Before I talk about the game, I can't find any official EA forums for this.
If you goto EA's site, they have forum subsections broken down by category and genre.
Need for Speed itself only shows up once, which is under free to play games(NFS World).
And anyone who has picked up on this, has been redirected to the NFS World section by Origin reps....
EA and Origin, ..and I thought Walmart and McDonalds was a match made in hell.
So far impression of the game is not favorable.
Visuals are better than expected, though what it does lack is the ambiance and environmental ques that the previous NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 had - snow drifts, sand storms, howling winds etc.
Camera modes are severely limited. You get chase cam(who uses chase cam?) and bumper...not just bumper, but like high speed mini front wing slammed to the ground so low you actually start to get motion sickness - bumper. Unfortunately yet again, no cockpit view. For all these reboots and sequels they keep doing, you would think they'd take some extra strides to ensure the remakes are better. Given that some of the old versions had cockpits, not including them this time around is certainly going the wrong direction.
Performance is generally smooth as you would expect though a few features cause hiccups and stuttering at random times. Reflections on HIGH is a big culprit. Turning it to medium alleviates some of the issue, yet lots of the eye candy disappears.
Sound is also better than expected. Previous third generation NFS installments had horrific audio. I get a sense that certain engines and exhausts are different and unique between different vehicles.
Story/campaign seems to be a filler rather than a driving force. The way to get new cars involves going to 'jack' spots and stealing the vehicle (which involves you pressing a single button and you magically switch vehicles). Most cars found in shady places like under a dark freeway bridge. Right because I find Bugatti's under I-95 overpasses all the time....
Navigation is ok with the Easy Drive menu, though it seems a bit convoluted for what it really does
Controls/handling is (unless you are going to use a keyboard....) silly right out of the box. This is another one of those games where some bozo thought it clever to incorporate the early beginnings of the game play into the intro film. You take control of a vehicle at speed, only to find out (as you're slamming into a wall), that your controller is not 'setup' yet, and needs to be done from the options. Considering no buttons on the controller work, you have to use the keyboard to escape out and adjust all your settings. I wish companies would stop doing this. Give me a start menu with options that are clear and in my face - not hidden away as some 'extra features.'
Anyways, once you do get to the controls, there are far too many functions to be programmed to a game pad or steering wheel (you run out of buttons). When you finally do setup it all up, it keeps popping up a message saying 'controller is not setup' over and over whenever you try to use the controller to navigate the menus. And theres miscellaneous problems like translation from keyboard to gamepad. For example, to start an event you have to burn rubber/break traction at the event location. This means holding the brake and accelerating. You can't do that if your brake and accelerate are on the same analogue stick. You would think using the handbrake would be a sufficient brake substitute, sadly it's not. You then have to reach over and hold the two keyboard keys each time you want to initiate the event.
Handling is actually impressive for right out of the box, in the sense that you're not all over the road like previous NFS titles. However there is no axis adjustment or sensitivity options. This is particularly glaring as the vehicles are too snappy once you get beyond your dead zone. If you try to coast along at 75 in a lane, and drive normally, you have problems staying in the lane because every adjustment you make ends up overcompensating.
Essentially, the vehicles do not drive like real cars. There's no manual gear changing and the regular brakes are like swiss cheese with little stopping power. The game still uses that feature where if you tap the brake once lightly (brake not hand brake mind you), going into a corner, you can enact a near perfect power slide and take corners that way. If only it was that easy.... The hand brake seems to serve as a final brake, where if you need to take a wild last second whip, yank the hand brake. 90% of races are like a down hill touge, which would be cool if this was meant to be about touges, with vehicles setup and balanced for touge... Between poor handling and no real control over your vehicle, it's an underwhelming experience.
Gameplay is pretty atrocious. I never could understand why they think 'street racing' involves mobs of really expensive cars sliding across four lanes of traffic and wiping out eight street lamp poles, four mail boxes, causing five accidents, three vehicular homicides and leaving the neighborhood looking it was just carpet bombed during a Gumball 3000 run. It's like doing a racing side mission in GTA, Saints Row or Sleeping Dogs.
First corner of race I see all the AI go from the deep inside of one corner, and end up on the outside, farside of the road three lanes across. Half of them lose control and hit a wall and cause the aforementioned carnage, and the others slide around for a minute trying to get on the road again. Meanwhile, I fly by and surmount a ridiculous lead, only to magically be caught up again *great, another game that uses a 'catch-up' mode.*
There's also this inherent aspect where at speed, whenever you're nearing another vehicle of any type, you start to get ever so slightly dragged or sucked into their path, even though you're originally trajectory would not have you intercepting them. It seems to be a cheesy game mechanic to increase the amount of accidents (must be their idea of difficulty).
Funnily, about the only way I can get police to actually notice ME, is to go around peeling out in front of them. What are we, seventeen? If the game was actually intelligent, run over some people in the scenario I mentioned above, then you'll get police. No amount of being a public menace seems to be relevant to the cops interest in you unless you do something clearly obvious like slam into the back of a cop car.
Who does this in real life? Who takes out $300,000 cars and not only risks their lives and other peoples so callously, but also punishes their expensive vehicle unnecessarily?
This is not street racing. IF there's one thing that could make a new NFS game good, it would be some real damned physics amongst some real environments with real consequences.
We already have silly arcade games like this, they belong to the Outrun, Wipeout, MarioKart, Burnout etc. franchises.
Anyways, I think for now I'll just stick to real life street racing, it's certainly more enjoyable.
