The NFS franchise needs to learn from an entirely different industry to regain glory

 

Forza Horizon is the new open world racer in town that everyone is talking about. Until its release, no one really tried to compete with Need for Speed, the now 26 year old franchise on its turf. And for good reason.

There aren't many video game titles that seemingly just about EVERYONE has played. However, among titles like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Halo 2, everyone you ask will definitely remember losing his BMW M3 GTR to Razor in Most Wanted or driving Rachels green Nissan 350Z in Underground 2.

So when did Need for Speed kinda slide into obscurity? Because I don't see anybody ever really talk about new NFS titles. Maybe a little between announcement and release, but NFS Heat for instance, the latest title as of the time of writing this piece, is barely 4 months old and I honestly see more Forza Horizon 4 and Gran Turismo Sport stuff on my feed, games that came out 1 and 2 years earlier respectively. That's heavy.

Funnily enough, I see a parrallel between the racing game market and an entirely different industry - the smartphone industry. For this, we have to look at it a little and jump back in time to about 2010. Try to remember what the smartphone market back then looked like. Apple released the iPhone 4. Glass on the back, a nice aluminum frame around it. It was the next big thing and people camped outside stores to be the first to have it.

Apple undeniably led the smartphone market by a huge margin. So what did the competition do at the time? They built cool smartphones too, I used to have a HTC Desire HD back then. Everyone asked me how I can use a phone with a screen so big, 4.3 inches. Only months later everyone had 5 inch screens in their pockets. You could say I was a trendsetter. And indeed I seemed to have some sort of sense for how the market goes, because I realized something pretty important.

As a passionate 12 year old iOS hater, I wondered, and then realized why iPhones sold so well while Androids didn't. Or rather, they did but the market was all scrambled across several brands while iPhone people didn't have to hold and think about which brand, and then which model from that brand they should buy. The best is the iPhone 4, because 4 comes after 3. What the hell is a Sony Ericsson W810i or a Nokia 2720? How am I supposed to know which is the latest and which is the flagship? They all look the same too.

I have no idea when the models mentioned above came out and what class they were in, I just used whatever Google auto complete suggested. You could sell the best Android phone in the world, beating out the iPhone in every single category. But how will you get people to buy it if people have no idea what they're looking at?

What companies like HTC, my favorite back in the day, should've done is streamline their model line up. Build a flagship smartphone, call it the HTC 3, say it's the evolution of the HTC 2 and market it as the next big thing. People will see the HTC 3 coming out in the same year as the iPhone 4 and directly know that they're competitors. A year later, as iPhone is selling their next phone, so will HTC. HTC would forever establish itself as the "go to Android brand" that competes with iPhone and brings Android to the table of smartphone snobs and benchracers.

After reading this, you may remember what hapened next. In 2011 Samsung released the Galaxy 2. A year later? The Galaxy 3. Now, some 10 years later, when I ask someone for a phone charger and show them my Huawei they say "Oh, you have a Samsung". Other brands have tried to follow lead, such as Sony with their Xperia Z1, Z2, Z3, ... but were too late. Samsung has already established itself as the daddy of Android smartphons.

Now let's move back to cars and racing games. As good as Galaxy-series phones sell, it'll still be a while till they catch up to iPhones, simply because iPhones were around for longer. (If that ever happens because both Apple and Samsung think people want to pay $1,000 for a phone, meanwhile people go buy Huawei because they offer similar performance for half the price, but that's for a different blog to cover). Similarly, it'll be a while until Gran Turismo and Forza will catch up to granddaddy Need for Speed and their 150,000,000 sold games-empire.

Need for Speed has just been around for too long to be outsold that easily. But how much of the story does that tell us? Not much until we check individual sales numbers. Bellow are the best selling few NFS and GT titles.

• Need for Speed: Most Wanted - 16 Million 
• Need for Speed: Underground - 15 Million
• Gran Turismo 3 - 14.89 Million
• Gran Turismo 5 - 11.95 Million
• Gran Turismo 4 - 11.76 Million
• Gran Turismo - 8 Million
• Need for Speed: Underground 2 - 7 Million
• Gran Turismo 6 - 5,22 Million
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) - 5 Million

Forza has yet to sell more than 5 million units of a game, but outsells NFS in statistics like sales in the first week. It's a mater of time. So where did it all go wrong? Maybe you know the answer from reading up to this point.

 
The Fast and The Furious shook car culture across the world up like a hydrogen bomb. Suddenly only old farts talked about Ferrari and Lamborhini and everyone drooled over Honda Civics and other small displacement cars from mostly Japan and Europe, complete wih wild vinyls, widebody, huge wings and wheels and neon underglow. Electronic Arts rightfully saw the opportunity in the empty market for fitting video games. However, in a move that should set the corner stone for Need for Speeds fall into eventual irrelevancy, they shifted the entire video game series down this path now.

Up until the release of Underground, Need for Speeds mantra was to drive exciting cars on exciting roads. Picture you sitting behind the wheel of a beautiful Ferrari 355, driving down a scenic coastal road, racing other cars like yours. With the third title of the series, Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit from 1998, EA introduced police chases to the equation for that extra kick of excitement. EA made headlines with its games, incorporating real engine sound recordings, revolutionary graphics and incredible details, such as implementation of driving aids like ABS and traction control.

But from 2003 on, three titles later, it was over with that. Your car of choice was now a slow hatchback. This was the first identity change the franchise went through.

Police chases returned with 2005s Need for Speed Most Wanted. I don't know if they tried to mix the old with the new since it was the first time you could drive super cars like the Ford GT, Porsche Carrera GT and Lamborghini Gallardo along with cars like the Fiat Punto, the VW Golf and Mazda RX8, however if they did, they failed. It was their most original title since the switch but it was still hoodrat vibes with the game. Playing it had none of the glamor older titles had but it formed the proto-NFS game, one that games would always be compared to.

Fast forward three years later to 2008, NFS ProStreet was for sale for a while and it wasn't doing too well. Need for Speed tried itself at legal car racing with semi-realisic physics. Although sales weren't too good, lots of people enjoyed the game for its unique vibes of legal, unprofessional motorsport events. They brought a third potential target group into the genre, people who like less arcade-ish games. NFS was meanwhile releasing Need for Speed: Undercover, a highly anticipated spiritual successor to Most Wanted.

The same formula; a cinematic story, police chases, open world in an urban environment and car personalisation. What they forgot? That it takes effort to make a good game. With impossible deadlines and little ressources, EA released a game full of glitches and shortened content. Although it sold well, critics were ripping the game apart.

Need for Speed was in crisis. They thought they had given the fans exactly what they wanted but comments on the internet were all over the place. I remember well how people in the YouTube comment section fought each other over which direction the next game should head, meanwhile people offered themselves up on forums to please be incorporated into the game develoment process, because EA just seemed so detached from their target audience. Wild times.

Basically everyone wanted remakes. While many wanted some sort of new Most Wanted, most wanted either a new Underground with full, in depth car modifications like neon underglow; or a return to true super cars like said Ferrari 355 on open roads. I was one of the latter back at the time.

So what did EA provide in 2009? Exactly, Need for Speed: Shift. A sim racer of the likes of Gran Turismo and Forza, something nobody asked for. Along with NFS World, a free to play open world game based on the mechanics of Most Wanted and Carbon and NFS Nitro, a cartoonish arcade racer for the Nintendo Wii to tackle fun racers like Mario Kart. It was like a great experiment as a result of great desperation over at EA.

So let's recap up to this point; we have NFS fans who...

• ...want a return to sexy super cars and scenic roads with police in their rear view mirror
• ...want a return to pure midnight action in their highly modified tuner cars
• ...want a return to the Most Wanted-esque model with open world roaming and a campaign
• ...want a return to a ProStreet-esque legal event with modified street cars-title
• ...want an improved NFS Shift that can compete against console exclusive GT and FM

And we also have the NFS World and Nitro guys to keep in the back of the head, although I don't hear much from them anymore.

HOW ON EARTH is EA supposed to make people happy if they have half a dozen target groups? And with each release, they push the people of the target groups they didn't reach with their latest title closer to the competition.

With the release of Shift, they absolutely opened the door to any kind of speculation about the next title since everything is possible. People were fighting everywhere. Then came 2010 and EA announced their new title: NFS Hot Pursuit. The first and so far only real return to earlier games. It also shows an inherent fault in the NFS strategy of keeping fans.

Now, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is a special game to me because I think it's the best of the series for one simple reason: It's online mode. The matchmaking was SUPERB. You had three modes; "Race", which is self explainatory, "Hot Pursuit" and "Interceptor".

In "Hot Pursuit", a group of 4 racers needs to make it to the finish before the group of 4 cops stops them forcibly. In "Interceptor", one racer was pitched against one copper on the open map. If the racer manages to destroy or lose the police car, he wins. If the cop manages to block or destroy the racer, he wins.

Cars were equipped with "weapons" or "power ups". Cops had a helicopter that threw spike strips, road blocks on call, EMP hits that you had to sucessfully aim at the racer and spike strips to come out from underneath the car for when you're in front of the suspect. Racers had a turbo that accelerates them to very high speeds, ideal to get away from somewhere fast or for a last spurt, a jammer that would jam the EMP hit and the police cars mini map and identical EMPs and spike strips like the cops.

Imagine you're a racer in Hot Pursuit. Will you use your EMP against a fellow racer to increase your chance of winning or will you use it to attack a cop that's currently harassing a competitor but who could come after you after he's done? Or you're a cop in Interceptor mode. You have to keep your safety distance to the racer so that he won't hit you with the spikes. But will you hit him with an EMP? If you do, you could provoke him to lose one of his spike strips and a jammer, which he then can't use anymore to hide the mini map and take a quick turn on an intersection that you couldn't quite catch.

I even went as far as to play with the three different sirene tones to psychologically intimidate my opponents. When I played against a similarly skilled player, it took us about an hour for each round to finish because this chess-like game of back and fourth kept on for so long.

I could go on forever, but a mere 4 months later, in March 2011, NFS Shift 2 was released. Just over half a year after that, within the same year of 2011, NFS The Run dropped. Both were bad games, one was programmed terribly and kept crashing, the other used a game engine not made for racing games (Battlefields Frostbite engine). The online servers for both of these games were close to empty, however the same was now the case for the once flourishing NFS Hot Pursuit.

Because of course they were. EA stopped supporting and caring. Cheaters were on the run and no one gave a damn. No new content after one or two DLCs, because obviously there were two entire new titles out.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, where does this leave us?

To finish the dive into NFS history, EA released 2012s Most Wanted after The Run, which was a mediocre game according to critics and people who played it. Followed by NFS Rivals, then NFS 2015, NFS Payback and now NFS Heat. Apart from the somewhat memorable 2015, do you have any fond memories of The Run, Most Wanted 2012, Rivals, Payback or Heat?

Anyways, so WHAT EXATLY is EA supposed to do?

Streamline their line up.

What do Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo have in common? Right, their titles go GT, GT2, GT3, etc., same with Forza and FM1, FM2, FM3, etc. (Don't ask me wtf Sony and Polyphony where thinking when they thought up "Gran Turismo Sport") Though in 2012, Forza did a genious step. They thought "what if we would take our game engine and mechanics and cross them with an open world racer? Forza Horizon was born, which now in my eyes is NFS's main competitor.

Also, with Forza Motorsport you know what you get: A sim racer. Same with Forza Horizon; an open world racer. Be it 2, 3 and 4 or 10, 11 and 12. Do you know what you get from NFS Heat? Or NFS Hyperdrive? NFS Ultimate? NFS Velocity? Those last three were made up, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Need for Speed has to establish brands, or rather subbrands. Let Hot Pursuit be the game where you can drive Ferraris on sunny open roads. Let Underground be the one where you tune your Toyota Corolla to race through the city at midnight. Let Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 4 release in 2021, Need for Speed: Underground 3 in 2022, Hot Pursuit 5 in 2023 and Underground 4 in 2024, etc.

If EA must, they can use the Shift series to attack Forza and Gran Turismo at their own game - although I personally think that it should just stick to what it does best: NFS games.

This bi-anually release schedule doesn't belong to Forza's marketing department, just like periodically releasing your phone but with the next number in the model name doesn't belong to Apple. They are THE LOGICAL WAY TO SELL THEIR SPECIFIC PRODUCT.

And finally, give the games characteristic game mechanics. The chess/rock-paper-scissors model of NFS Hot Pursuit had loads of potential. Not only to be carried into the next game but also for things like E-Sports. You have entire stadiums selling out for people to watch other people play League of Legends. Sports TV channels are broadcasting Dota. The engine for Hot Pursuit allowed for just as competitive playing, why didn't they make anything out of it? HP could've lived 3-4 times longer as it did and therefore also sell 3-4 times more often than it did.


But who am I to tell big ol' Electronic Arts what to do. I bought every NFS title from 1998 to 2014, where I grew too disappointed with NFS to buy another game again. My last played racing games were Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport - and it doesn't look like this will change any time soon.

Am I wrong in saying, that it looks similar on your side?