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Tuesday 21 May 2013

Need For Speed: The Decline

Need For Speed is the most successful racing game series of all time, with millions of copies of the games being sold since the original, The Need For Speed, was released way back in 1994. The series was reasonably successful until a breakthrough in 2002 with Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 becoming a more popular game than expected. This was the launchpad for the 'golden era' of Need For Speed, where they would dominate the racing game market with very little opposition for years to come. 2003 saw the launch of Need For Speed Underground, a game that took players into the world of car customisation, where the looks of your car were just as important as your finishing position in the race.

Things went one step further a year later, with the launch of Need For Speed Underground 2, a game that contained the most detailed customisation ever seen in the series, and a new free roam concept that was incredibly successful, allowing players to choose how they play the game. There was also a new storyline, and the customisation of the cars was to affect your progression in the game, thus making sure that your car was as far from standard as possible.

In 2005, EA Games launched Need For Speed Most Wanted, a game that brought high speed police chases back to the series. Minor damage was also included in the game, as well as live actors in the cutscenes for the first time in Need For Speed's history. The game was in immediate success, scoring a 98/100 on the F1Fan0001 review. Car customisation was more limited in Most Wanted than the Underground games, but a much larger area and a considerably longer story more than made up for it.

2006 saw another revolution in the series, as the autosculpt feature was introduced in Need For Speed Carbon, a game that follows on from the ending of Most Wanted, a rare thing in the series. A more involved and complex story was added, as well as a crew system, but Carbon was not as successful as the previous few games as there were no major changes to the gameplay, so people felt that it was a repetition of Most Wanted. This was the start of the decline.

In 2007, EA Games took a radical step by introducing ProStreet, a game as much about getting rid of the boy racer image of the series as trying to move Need For Speed on. ProStreet, though, was a sales disaster. Many people who had become used to the features of the successful Need For Speed games of late missed the illegal racing, police chases and free roam, the things that had made Need For Speed the dominant series in the early to mid noughties, with only Burnout 3: Takedown coming close to challenging it.

2008 was a savage job for EA Games. They had to return to illegal street racing to try to fend off the likes of Midnight Club, Burnout Paradise and also the increasing success of Forza Motorsport, which had wiped the floor with Prostreet the year before in the competition between the circuit racing games. As a result, Need For Speed Undercover was released. However, Undercover was far from a success as well, as many gamers criticised the game for a poor plot, bad acting in the cutscenes, an idiotic levelling system, an absence of difficulty and a below par frame rate.

2009 saw the first Need For Speed game after the demise of the PlayStation 2. The game of choice for this year was a ProStreet-esque game featuring more legal racing: the biblically terrible Need For Speed Shift. The handling model was poor and the levelling system was messy, but the major problem was that EA's rival in the circuit racing stakes, Forza Motorsport, completely thrashed Shift in terms of...well...everything. Forza Motorsport 3 was a comprehensively better game. Making it Forza 2-0 Need For Speed (Forza Motorsport 2 having given ProStreet a damn good kicking in 2007 as well)

2010 saw the introduction of Criterion games into the mix. The creators of the hugely successful Burnout series got straight to work with Need For Speed Hot Pursuit, a remake of the game that started off Need For Speed's success in the first place. Whilst it was Need For Speed's  most critically acclaimed game of all time, many gamers were disappointed to discover that the entire game was just a Burnout game in fancy dress, but without the free roam.

2011 saw the release of two Need For Speed games: The Run and Shift 2: Unleashed. Both games were simply abysmal, with many people describing The Run as the worst in the series. Shift 2: Unleashed was labelled "the second worst video game of all time, with the original Shift at #1" by F1Fan0001. Also, Shift 2: Unleashed was comprehensively beaten by Forza once again, making it 3-0 to Forza.

2012 saw a remake of the most successful game of the series, as Need For Speed Most Wanted returned, only it was missing nearly everything that gamers enjoyed from the original game from 2005. add to that its beating at the hands of Forza Horizon and it is clear that the series is struggling, which leaves question marks over EA and Criterion's commitment to future titles




1 comment:

  1. In my opinion, this has to do with the age of the fans of the original. When I played the first game, I was 11 years old, it was brand new and exiting. The last game I bought was Most Wanted. I stopped playing games all together after that. Life happens.

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