) sequences sprinkled through its wild storyline.
Sega CD and 3DO salted the Earth for FMV games for two solid decades. Actual footage of real people with marginally interactive sequences doomed Night Trap, Ground Zero Texas, Wirehead, and countless other titles into bargain-bin oblivion. 2015 has seen something of resurgence for hybrid entertainment, with Her Story, Guitar Hero Live, and now Need for Speed embracing live humans over CG monsters. Maybe it’s the diminishing depth of the uncanny valley, or maybe it’s actually applied talent in contextually appropriate sequences. Whatever the case or reason, FMV fits neatly into Need for Speed’s framework.
Your eclectic crew is the centerpiece of Need for Speed, and it’s through these FMV sequences where you’ll encounter them. The game opens by railroading the player through a montage of meet and greets sequences shortly before it takes off the leash to Ventura Bay. Spike is your irritating (on purpose) trust-fund dipshit vector to the rest of the crew. Later you meet Manu, a bruiser consume with drifting cars, Amy, the wrench-turning gearhead who literally lives in a garage, and Robyn, who seems obsessed with collaborative performance driving. Need for Speed demands you earn reputation to impress your crew, and provides a variety of outlets to articulate that mission.
Ghost Games, the Criterion ex-pats who backed 2013’s Need for Speed Rivals, heavily invested in making these characters feel real. Need for Speed projects an idealized underground racing / street tuner lifestyle, and tagging along with your new crew is its means of expressing its ideals. Caffeine-addled twenty-somethings may seem like peculiar guides to the world of chaotic street racing, but Need for Speed’s unyielding commitment to this idea is what makes it all work.
Whether you want to view these sequences as intensely serious or remorseless camp, they never blink in their commitment to their craft. Ghost Games has even gone as far as making they player—or more specifically, the player’s car—an inclusive part of the crew. Advanced compositing techniques often place your heavily customized car seemingly inside FMV sequences, creating a tangible reason to suspend disbelief. As a protagonist, you’re still a mute visage accepting the good-natured ribbing and friendly advice of your adopted crew, but it does wonders for Need for Speed’s implied world. No matter what, you can’t get away from these guys.
Thankfully, Need for Speed finds a way to make your crew integral to its systems. Each crew member idolizes a particular real-life legend of their respective scene; Spike, for example, is obsessed with Porsche aficionado Magnus Walker while Robyn harbors an unyielding admiration for Chicago’s Risky Devil drift crew. More than just idols to ogle, all of the races and challenges scattered across Ventura Bay directly correlate to your reputation on the streets and with your crew. Spike’s speed races typically include check point races or top-three finishes. Amy usually hooks you with races that require you to hit a certain top speed or possess a vehicle with a certain amount of horsepower; anything related to building your car Manu’s the drift guy, and Robyn’s challenges usually require collaborative or competitive group racing. In any case, you’re always peppered with texts and calls from your crew telling you where to find the latest and greatest races happening across Ventura Bay.
Everything you do is in the name of creating your reputation. Participating in any of your crew’s specific events spreads your reputation across five categories. Speed, style, crew, build, and outlaw all correspond to different members of your crew, and either engaging races targeted toward these categories or acting like a madman out on the street adds rep points to each one. There’s also a global rep score, more or less a player level, that acts as a gateway to more challenging races. Specific car upgrades also seem to be tied to gaining reputation with certain crew members, though I can’t say I was left wanting for more power with just five hours under my belt.
Need for Speed always has its foot on the reward pedal. This phenomenon is best observed during a casual race. If you match an opponent’s speed, you’ll receive corresponding speed reputation. If you slipstream someone, you’ll gain style reputation. If you slam into another car (or a cop, road sign, whatever) you get outlaw reputation for destroying something. Every beat of Need for Speed’s pulse feels prepared to reward the player with something.
Five hours in, and I’ve already seen a significant amount of variation inside Need for Speed’s races. Drift friendly races require you to rack up points by drifting around every surface of the make-shift track available. Doing it one better, Drift Train sequence make you do the same thing in close proximity to other racers. It’s tough to keep pace, but staying in line adds a hefty multiplier to your score. Time trials, standard races, and the unusually crazy point fiesta gymkhana challenges are also in no short supply. Need for Speed also likes to combine its challenges, like Touge races that rely on your drift score, but provide a multiplier if you’re also at the front of the pack. There’s even a set of rotating daily challenges, like completing a specific race or drifting a certain distance, to rack up more reputation points.
During our preview session, I managed to get about a third of the way through the game’s content (each racer’s make-shift storyline has a finite end point, and finishing all five leads to a game-ending series of events), and progression has been coming along nicely. Easy races usually allow me to make a few mistakes and/or all-out course-resetting crashes, but only yield 4000 credits. Medium range challenges have a much higher threshold—before you had to rack up 10000 rep points while drifting, but now it’s 40000—but you’re also expected to have a better performing car at that point. I haven’t gotten to anything hard (or beyond) yet.
Because Ghost Games had to put an incredible amount of effort into seemingly everything, car customization—visually and mechanically—is another area where Need for Speed excels. Expected visual cues are in place; you can adjust the rims, how far the rims protrude, what sort of wheels are on the rims, and what kind of decals and stickers are applied to the paint above the rims. This philosophy applies to the entire car, which can either be decorated piece-meal with decals, or wrapped in custom or pre-defined skins as a total package. In this regard Need for Speed has finally caught up with the aesthetically expansive Forza series, perhaps even lapping it a few times along the way.
Customization also applies to the myriad of go-fast parts, suspension accessories, and other gizmos inside of the vehicle. Some of these are standard pieces we’ve been upgrading and updating since Gran Turismo; flashing the ECU, bolting on a thirsty cold-air intake, signing up for greater levels of forced induction, and adding magic nitrous oxide are all accounted for. More nuanced options, like adjusting shift differentials or switching out cylinder heads, allow you to make specific adjustments to the car’s handling models are also included, but it’s tough to pay attention to something that doesn’t directly respond by boosting your horsepower number.
It’s easy to get lost in the details of handling, but there’s no denying that Need for Speed, as a series, has a variable approach to car handling. Black Box’s games always leaned toward traditional racing, whereas Criterion’s contributions where very drift-friendly. Neither met the extreme ends of Gran Turismo or Ridge Racer, respectively, but there was a tangible different approach in handling philosophy. Need for Speed, against all odds, accounts for both styles of play. Adjusting a car’s handling model is a completely different menu from performance upgrades, and it allows you to perform actions (like lowering tire pressuring or adjusting driver assists) that move a slider from drift-friendly to traditionally grippy. Need for Speed makes room for both worlds.
While my time with Need for Speed is far from complete, the more traditional handling model feels like it’s at a disadvantage. So many events feature drifting as an integral part of the challenge, and even though you can utilize the handbrake as a drift substitute on non-compliant vehicles, it feels like a band-aid on the problem. Short of returning to your garage and subbing out a drift car whenever the need demands, the traditional handling model might get left in the dust.
While Need for Speed contains truckloads of real-world vehicles, the collect ’em all mentality that fueled games like Most Wanted is not present. Members of the development on-hand at our preview event stressed that any car could stay competitive provided you kept up with performance upgrades. In fact, your garage only has space for five vehicles, ensuring a stable of highly powered machines prefers quality to quantity. I divided my time with Need for Speed between a Honda Civic Type R (as a starting vehicle) and later upgraded to a late 90’s Toyota Supra. Aside from the rear-wheel drive Supra’s tendency to be a bit better at drifting, I didn’t notice too big of a difference, especially since, at the time, they both had similar horsepower numbers.
Multiplayer, branded in Need for Speed’s long running AllDrive interface, makes another curious appearance. Similar to Rivals, other players will always populate Ventura Bay. Need for Speed requires and online connection to play, though your interaction with other people remains (mostly) optional. Fellow racers can either be located on the map and engaged for a one-on-one race, or co-opted by proximity into almost every proper race in the main game. If you and your friends all start the same race at the same time, for example, they’ll be in the race. There are dozens of other named AI racers prowling Ventura Bay, and you’ll run into them frequently either by luck or their sporadic appearances in other races. Like past Need for Speed games, your friends’ (or frequently encountered players’) best times on every challenge will be seamlessly matched and ranked against your times.
The multiplayer interface wasn’t without its assorted hijinks. You occupy Ventura Bay exclusively from dusk to dawn (racer culture and vampires have similar activity schedules), leaving little normal traffic on the roads. The exception appears to be other real people, who can be found zooming along at impossible speeds. This can create havoc, especially when two of you heading opposite directions collide in the midst of a hectic challenge. It’s worth noting the AI is affected by this as well; once, during a group race with Robyn, another player’s race crossed our path. A dozen cars heading opposite directions at full speed created a veritable demolition derby—and I went on to win the race. It worked out well for me, but Robyn was totally obliterated.
Police make an understated return. Cops are stationed with radar guns at set points around Ventura Bay. If you’re caught speeding you have the opportunity to pull over and pay a paltry fine. I never did this. Instead I sped up and engaged in a police chase. The longer you give chase, the higher fine you start racking up. Police can increase in intensity, but losing them didn’t appear to be too much of an issue. Either I would get a significant lead on them and find some out-of-the-way alley to hide in, or ram into one and slow it down. This leads to a cool down timer, and once the countdown is complete you’re usually rewarded with a ton of outlaw rep.
There’s actually a fifth member of your crew that corresponds to outlaw reputation (the identity of whom Need for Speed prefers to keep under wraps). Early on, rather than mark specific events, he texts you with abstract challenges, like enduring a two minute police chase or blowing through several breakable blockades. Eventually the “outlaw” challenges start manifesting on the world map, usually consisting of normal challenges with the additional modifier of having a ton of police on your tail.
A few other tasks round out Need for Speed’s activity list. You can challenge any encountered racer to a face-off at any time, and doing so with every car checks said car off a list. Free car parts are on parked pick-up trucks scattered across Ventura Bay. Likewise, certain photo-op points can be found and collected. More curious are donut opportunities, which function as a collectible but require the player to spin a massive donut in the designated area first. This isn’t possible with front-wheel drive vehicles, which, I get why, but it was kind of a pain to find a donut point and then not be able to check that off the list when I was in my Civic.
Above all else, Need for Speed seeks to strike a balance between expectations and surprise. Facets fans have been asking for years—better customization, diverse handling models, competitive visuals, assorted race challenges, and cohesive persistence—are in place. These are the things that you expect, and Need for Speed delivers. The surprise lies in the strength of its characters, and how well the game makes you feel like you’re part of an emerging underground race crew. FMV sequences are a bold choice, and creating a symbiotic narrative in a racing game presents a significant risk. As of right now, with equal parts irony and sincerity, I’m enjoying it.
Check back with us next Tuesday for a full review of Need for Speed.
