Need for Speed developers don’t understand the point of cops in the game

This was suppose to be a NFS Heat review, but since I haven’t finished the game yet for reasons you’ll read below, I’ve decided not to make it a full review, but a rant about cops mechanic in the game that entirely ruined what looked like near perfect game…

I’ve been in love with the concept of racing and cops basically since the original The Need for Speed back in the early 90’s even though they only had to overtake you to bust you and that was it, the only mechanic in the game. I’ve played racing games a lot back then since 90’s were the golden era of racing games and the one problem they all had before and they still have to this very day if cops are not present is that they become repetitive and boring very easily and very quickly. It’s also one of reasons why I just never liked F1 games or “racing simulators” or quasi simulators like Forza, because they always end up being these dull repetitive real world circuits racing by holding same perfect line every lap, for 50 laps. Or whatever. Yawn.

Some time has passed and NFS3 Hot Pursuit arrived back in 1998 and that’s when EVERYTHING changed (now you know my fascination over NFS3). The game had amazing selection of sports cars and you could download more of them made by fans. Hundreds of them. It also had absolutely amazing circuit tracks with various elevation changes, shortcuts and were thematically unique. Countryside highways, futuristic cities, desert canyons, snowy summits, beautiful coastline cliffs in the sunset, the lot. And it also had cops. That cherry on top X factor that made game so diverse with every race I can still fire it up today and have fun with it despite knowing exactly how each car feels and handles, every corner of every track, but I never know where and how exactly I’ll have cops getting in the way, something no other game could offer before. When you learned other racing games, they became boring because you just drive the track in best line you know it works and other racers just weren’t a distraction enough to matter. But with cops, every race is just tiny bit different. You interact with cops at different points of the track, you interact with them in different ways and they used different methods, so while not a groundbreaking change to the concept of racing, they were this random modifier within the game that wasn’t a focal point and wasn’t absolute annoyance, it was just sort of there to spice things up. And this trend basically continued through out the NFS franchise till EA handed over development to their internal studio named Ghost Games. Apparently a team of game developers that hasn’t played a single NFS game in existence and develop NFS games based on description made by someone who also never played any NFS game. Coz they just feel exactly like that in the end.

When NFS 2015 was released, the “reboot” to the NFS series, there were cops in free roam. And I was excited. I remembered all the fun and exciting moments I had with NFS Most Wanted 2005 and NFS Carbon as well as many games before. Just to be let down entirely by how worthless cops were. I had a stock starting car and I could shake off cops in matter of seconds and as soon as you upgraded the car they were basically non existent. They hardly had any presence in races and they were so useless in Free Roam it felt like they don’t even exist, basically eliminating the X factor cherry on top, exactly what cops were suppose to be in the game. All they had to do is tweak few parameters about cops and it could be perfect. But they never bothered and just kept the game in its broken boring state. The game was so boring I never finished it. Guess who made it. Yup, it was Ghost Games.

Then NFS Payback was released. Again by Ghost. They didn’t even bother to have cops in free roam because of all the criticisms of worthless stupid cops in NFS 2015. They appeared in scripted races where their presence was basically pre-coded and when triggering “loot boxes” around the map. Otherwise they didn’t exist. Game was plagued by other problems like cars locked into classes and upgrading with absurd slot machine mechanic. I’ve finished it, but the thing was so forgettable and boring it’s one of the worse NFS games of all times.

People wanted cops in free roam for the next game after NFS Payback. And we demanded them to actually mean something, not like in NFS 2015. And Ghost Games being Ghost Games, they’ve gone totally overboard in NFS Heat (current latest NFS game released in Nov 2019), making cops these absurd absolutely obviously cheating god like fuckers that ruin the whole game because they’ve decided to make them a fucking focal point of the game. And I was like my fucking god, you morons don’t have the slightest clue why cops exist in NFS games. Focal point of NFS games should always be racing and exotic cars. Cops were always a thing in the game that was just sort of there that spiced things up and brought randomization factor. Not here. I’m 26 hours into the NFS Heat game and I currently have a 1000 HP Mitsubishi Evo X and apparently, that’s still not enough to actually even have any fun interaction with cops because they are so stupid overpowered they chase you at lightning speeds at only Heat 3 (there are 5 heat levels and 5th being highest) and these Heat levels seem to escalate too quickly before you can even shake off cheating cops whole games becomes an absolute god damn chore to play. And you need to go against cops during Night Time because that gives you REP points which you need to actually unlock higher tier performance parts so you can buy them with money earned during Day Time. So, you’re literally forced to do this chore of dealing with motherfucking cheating cops that are so freaking not fun to interact with. And to make matters worse, apparently when you upgrade the car to level 400 and above, cops become too easy. Or so I heard from others, it’s downright chore to play this game so I’m not in a rush to play or upgrade cars in it…

So, Ghost managed to create a game that’s dreadful to play until you get everything to a certain level and when you get past that level the game becomes boring. And there is this tiny window within the entire game where you have like 5% of actual fun coz then you soon have 400+ level car and it’s boring. And I can’t believe how they fucked up the game with 1 (ONE!) elemental rookie design mistake which they’ll never fix because they just playing don’t give a shit. Player car damage. Just this one single fucking detail in the game fucks up the whole game so badly it’s literally unplayable and considered anything but fun, hours into the game.

Currently, player has a limited health and if cops beat you enough, you lose health, get wrecked and as a result, busted. Which is a problem because cops feel and behave like you’re playing against a player online who’s not hiding the fact he’s using all the possible cheats that exist. That’s how NFS Heat cops feel like. Oh, you have a 1000 HP tuned Mitsubishi, pheeeeh, doesn’t matter, those shit ass Crown Victoria police cars can keep up with you easily. And so can higher heat level Chevy Corvettes, that on paper have up to 600 HP, but somehow keep up with absolute ease with a way more powerful car you have. Because they just so blatantly cheat.

And this cheating wouldn’t even be a problem on any level if you couldn’t get wrecked with such absolute ease. I’d even encourage them to be stupidly aggressive, at least it would mean you’d really have to try hard to evade them and since you’d not be limited by health, you’d at least try to work something out even if you were pushed around like a pinball. But not in this game. Health goes down and you just kept on getting busted. Game after game. To a point it’s just not even fun to even play it and becomes this thing you want to avoid. There is no thrill because you already know in advance interaction with cops means almost certainly you’ll get busted. Opposed to all the NFS games from the past where your chances of evasion were WAY higher although you could still get busted if you were stupid. But it was fine. Cops are meant to be the randomizing factor and something that spices things up, not something that sucks all the fun out of the game. And that’s exactly what they do in NFS Heat. They suck absolutely all fun out of the game.

To make matters further worse is how cops behave as whole. In basically all NFS games, if you were speeding, cops reacted to that. Here, you can drive 300km/h past a stationary or driving cop during Day Time and they won’t react. At all. During Night Time, you can do the same 300km/h thing past them and for as long as your Heat level is 0, they won’t react. Have just Heat 1 and they’ll go after you with entire arsenal of cheating bullshit tricks. I was like, hey guys, what’s the deal with cops not reacting and apparently, that’s “by design”. A design that makes cops not behave like you’d expect cops to behave. They are just there not doing anything unless you straight up crash into them. Which is basically never unless you purposely do it.

And what’s even more shocking is how every time you comment and criticize this absolutely garbage design on NFS subreddit, there are a always smartass morons who say “uh oh git gud and learn to drive noob”. Bitch, I was probably playing NFS games before you were even born and you’re gonna be saying this smug shit to my face? You don’t fucking have a clue what the purpose of the cops is in this game and you have no clue how good cops would and should feel like in the game. And I can tell they most certainty shouldn’t be this fuckery we have in NFS Heat. It made otherwise well designed game and turned it into absolute unfun (I made this word specifically for this game) horseshit.

And all because stupid Ghost couldn’t leave fucking player health out of the game that would ensure epic massive chases and doing so would eliminate cops being a problem with their absurd cheating. Hell, it wouldn’t even be a problem if they made them even more absurd at Heat 5 level just to keep things interesting long term.

I still just can’t understand how they fucked up NFS Heat game as whole so badly just by fucking up the design of cops. Graphics are amazing, the city is beautifully crafted, cars handle well and just feel good to drive and there are tons of them, sensation of speed is amazing , sound design is amazing and there is a lot to do on the map from collecting Street Art, collecting flamingos, smashing billboards, doing long jumps, there are alright races across different map even though Ai players suck pretty badly and they brought back normal car upgrading and tuning. It’s becoming a well rounded package at this point. And then they put these bullshit cops into the game and fuck it all up to a point it’s one of the worst NFS games I’ve played in my life because the fun factor is down in the shitter. HOW?! How could you people fuck up a game that could actually be one of the best NFS games in decades to a point it’s actually one of the worst ones of all times. You really have to commit and go out of your way to fuck something up this badly with just one aspect of the game that drags everything around it all the way to the bottom. And all this could be solved by either eliminating the player health or just make cops that are actually capable of being cops and not be this blatant obvious cheaters. And since fixing the second would require a lot of effort, removing player health should be the approach. But I already know for a fact this will never happen…

Need for Speed: Payback review

Ok, ok, I know it’s 3 months since release, but I couldn’t just take a piss at it 2 days after release, because in all honesty, that’s actually enough time to see what kind of game this is. But as a decades long NFS fan, I gave it a proper try and here is my review of this thing…

I actually wanted to make a full blown serious in-depth review of this game, but it’s such a steaming pile of shit I just can’t be bothered wasting my time to do it. I’ll probably still spend an hour or two writing this anyway, but whatevers…

Lets make a quick summary of goods and bads and then I’ll briefly tell you why I think so.

The Goods:

• Graphics are good
• Reasonably good car engine sounds
• Alright music selection for the most part (mostly in garage)
• Driving model is pretty good
• World is reasonably diverse with somewhat interesting layout
• Reasonably OK car visuals customization
• Reasonable car selection

The Bads:

• On release day it felt like an expensive 60€ Early Access game
• 3 months later, it still feels like an expensive 60€ Early Access game
• Missing tons of content on release day
• Still missing tons of content we already had in NFS series freaking 15 years ago
• Unfinished world
• Microtransactions
• Speed Cards
• Idiotic car upgrading
• Limited car levels
• Idiotic car tweaking
• Enforced car classes
• Stupid races with retarded enforced cars
• Racers are cheating scumbags
• No free roaming cops
• Cops are cheating scumbags
• Wonky car physics
• Offroad driving is weird
• Retarded multiplayer
• Cheesy and boring story
• Absolutely annoying “characters” chatter during driving
• Tons of inconsistencies and illogical stuff
• Visual car damage can’t be turned off
• It just doesn’t feel like Need for Speed anymore

I’ll now describe all the things in more details in same order as they are listed above. So you can follow exactly what I meant with that…

The Goods in more details…

So, lets start with the good pars… Graphics look good. Then again it’s Frostbite, getting any less would be a major disappointment. Car engine sounds are also good, although it feels a bit generic at times, mostly because of missing distinct turbo whistling or supercharger whining (because unlike in NFS2015, there isn’t any Supercharger part even available). Music in some parts is good, especially in garage. I like quite few songs there although still not on level of dedicated music created for the game specifically like in pre-2000 era. Driving model is pretty good, cars have a distinct differences in driving feel and whole driving model feels more like Screamer 2 or NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 which is more to my likings. Perfectly holding a drift line through corners is challenging and fun. It just works. Driving around the map is fairly interesting, it has a highway ring basically around it, it has a lot of elevation changes, straights and twisty roads, has flat desert plains, twisty hill roads, certain interesting points like the observatory peak, the dam, canyons, bridges, dense city… I wouldn’t say it’s a peak of possible design, but it’s interesting enough to be enjoyable driving around it. It’s not easy to remember because a lot of things look all the same without really distinct map parts or elements that would make roads memorable. This especially applies to city part. Car customizations are also pretty good. You can keep your cars all stock visually, you can tastefully modify just few details or you can rice the hell out of them and turn them into abominations. It’s your choice and game is not forcing anything on you so that’s fine. There is also reasonable selection of cars, from casual hatchbacks to million dollar hypercars. Can’t complain over that even though I wouldn’t mind if they added few others, like for example something from Tesla to spice things up and make them funky with a fast car that makes no engine noise. Would be interesting.

Now to the extensive The Bads list…

When it was released, it literally felt like a really very expensive Early Access game. It had tons of idiotic bugs, flaws, missing content that they are still adding to the game. And I’m not talking about small eye candy, they are adding whole new segments to the game like actually functioning multiplayer and multiplayer free roam. You know, something NFS2015 released 3 years before had on launch day. It feels like a very eager indie project by some unknown developer. In which case, I’d actually be impressed by the game if it was being sold for 20€ or so. But this is a game from EA. A multimillion AAA developer and this is the best they can make in late 2017? Come on! I also love it how everyone defends Ghost Games like idiots because apparently everyone thinks Ghost Games is some poor 3rd party studio being bullied around by evil EA. Stop doing this shit, Ghost Games IS an EA. Just because EA smacked a label on a group f their internal coders and designers, that doesn’t make them anything. They are still just EA with a different name sticked on top. I’ve bought Killing Floor 2 in Early Access few years ago, made by actual indie studio and it felt more polished and properly designed on Early Access release day than NFS:Payback was on actual proper final release day. Sure they are totally different types of games, but you can’t cheat the feel you get when you play one or another. And while they are adding content, the game is still missing pretty much all the cool things we already had in NFS games in the past.

Game world, while praised in the Goods part, it also has a desert segment on the southern to central part of the map where is literally a big slab of nothingness. I think it only has 1 gas station and few notable structures and that’s it. The 99% rest of it are just empty hills. It feels like they had plans to make something there too, but then somehow forgot it till game was already released and they just said, oh well, fuck it. This goes along with the Early Access remarks. Because it helps game feel like it wasn’t even finished, they just had to push it out because board members wanted moar profitz.

The worst part however is the fact EA shoved microtransations in this game and as a result, totally fucked up entire core of the game which is having fun with the cars, fiddling with them and driving around, trying to hoard all of them etc. What I’m saying here is that EA shoved microtransations in this game and as a result screwed up car upgrading entirely. There is no “car parts” shops or garage anymore. Instead, you get “Speed Cards” which replace the usual car parts you’d install in your cars. Instead of having 20 different parts, you get 6 Speed Cards classes that “upgrade” your car. Except it’s so monumentally retarded I can’t understand what retard at EA thought this is good for any kind of game. But got to get dem moneyz from dumb gamers. You’re not really in control of car upgrading, you drive up to Tune-Up Shop which randomly throws few cards at you and you can decide from that crappy selection which one to buy to slightly boost your car stats. And as you progress through game story, Tune-Up shops slowly give you higher and higher cards. After grinding races for hours you then piss away all the money on these stupid cards moving your car stats back and forth because these cards have stats connected in most retarded way. You buy a Turbo card upgrade and your car also somehow gets a boost or nerf of the brakes. Or buying a “better” block improves your top speed but somehow nerfs your nitro. You can also use random parts generator which is essentially a god damn slot machine in which you throw 3 fucking token points and it randomly assigns a Speed Card from one of 3 categories you pick. It’s so stupid it’s hard to describe it in words. And when you complete the story, if you want to max out all your cars, you have to go through all the 18 levels of Speed Cards each and every god damn time. You can’t just buy all the level 18 speed cards straight away. No, no, no, you have to always go from whatever each car starts at. And you can’t just do that in one go either. You have to leave Tune-Up Shop for 15 minutes so it “restocks” and you can try your luck again. I miss the days where buying car parts an cars was down to hard work and grinding money so you could then buy EXACTLY what you want. Instead, you actually have to grind even more because you then piss all your money and token points trying to upgrade your fucking car. You also get reward Speed Card for winning a race. They give you a choice between 3 “mystery” cards where I bet it literally makes absolutely no difference which one of 3 you pick, behind the front end, game would always assign you the same card even if you had chance to pick any other, so I always just hit confirm key on the middle one. And the card you got as a “reward” often only nerfed your car instead of upgrading it. You can look on NFS Subreddit what a shitshow that was and still is to this date, they just mildly patched it to make it less retarded. They also just released an upgrade like a day ago that introduces “Catch Up” packs to upgrade cars. So, I have a choice between 3 of them. First two literally nerf ALL my car stats. I’d literally pay 130.000 in-game money to make my car worse. The 3rd option is a 180.000 bucks upgrade that boosts car acceleration, top speed, but literally nerfs everything else almost down tot he bottom. Almost no nitro, no air time, shitty braking and so on. You can piss away 500.000 money on single car just because you have to go through tons of utterly useless shit that does nothing but nerfs your stats so you have to grind some more randomized Speed Cards shit in order to upgrade cars. It’s so stupid and makes whole game 100x worse grinding shit any NFS ever was to date. To make things worse, some cars that you may like, can’t even be upgraded past a certain level, making them useless for later in the game because you’re forced to buy better ones in order to even progress anywhere.

Car tweaking doesn’t fall down to installing tires with different properties. It literally doesn’t matter now anymore. You smacked that sweet oversized rear spoiler on your car? Guess what, it does nothing at all. Suspension stiffness, what’s that? All this is gone. I spent hours in NFS2015 fiddling with cars. The game was somewhat boring in general, but the stuff around cars was fairly ok. Installing different car parts actually affected how cars were handling, on top of extensive car tweaking which was dependent on car parts you actually had installed. NFS2015 had quick tweak sliders while free roaming which depend on installed parts. If your car was stock, you couldn’t really change much. But with racing brakes, better engine, turbo/supercharger, spoilers and tires, you could control brake bias, suspension stiffness, spoiler downforce, tire grip etc. In NFS:Payback, it literally doesn’t matter what you have installed, you have like 2-3 sliders for steering responsiveness, drivetrain mode like 2WD or 4WD mode and few other things that depend on car or class.

Talking of car classes, all races have enforced car classes. You need to buy a car dedicated for a certain class. For example, you can’t use a Race class car for Drifting. Or vice versa. In NFS2015 you could just use whatever car you had and just tweaked the parameters in such way to make rear end loose. Here, you need to buy sometimes even same car for different class. For example, I fancy the BMW M5. It’s not enough to buy it once, no, you’ll have to buy same car several times if you like it in order to satisfy the game requirements for each class. Now, place this multiplied spending on same thing on top of already retarded Speed Cards. This game is such a fucking grind fest it’s unbelievable. All in favor of fucking microtransactions because they need to make game as insufferable as possible for people to voluntarily decide to buy part tokens which are a slightly faster way of actually getting parts that aren’t total garbage. Whoever actually buys this shit is a fucking retard and you should be ashamed of yourself if you have done that, spending actual money on in-game content because developer made the game so insufferably lame to grind through that you feel desperate enough to do it.

Oh, and to make things even worse, it was not enough that they enforced car classes for races, they’ve gone beyond that and also enforced races within classes. Most notable being Drag class where you have races that require you to use a Drag car that steers like a crippled whale through city streets around fuck tons of 90° corners and bends. It was one of the most infuriating race I’ve ever experienced right after racing portion of Mafia game. To make pain worse, they made Ai racers so obviously cheating in this race it made me go ballistic. I was sweating with the damn handbrake trying to move the fucking Drag class car through god damn corners using handbrake and Ai opponents were flying through corners like they are driving a god damn agile Race class.  Like fuuuuuuuuck, why can’t you leave Drag racing be a fucking Drag racing? NFS Underground 1 had most fun and exciting Drag racing of all NFS games. Manual shifting, one shot nitro, flying through a straight street between traffic. The rails system actually made it more fun than having full control over steering. But no, they had to “upgrade” it with fuckery like normal race in a wrong car against cheating Ai. Bravo. Thats’ a great plan to make people like your game or race mode…

Now to the part I was most annoyed about and still am. NFS:Payback has NO free roaming cops. Sure, NFS2015 had them and were so boring and useless you could evade them in 30 seconds using stock crappy car. But they were there and they could improve them to a point of being good and fun like in Most Wanted 2005 or NFS Most Wanted 2012. Instead, despite of all the complains, they didn’t bother even tweaking them a bit. They just left them being totally useless. Fast forward to NFS2015 successor, NFS:Payback and you’ll find out there aren’t even any free roaming cops. None, nada, nill, zero. You can drive around at 350km/h and crash into everything and no one will be there to enforce the laws of the road. Cops only exist in limited range of missions, mostly for the Runner class, there are some Bait Crates which you can use to initiate pursuits and recently they’ve been releasing new extra cars all over the map that you have to find and then race back to the airfield to claim them. And that’s where you find out just what kind of cheating scumbags cops are as well. Not only their cars behave like they are on god damn rails, they also have ridiculous acceleration and their tactics are utterly idiotic. Most of the time I get busted by a fucking EMP bullshit that is so unpredictably idiotic you can’t even know how to evade it because you can do same thing twice and once it’ll bust you and other time it won’t. It make it even worse when you’re out in the offroad sections of a map and if they fire EMP on your there it’s basically a guaranteed bust. To make things worse, all these abandoned cars are piles of shit so it makes racing back to airfield not an exciting experience but the most infuriating shit ever. Ever since I started playing this game on release date, I haven’t been once busted by cops being capable like in god damn NFS Most Wanted 2005 from 12 years ago, no, I was always busted by some stupid dumb shit, be it stuck into some fucking rock in the middle of nowhere, getting rammed off the road over the cliff by illogically accelerating cop and busted when it resets you back, nailed by EMP with absolutely no ways of evading it or just getting fucked by wonky physics…

Yup, we had funky things happening in the past NFS games, but the amount of bizarre shit your car will do in this one is just outstanding. Enter a tunnel and hit the 3cm high curb int he middle and your car will spasm out into the air like you hit a god damn jumping ramp. Or flipping over for hitting a small bump in the road or spinning on the front bumper with rear raised int he air for half a minute. or hitting invisible ceilings because you somehow jumped too high or hitting invisible walls because they decided that collision box around ground rock should extend 50 kilometers into the air. When things work fine, the physics work alright, but there is just too much of this really dumb shit that shouldn’t be happening in regards to physics.

Which goes the same with offroad racing. Opponents again being on rails that you can’t move them from, but they can push your around like they have 100 tons and you’re in a fucking Fiat 500. To make things worse, it doesn’t matter what car you have or what tires you use or what car height is, ALL cars without exception have same speed and behave basically identical on gravel or dirt. You can have a Honda Civic or Mercedes G63, they’ll both ride at the same speed over offroad surfaces. That’s just dumb.

Now, lets talk multiplayer. It was bad on release and it’s still bad. Probably one of the worst in entire NFS history. Initially there was a mix of Race and Offroad class. You can’t just decide to play Race class modes because you fancy high speed tarmac racing. Nope, you’re again FORCED to do one offroad race between 2 Races. To make things even worse, I wasn’t aware of this in the beginning when I only had 1 upgraded car which was for the Race class. But no upgraded car at all for Offroad. So, I was forced to compete against others who had both cars upgraded. I was doing reasonably well in Race, but in offroad I was last because my car was shit. The ones game gives you as option if you have none at all are all stock and just as shit as not having a car at all. Later EA added Drift competitions and managed to cock that up again (what a surprise). They made drift points scoring higher if you’re in the front, leading the pack. What people did then was crash everyone into shit or push them ff road and complete the Drift race in front of the rest, scoring highest points. because a developer “Ghost Games” (still just EA) never heard of this thing called “GHOST CARS”. It’s a recording of your best race using a transparent car that can’t collide with you. Same could be done here. Opponents in your view would be a ghost car and you’d be a ghost car to them. Everyone could be on the same road at the same time, doing Drift race while applying the points boost for the one in the front, but with no means for people to ram each other off the road. I’m a fucking nobody and I thought of this solution in 2 minutes that a fucking AAA developer with allegedly professional game designers couldn’t. Fuck me sideways. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 multiplayer and while it was flawed, I’ve had tons of fun in it. It was just designed well enough for it to work and be enjoyable despite its flaws that never even got fixed. This here is just absolutely horrendously terrible. So bad I gave up after doing just once race and I have no wish of ever trying it again. It’s almost as if they never planned to have mutliplayer in this game and they decided to add it anyway pretty much 15 minutes before game was released to public.

Story, while I never demanded one or had any problems with any in racing games is rather cheesy and inconsistent here. For example, NFS Most Wanted 2005 had cool cut scenes that were funny and I couldn’t wait to see what more I’ll see. It also had a really nice plot twist that surprised me more than many heavy story driven games. And then here we have a bunch of missions and races stitched together in really weird way that again gives that weird sensation of playing a game made by very eager designers who don’t have the skills to materialize the ideas proper way. Everything I did to progress through story was just “whateverz”, just let me get over this already. And to make things more annoying is this stupid characters chatter when they just randomly “call you up” and ask you shit or talk to you for no reason what so ever. And they usually decide to do so when you need distractions the least. I’d almost prefer a tree style progression with unlock rewards like we had in NFS Hot Pursuit 2 with no story at all than the fact they spent tons of time doing all these animations and dialogs instead of making properly capable free roaming cops. I just can’t get over that fact…

There is also bunch of weird inconsistencies in this game of which most memorable was when you evade cops in some mission, totally obliterating some bridge across the highway. Just for it to be absolutely spotless 1 minute later. Or how in some part of the story someone says to you that all the cops in the city will be after you from now on and that you should lay low. Motherfuckrs, there are no free roaming cops. I could plow right back into the city, do donuts all over it and literally nothing happens. old NFS games that were story driven had this covered and done properly. You actually had heat level that affected how trigger happy cops are on your presence. But here they say one thing like thy had plans in doing it but then they got distracted by sweet Microtransactions and Speed Cards to be bothered doing it.

What also annoyed me was car damage. Now, the car damage doesn’t affect driving capabilities at all (well, not all). It just makes your lovely car look like absolute shit. But there is no way of turning this off to always have spotless beautiful car. You’ll be riding this wrecked pile of shit most of the time because lets be honest, you’ll be hitting shit in this game. What I meant with that “well, not all” above is that if you like the Hood Camera view, the one where you feel the closest to sitting in a cabin, it’s because when you hit a car into something, the hood will bulge upwards, obstructing your view, forcing you to use way too lower Bumper Camera or some top of the view one. And that’s fucking annoying. Giving players ability to turn off visual damage would solve this. But nope, can’t be bothered with that either.

Verdict

In all honesty, I haven’t played NFS game this bad. NFS Hot Pursuit 2 was a lackluster but I actually had fun with it. NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 was also a lackluster, but it was fun despite not having any story at all. NFS Most Wanted 2012, it was crappy copy of Burnout that ran like shit on pretty capable hardware, but at least it has properly capable cops and quite fun world so it was still exciting. NFS The Run, despite going absolutely the other way without any open world and car customizations and people bitched over that endlessly for it not having all that, it left a mark on me. The sheer experience of racing across entire United States was really exciting for me, especially because the world was so beautifully crated to really give you feel like you’re conquering large distances. Hell, even NFS2015 was quite fun because of how much you could fiddle with cars and just drive around, despite having absolutely useless cops and also cheesy boring story. Only game that relates to NFS:Payback garbage that it is is NFS Rivals. NFS Rivals was a weird one, it wasn’t absolutely bad as such, it was just so god damn forgettable I often forget where it is positioned chronologically in the NFS timeline. I know it had cops and that you could drive Ferrari after long time of not having them, but that was about it. Like I’ve said, it was just so damn forgettable it’s almost as if it didn’t even exist.

I’d actually say NFS Payback is a decent racing game if it was made by some unknown studio and being sold for even 40€. You’d have no expectations from them because they would have no reputation. And it would probably surprise me as a game worth considering. It does some elements right and a lot very wrong. But that would be OK for a no name studio releasing their first project. However, Ghost Games is an internal label of a group of EA programmers and game designers. This is an AAA (triple A) studio with millions to piss on development and having allegedly capable teams to do the job with perfection. Instead they made this mediocre thing that has nothing fun, no identity, it just feels out of place, made around bunch of eager ideas that never got finished. I gave me sensation like not a single person from development team has EVER played ANY older NFS game. Dropping all the cool stuff people always wanted is just inexcusable.

I’m a NFS fan since TNFS released back in the mid 90’s of the last century and I regret buying this game even for a cheaper price of 30€ from a 3rd party store (which is a reason why I couldn’t refund it). I was disappointed by certain NFS releases, but never to this extent as with NFS:Payback. I was always willing to forgive mistakes or changes and just accept them. But NFS:Payback is so monumentally flawed at its core it’s impossible to look away and ignore the flaws. NFS:Payback would actually be a fantastic game if they ditched the god damn Speed Cards that fucked it all up, if it had NFS Most Wanted 2005/2012 capable cops and car upgrading and tweaking from NFS2015 with classes of cars like in NFS:Carbon which weren’t enforced, but separation between Tuner, Muscle and Exotics made it refreshing and you could pick the right class for your driving style and stick with it. I could ignore the cheesy story, inconsistencies, bad design choices if NFS:Payback had that. But it doesn’t. And because of it it gets the label of being probably the worst NFS game in history of this franchise.

Only buy it if you are really so desperate in playing an arcade racer and even then, only do it with maximum possible discount. In all honesty, it would be difficult for me to pay 20€ for it, knowing I paid 20€ for far better games made by nobody indie teams consisting of 3 developers… This is a disgrace for EA and NFS franchise. Get your shit together EA. The Star Wars fiasco with same shitty microtransactions and this bullshit with NFS made me drop EA on the same list as I have Ubisoft. The DON’T EVER FUCKING BUY THEIR GAME one. I’m a NFS fanatic and since there aren’t any other decent arcade racing games around, I’ll most likely still consider next NFS game, but I’m not just gonna buy it like NFS:Payback. I’ll get a pirated copy first if I’ll have to and evaluate it properly. I don’t even trust their refund policy anymore at this point for it. And then I’ll decide if it’s actually worth the money or not.

Need for Speed: Payback’s dumb shit

I love arcade racings games that are just pure distilled fun. For example Disney’s (Black Rock Studios) Split/Second: Velocity was one of such games. No drama or massive PR campaigns around it. It just arrived in to the gaming scene and took my heart. It was just pure racing fun. But since then, there weren’t many fun arcade racing games (hint literally just Need for Speed left), the rest are simulations and realistic wannabes like Forza. So, NFS:Payback was released recently and I wanted to satisfy my Need for Speed. And here’s the top dumb shit they included in it (or removed good shit from it). Because 2017 ya’ll!

Speed Cards & Micro-transactions

The game doesn’t work anymore in the way that you buy a car, go to parts store or garage and simply buy parts and upgrade it to boost acceleration, top speed, nitrous capacity, brakes and aerodynamics. NFS 2016 was pretty good in this regard and I spend hours and hours upgrading and fiddling with cars. But nope, now you have some dumb ass “Speed Cards”. And they’d be somewhat bearable if they made any kind of sense. Instead, these stupid Speed Cards have dual statistics. For example, you buy an ECU and it somehow also boosts Brakes if it’s that kind of a card. Or you buy a Turbo card and it somehow boosts your Jump statistics. And if you use 3 of the same “brand”, it gives you extra bonus. And all of this is just a cover for even more retarded “loot crates”. They don’t call them this way, but thats essentially what it is. You can “trade in” unused cards to get tokens which you can then spend on randomizer bullshit which gives you some random card for 3 tokens. You can also buy these tokens for real money and then go through the randomizer to use tokens bought with real money to give you some random Speed Cards if you feel like you’re dumb fuck who literally spends real money for some pointless randomly generated goods. I never asked for this micro-transactions shit. And neither should you. Because it’s making games rotten. Get this shit out of our games. I might stop buying EA games entirely because of it. I stopped buying Ubisoft games entirely. You’re next EA if you continue with this shit (and it doesn’t look like they have any plans to stop it). I’m really sick and tired of this crap. Season passes, DLC’s and shit, fine. It’s real content you can decide for. You know exactly what you’re buying. But paying real money for some randomized garbage with zero actual content value is just dumb. I can’t believe people are so obsessed over it and all game devs are just rushing to include it. I see where this is leading and it’s the future I DON’T want.

No cops what so ever in free roam

When I complained last year for Need for Speed 2016 having absolutely useless cops in free roam, EA representatives assured me that “next NFS game will have badass cops again that will want to take you down!”. Their Twitter rep said almost exactly the same words to my inquiry if cops are any good like month or two ago. Just to realize game after its release that it does NOT have cops in free roam at all. You can forget about insane random cop chases that could last for several minutes. There aren’t ANY cops in free roam. What the fuck EA?! You go on and spend time adding some retarded stupid “Speed Cards” and “loot crate” like system, but you remove cops from Free Roam entirely? Only time I’ve met cops was in scripted “missions”. NFS 2016 was boring because cops were dumb and so slow they didn’t give ANY challenge even for a freaking stock starting car. In NFS:Payback, there simply aren’t any cops. And even those in scripted missions are rather dull and uninspiring. They just chug along and you bump into them till they crash Ugh?. NFS3 in 1998 had more capable cops and we ran the game on freaking Celeron 333MHz CPU’s. Or Most Wanted from 2005 which brought us one of the most epic open world cop chases I’ve encountered to date. Fast forward to 2017 with game running on hexa core CPU at 4.5 GHz and they can’t make some god damn cops that want to chase you if you crash into cars too much or destroy to many objects? C’mon, what’s this bullshit!? Congrats EA, you done fuck up the game at its core already. People bought NFS games because they were fun and they had cops that you could piss off and then wreck them in epic chases while sweating in some dark corner as your cooldown timer was counting down. All this is now gone and you’ve turned the game into a fucking casino with cars. Fuck you EA.

Second thoughts about this game…

Bad thing that I can’t refund the game because I bought it from alternative store. Good thing is I didn’t pay the EA’s asking price for it. Because that would be just a straight rip off. And don’t even think about buying a god damn “Deluxe” version for 80€. I’ll track you down and bitch slap you if you do.

I’ve had some racing across entire map and have done some missions and also done quite a lot of “activities”, but I’m already starting to feel the “boring” part kicking in. Especially seeing how much of this stuff I’ll have to go through to even get to the fun cars. Almost half of the list are some normie cars before you even get to Porsche’s and other more exotic stuff. NFS 2016 had the edge because of traditional car upgrading without stupid Speed Cards, it was exciting to buy new cars and upgrade them while saving for new car till you ran out of garage slots to buy them. And cars had tweaking that actually affected car handling and behavior a lot. While driving model by itself is admittedly pretty good in Payback, none of that fun stuff is in this game. And this is making me angry and disappointed.

If this is “returning to the roots” as EA said when they rebooted the NFS franchise back in 2015 (first on consoles and then 2016 on PC), we don’t seem to be thinking of the same Need for Speed roots apparently…

Need for Speed community is shit

Well, to be more specific, it’s shit in official NeedForSpeed subreddit. For the first time in history, EA (Ghost) is actually updating and adding content to the latest NFS 2016 game AFTER its release. And I though, awesome, finally devs might listen to recommendations and ideas. Just to be slammed in the face by the most moronic attitude I’ve ever seen in any game community.

The game originally shipped with just 5 garage spots. You could buy 5 cars and that was it. People complained about lack of garage space and they added 5 more via virtual warehouse slots from where you can exchange 5 more cars, totaling 10. Guess what, in a game which offers over 30 cars, you’ll probably want to buy all of them. So I’ve opened a thread there asking for 100 garage slots (it was just a figure of speech for enough slots to buy all available cars) and while vast majority of people agreed, there were retarded special snowflakes who got this bizarre idea in their heads that being able to buy all available cars will somehow ruin the emotional connection with cars and the depth of the game.

Bitch, please, the game has no emotional connection when you can’t even fiddle with the car the way you want it. Half of the cars can only be modified via car paint and rims. The remaining half has like 2 items max for SOME areas of the car. There is not a single car I own currently that can have ALL parts modified. There just isn’t any. So, how can I ever get attached to a creation that’s never the way I want it?

And then those same retards brought up idea that having just few cars opposed to all of them is somehow beneficial to everyone. Motherfucker, if you limit the number of cars, it’s only catering to your fucking taste. The rest of us who want to buy more cars are basically fucked. But if there is enough slots to buy ALL cars, you can still own just 2 if you fucking want. But no, apparently he has to be limited by a game, otherwise that fucktard is incapable of owning just 2 or 3 cars. Like whaaaaat!? And he keeps on going like a fucking broken record, calling in mods and everything because I apparently offended his feefees when I disagreed with him.

And then he digged out a message posted by NFS dev who said it’s “too much work” to raise a fucking already implemented limit. Holy fucking shit, if changing a limit variable from 5 to 50 or 100 is too much work for a professional coder, then what the fuck are you doing at your job? I could teach a baboon to code in C++ and make him reverse engineer whole game faster than these idiots would consider adding something as simple and beneficial to all players as raising a fucking garage slots limit. Fucking hell, no wonder no one fucking likes EA, they still have no fucking clue how to make gamers happy.

Bottom line, this is the first time I’ve witnessed in my entire life where community wants stagnation instead of progress. And I’m not even talking game changing progress that might be disliked by some people if it affects gameplay too much. This change would not affect gameplay at all and yet there are idiots against it like it’s threatening their very existence. Fuck me. I was already getting bored by NFS 2016, getting all cars was my last go-to achievement goal, but since it’s official now regarding garage slots (meaning there won’t be any), fuck this game and fuck the stupid community. It has a dead multiplayer anyway and it hasn’t been out yet for 2 months on PC, so that alone speaks volumes…

Need for Speed 2016 review

So, here we are again. The new Need for Speed. I call it NFS 2016 because this is when PC got it, it was actually released long ago in 2015 on consoles. But since EA wanted to ensure better PC support, they postponed the PC release date to mid March 2016. But in general, this is a franchise reboot. So, no sub title or number for it. Just Need for Speed.

And off the start, I’ll just say that my experience is mixed as a whole. Part of me loves the game and other part of me hates it quite badly…

Visual and audible presentation

It starts with the presentation itself. Graphics wise, the game runs latest Frostbite engine. It looks spectacular and there is just no way in denying that. The engine is very fast and looks amazing. The game is set in Underground-ish world so you can expect night time only with lots of glare, reflections, neons and rain. The city is huge and has different areas from high speed highways, winding hill roads to dense packed city streets through central city or through industrial parts. The city on the other hand is kinda forgettable. Maybe it’s because of the night or my poor memory that is incapable of memorizing the streets. But I think it’s mostly because of the darkness which just sort of swallows the memorable buildings, landmarks and sections and in the end it all looks very similar. Dark and reflective. Which is strange, NFS Underground 2 was like that as well and yet I could memorize whole city very quickly. Hell, if I close my eyes I can drive through it in my mind and I haven’t played that game for 10 years at least.

Second thing, the audio. While car noises are very distinctive, I miss a bit louder engine noise and more distinctive supercharger/turbocharger whine. It’s there, but you really have to pay a lot of attention to hear it. And kinda kills the atmosphere. I want to hear the engines roar. Every petrol head loves that. But in general it’s pretty good. This experience however is again ruined by atrocious music design and usage. At first I was all thrilled when I first heard legendary tracks from old NFS games in the garage. But that soon became an issue by itself because those tracks are only being used in the garage, but never in the All Drive world or during races. While driving, I got the feeling there were 3 generic uninspiring forgettable tracks playing on some crappy 10 watt cassette player. I just don’t understand what the hell they were thinking. To me it seems like they finished the game and remembered they forgot to insert any music. So they picked bunch of old tracks and composed some crap for the driving part. And they were ok with it somehow. Very lazy EA.

Car driving model

Now, lets talk about the most important part of every racing game. Driving model. I’m happy to report they’ve done a good job here. Cars have very distinctive behavior and feel. They also behave vastly different depending on the drive type, FWD, RWD and AWD cars behave very differently and in general, they feel very good on the road. With wide range of car handling tweaks you can really tune car behavior to your taste and driving style. You can make them super sticky or you can make them crazy drifty. I like them somewhere in between. I need the cars to be responsive on corners and easy being thrown into a precise and controlled drift, but sticky enough so I get a fast acceleration when straightened. Only thing that I really dislike about car handling and drive model are the collisions with the world, something we’ve been complaining for quite a while and we are still waiting for the fix. A lot of times, you grind against the wall while racing and even though the wall is seemingly smooth, you just get stuck into it like you’ve hit a wall corner. I don’t know what goes wrong within the physics engine at that moment, but this shouldn’t be happening. I’ve never seen anything like it in any older NFS game. It was always just dramatic deceleration and lots of sparks, but that was it. Here, you’ll just crash for no reason simply for grinding against a wall at very tiny angle. It just feels awkward and weird and I really hope they’ll fix it in the future, because it’s a really annoying one. Same goes for slightly harder hitting of the wall sideways. It should destabilize the car and slow you down, but here you just crash most of the time. And I think this is still related to the same collision bug.

Cars customization

After car wide range of handling tweaks, we should also talk about car customization. And here is again the part which makes the game this weird mixed experience. They bragged about all this Underground-ish culture, customization of cars, bunch of stuff to do to your car. The reality is, car customization is VERY limited and horrendously clumsy. Each car has just 1 body kit available. ONE. And most of them look horrendous. C’mon, even The Run had 3 or 4 body kits and most of them were actually quite nicely designed from mildly aggressive to space looking. You want to spice up your car to be unique on the streets? Most of the time and I mean 80% of the time, you’ll see text “No parts available” when you move around your car. I’ve bought 8 cars so far ranging from tuners to muscle cars and sports cars and not a single one of them can be fully customized visually. Not even bloody Mitsubishi Lancer Evo which is a definition of a ricer. I understand Ferrari being anal about customizations on their cars, but I don’t understand it for all others. And even those that do have parts available, you’re again limited to mostly really ugly bits, one type of bumper, one type of side skirts, really butt ugly exhausts, no parts for lights and those that are available are stock lights with yellow cross taped over them (what!?) and 2 sets of identical lights. I shit you not, Lotus Exige S has stock front lights, yellow taped over ones and 2 sets of IDENTICAL carbon fiber. And that’s it. Anyone who played Underground 2 knows there were like 10 types of headlights and like 8 light temperatures from halogen to coldest xenon, at least 6 types of sideskirts and bumpers for front and rear. None of it is in this game 12 years or so later. Remember the dynamic modification of car parts from NFS Carbon where you could sculpt car parts? Well, this game has none of that either.

What they’ve put lot of effort into is car painting and stickies/vinyls for them. You can paint cars in countless many ways and people make all sorts of amazing designs on forums and on Need for Speed subreddit. But again, I’ve tried it myself and it’s so god damn clumsy I couldn’t be bothered to spend 5 more minutes in the editor. And I’ve just wanted to paint my BMW in the M colors from back to white front. Keyboard controls for it are utterly moronic, clumsy and imprecise. Shuffling vinyls through layers and doing symmetry on both sides of the car was a dreadful and painful experience. Aaargh, just awful. I know Underground series, NFS Most Wanted and Carbon had more basic vinyls systems, but they were at least usable and something inviting to do. In NFS 2016, it just isn’t.

The biggest grudge I have with the garage is possibility to rotate view when picking car parts. Camera is always locked when buying parts and you just can’t check how it looks from far away or at different angle. Because of this I’ve spent like 10 minutes shuffling rims back and forth because I just couldn’t decide at the given angle. Or for the body kit. You only see the car from the front. You can’t even know how the car will look like from behind until you purchase it and go into free look mode where you can rotate the view. When you waste 8000 credits for some crappy ass ugly body kit that looks horrible from behind, you’ll know what I mean. That’s so idiotic it makes my blood boil.

The Police and opponents

Every Need for Speed game that’s about illegal street racing also has to have cops in it. And I’m happy to report they are in this game! What I’m not happy to report about is how utterly crappy, incapable and boring they are. Not only they are so hard to find in the city they had to place police station icons on the map so you can even find them to complete daily challenges which usually involve something with the cops. And not only this, they also drive worse than my grandma and she’s not even driving a car. At all. They are slow and to do challenges or even initiate a police chase you have to intentionally crawl around at 60 km/h for 15 minutes and keep hitting them until you reach at least heat level of 3-4 where they can at least keep up with you for 2 seconds. They use some crappy Crown Victoria grade garbage and they don’t even bother apprehending you. And only way of getting caught is to get stuck in the impenetrable roadblocks by some stupid random chance. Gone are the insane high speed chases through downtowns and highways from Most Wanted 2005 where cops upgraded to Corvettes at higher heat levels, they started using Rhino SUV’s for roadblocks instead of normal cars and they even used helicopters to prevent you from evading at high speeds and a duo of Rhino SUV heading straight at you head on. There is just none of that here. Roadblocks are now just bunch of blue wooden crap with lights across the road that slightly slows you down when you hit it. And that’s that. Not even 1 police car next to it. Or concrete blocks with a police van. It’s the worst attempt at doing cops I’ve seen in my whole entire life. And with this part so horribly nerfed and broken, game simply doesn’t give the player that thrill of doing hot pursuits, because they are so dreadful I can’t even be bothered with them. I just do them for easy money for daily challenges and that’s that. Where in Most Wanted 2005, I could initiate a chase and have amazing fun in it for 10-15 minutes at a time. You can just forget any of that here. EA, seriously fix this shit. Like NOW.

Ai controlled racing opponents aren’t much different to be quite honest. Maybe I haven’t noticed it all that much myself, but I’ve seen quite a lot of complaining by others. The Ai ranges from retarded amoeba to idiotically capable drivers. They can be so bad you leave them behind by a lot in points or distance, but they can also be stupendously good for no logical reason. Especially in those timed circuit races where you have to get best lap time. The catch up system is a bit broken and needs some adjustment to make them feel more challenging, but not robot like.

The Story

I know not many people expect story in racing games, but if we again go back in time, Most Wanted 2005, Carbon and The Run tell a different story. And I loved those games for it. Especially Most Wanted 2005 which had really iconic and unforgettable cut scenes with original 3D game world and live actors merging. And I was very enthusiastic at first because the initial intro sequence brought back those memories. Until I realized it was just that. And that every next video sequence doesn’t really tell any story, just bunch of people doing some random almost unrelated stuff. And that’s suppose to tell me a story of some sort? Sigh. There is a hint of it, but it’s so uninspiring I don’t even care about it anymore. Your so called friends keep calling you and texting you and you keep showing up to places they say you should meet them up. And that’s all there is to the story. The cut scenes don’t interconnect races and happenings outside of the racing as they used to in Most Wanted 2005. One part of the game is racing and the other are video cut scenes and chats through phone calls. And they don’t give much impression they are related to one another. So much potential and they wasted it all. Even if some missions were scripted, at least it would be interesting and not this dull grinding of races. Hell, I absolutely loved QTE’s in The Run and I’d be the last person to appreciate QTE’s in any game. But I loved it in a freaking racing game. It brought story and action between races and it was freaking great. Why wasn’t that used here? Imagine all the possibilities with the cops, with other gangs with your “crew” of race friends. But nope, none of it is in this game.

Multiplayer

Lastly, the multiplayer which people say it even has lobbies, but I have yet to find them. You can invite people to races and even make crews somehow and even voice chat with people. Or so others say. In my experience, game has no lobbies. There is no menus like with NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 where you picked a game type, car class and waited for game to drop you in a lobby. Then you’ve waited for people to join up and start a game. It was very straight forward and it just worked. Instant races one after another. There is no such thing in this game. It’s again so clumsy and stupid I hardly ever do any race with actual people. And most of them initiated by others are Drag race or Drift which I’m not really interested in as much as I am in Sprint or Circuit races. I can’t selectively play just those. And that’s so stupid and infuriating. Stop making this seamless offline/online mode because it just doesn’t work. It never worked in Rivals and never will. Just bring back the damn normal menu lobby like in Hot Pursuit 2010 and be done with it. Doing random Sprints or Outrun races with real people is nice, but it just doesn’t outweigh the overall crappy and clumsy multiplayer.

Verdict

Like I’ve said, there are great parts of the game and there are really shitty ones. I keep wanting to give it a good review because I’m a huge fan of NFS series, but I just can’t because this game is mediocre at best. Which is very sad to say the least. I’m having some good time in it, but mostly me fiddling with various cars, their handling to emulate NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 drifty cornering and just driving around with no purpose, because I like doing that. But the game, if I judge it based on content it provides, it has very little substance. And for a reboot of the franchise, I just can’t shake off the feeling developers behind it don’t have a clue what Need for Speed franchise even is or should be. It’s giving me the impression not a single person from game development team has actually ever played any of the old (good) legendary NFS games like constantly mentioned NFS Most Wanted 2005. And that’s most likely the reason why it’s not as good as it could be. You make a reboot by taking all the best bits of old games and start all over. Not by dumbing it down or entirely scraping most of the good stuff we already had and loved in old NFS games. Because when you do it like that, you’ll end up with a mediocre or even really bad game.

Only thing that brings tiny bit of confidence is, unlike other times, EA or more specifically Ghost Games folks are actually reading feedback from people and are fixing stuff as well as adding new content (recent update brought expanded garage and new Drag racing mode as well as bunch of fixes). It most probably won’t change things like story, but there is a possibility they’ll fix moronic cops which could up the game value by at least 10x as far as I’m concerned. I love cop chases and so do other people. Bringing in more car customization parts is also a possibility. So, unlike other times when game remained the same after release, this game will evolve for the better. Slowly and in small steps, but at least something is happening.

It’s not a great game, but it’s not absolute crap either. It has its moments. Just decide if those that aren’t crap are important enough to you to justify the purchase of this game.

Disable film grain effect in Need for Speed 2016

Not sure why this isn’t in the game’s graphics settings, but if you want to get rid of weird shimmering effect on reflections and world in general, you’ll have to disable film grain effect for this game. It may add a certain gritty feel to the game, but not everyone like it and like I said, it creates some sort of minor artifacting on the screen which can be annoying sometimes. I’ve made two screenshots, but on still images, you really have to zoom in to see the difference where in real-time gameplay, it’s easily noticeable. So, best to try both and decide yourself which effect you like the most. I hope Ghost will add this setting to the in-game graphics settings so you don’t have to fiddle with setting files using Notepad…

How to:

Go to…
.\Documents\Need For Speed\settings

…open PROFILEOPTIONS_profile using Notepad.

Search for text 3GstRender.FilmGrain using Ctrl+F function (text searching field).

It will look like this:

See that 1 at the end of 3GstRender.FilmGrain? You have to change it from 1 to 0 (zero).

In the end, it should look like this:

Click File and Save. Play the game 🙂

 

NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 Car Unlocker Patch

I got kind of a nostalgia bug recently and decided to try NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 again online. I remember having tons of fun for years but like since 2014, I haven’t played it anymore. Till today. There are actually people still playing this game, 6 years after release! And it was quite fun. Hot Pursuit mode was infuriating like before, but normal Race mode was super fun. It brought back so many memories.

Anyway, while I was in the process of setting up the game I’ve noticed I still have a special patch that unlocks tons of cars that are otherwise hidden away from regular players.

Hard top Dodge Viper GTS, hard top Audi R8, hard top Cheverolet Corvette Z06, hard top Lamborghini Reventon, hard top Aston Martin Volante. There are also Porsche Panamera Turbo and Maserati Quattroporte which were previously only available as Pursuit cars. Plus many many more.

What’s also cool about this patch is that these special cars appear for other players even if they don’t have this patch. So, your selection of hidden cars doesn’t depend on others also having the patch. Though I’m sure they’ll be confused a bit how you can drive these cars and they can’t. 😛

It’s incredibly hard to find this patch since its “official” webpage went offline. So, I’ve decided to share it with you guys. Maybe some of you will still find it useful. Enjoy.

DOWNLOAD:
NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 Car Unlocker Patch

Need for Speed 3: NextGen released!

After long time, Need for Speed 3: NextGen patch has finally been released!

RejZoR and Evgeny Vrublevsky bring you the old epic racing classic from the late 90’s with latest Windows support, new enhanced graphics support, new visuals, new features, less restrictions and more fun!

Highlights

• Proper full support for modern Windows operating systems, including latest Windows 10 in 32 and 64bit
• Fully portable, no more ties to the registry
• Full widescreen support with resolutions up to 4K (UHD) and beyond
• Enhanced Direct3D 6 mode with advanced fogging and lighting effects
• No Ferrari/Mercedes licensing restrictions in Hot Pursuit mode
• New 3DSETUP_NXG for easy rendering mode selection
• Ability to add and drive traffic cars (optional)
• DirectSound3D/EAX support via audio wrapper
• Easy to use patcher/installer

New dedicated NFS3: NextGen micro page:

https://rejzor.wordpress.com/need-for-speed-3-nextgen

You can also access NFS3: NextGen micro page directly through My Projects menu above.

Enjoy!

NEXTGEN NOSTALGIA… SOON!

A small teaser on a project me and Evgeny Vrublevsky were working on for almost entire week. We were working on our own versions separately for ages, but this time we joined forces in a very successful joint project of two gamers who just can’t let go those epic moments behind… 🙂

It’ll be a journey full of shiny metal, smoking tires, screaming engines accompanied with blue and red lights and sirens. It’ll bring nostalgic joy in hearts of all racers who loved the late 90’s era!

This time with full support for modern Windows operating systems, 32bit, full resolution, wide screen support with enhanced environmental visual effects. It’s something I’ve dreamed of for more than a decade!

SOON! 😀

NFS3 Modern Edition updated to v1.04!

Hello everyone, just want to let you all know I’ve updated my NFS3 Vista Edition patch to version 1.04 today. It has been a while, but I’ve discovered few issues so why not update it 🙂

What’s new in version 1.04?

– Installer/patcher renamed to “NFS3 Modern Edition”, because Vista is kinda dead now and it looked silly because of it.

– Removed Read-Only attribute from ALL game files. This might help in certain rare cases when files are desired to be modifiable.

– Enabled all Mercedes and Ferrari cars for Hot Pursuit mode (you need to select Extra content package during installation). Previously, all Mercedes and Ferrari cars were disabled due to licensing policy by those two carmakers. I hacked the car resource files, so the game now allows them. You’ll now be able to take Ferrari 550 Maranello, Ferrari F355 Spyder, Mercedes SL600 and Mercedes CLK-GTR against those annoying cops.

Future plans for v1.05?

I’m actually planning one more update which will require some more time to make, but I need to first test how it behaves in-game. Version 1.05 will provide additional Extras package inside the installer that will give you player-only selectable traffic cars. Currently, Ai drivers can also select those crappy traffic cars when you decide to drive one. But the extra package will give you option for those traffic cars to be player selectable only, so the Ai racers will only be able to drive original sports cars and players will still be able to pick traffic cars like they can now. It’s a small content update, but I guess it will allow you to have a bit more challenging races. School bus vs El Nino for example 😉

NFS3 Modern Edition page (for update download):
https://rejzor.wordpress.com/nfs3-patch

Have fun!