Need for Speed: The Run Interview
With EA Black Box's Jason DeLong
EA has been giving gamers a lot of racing games these last couple years, with three (arguably four) full arms of developers each putting out their own range of titles in the Need for Speed series. The newest one comes from some of the original developers in the series at EA Black Box. In this interview, I got the chance to talk to producer Jason DeLong about what's going into NFS: The Run.
AtomicGamer: What is Need for Speed: The Run and what makes it different from previous NFS games?
Jason DeLong: Need for Speed: The Run is all about a cross-country race from San Francisco to New York. It applies a few things that are kind of new to Need for Speed. One is for the first time in quite a while we've actually got a story attached to the game for a little motivation to the player. We've got a real [protagonist] in the game for the first time; you never played as a character in Need for Speed before. We've always done the racing, and movies that I won't say are cheesy, [but] maybe don't stand the test of the time where the actors talk to the camera as if you are the racer.
Going to the Frostbite 2 engine, the fact that we could actually integrate characters and racing into the game so it all looks top quality, as it should, allowed us to tell a story in a new way that we haven't been able to before. But most importantly it's about the race and that epic journey across the US, the race from San Francisco to New York, really trying to faithfully recreate the US as best we can. We're also going to real locations for the first time. In Need for Speed we've always been inspired by these great locations in the US, and around the world but they've never actually been the real locations.
In the race across the US, you experience it all from the race across the urban centers to the foothills outside of San Francisco into Yosemite National Park, the deserts going through Nevada, then into the Rocky Mountains and so on, really experiencing the breadth of the journey across the US.
AG: Obviously, you don't drive for two days straight all the way across the US. As developers, how do you break it up, and what kind of events are there?
JDL: The story mode is broken up into ten stages. Each stage is a familiar geographical location of the US. We start in San Francisco at Altamont, we move into Yosemite National Park, we then go into Death Valley in the desert. Each one is sort of inspired by different areas across the US, but it is important to convey that it is always a journey across the US. We're always moving from point to point; you're never doing laps in a city and moving onto the next place - you're trying to get to New York as quickly as possible. There are ten stages and after certain stages, the opportunity is given to switch cars or experience a story moment that forces the protagonist Jack Rourke out of the car. His objective is to get back behind the wheel as quickly as possible because he has to win the race. Then you get to force a car change and you're back in the race again.
AG: I noticed that the Frostbite 2 engine is being used, which is also powering Battlefield 3 this fall. What does Frostbite 2 bring for Need for Speed? I'd didn't think it would really be that great for a game like this.
JDL: At Black Box, the last Need for Speed game we made was several years ago. We've had a good two and a half, three years to develop this and we knew what we needed to do was to really look at our technology and make sure it was maturing with the brand. We looked at some third-party engines, we looked at rebuilding our own engine from the ground up for the next-generation consoles, or, what else is out there? So we talked to our friends at DICE, and they worked with us to integrate our racing and physics engine into Frostbite.
What it brings to us is a lot of things. It's a great tool for developers, it's an amazing content creation tool, and it allows us to create more content than we ever have before. For example, we have over 300 kilometers of track in the game, which is more than three times what you've seen in any previous Need for Speed. We really did want to sell this epic cross-country journey. The visuals are astounding, you've played the game for a while, you can probably tell us - one of the best-looking racing games if not the best-looking racing game out there. [It's got] killer audio, and it really just allows us to iterate and make a lot of content very quickly; there are breathtaking visual effects, and for just the whole package of wanting to sell this cross-country journey - Frostbite 2 was the best option for us.
AG: It's an arcade racer, so what mechanics are in there to make it more fun than pressing gas and not hitting the wall?
JDL: You say arcade, I'd call it "action racing" - six to one, half dozen to the other. What it comes down to is the handling of the cars, wanting to make sure the cars behave in a believable way, but not in a simulation way, if that makes sense. The idea is that we don't want people to feel like these cars behave [in an annoying way] - if you got behind the wheel of a 700 horsepower vehicle in Florida, you'd probably do three donuts and hit a wall. Obviously we don't want that to happen, but at the same time we want to make sure the cars are fun to drive and believable. But it's also easy to pick up and play, you can get behind the wheel quite easily, but they're difficult to master so there's definitely a learning curve as you're learning the intricacies and handling of each vehicle.
But as an action racer, we have things that wouldn't exist in reality, such as nitrous that continuously refills over time that you can reuse, and certain driver skills that we employ to help out the driver as well. The idea is that we're not full simulation, but we're not full arcade either. The handling is sort of in-between.
AG: I noticed that in single player and the multiplayer, drafting and the boosting off the draft - the slingshot - is hugely powerful. Is it as powerful as you want it right now?
JDL: It's a skill that [the player] acquires over the course of playing the game as you level up, and it's meant to be an additional bonus beyond the nitrous, so for the really skilled driver who gets to know how to use drafting really effectively, it can be an additional bonus for driving. It's not just about hammering the nitrous button, it's about drafting and using it to get further ahead.
We found in our playtesting at the office, especially with the implementation of Autolog, that you're always trying to compete against your friends, whether you're in The Run or in the Challenge Series, and you start to see times that just seem unbelievably fast and you try to figure out how people set those times. You realize they're not just using nitrous - they're using nitrous and then they're drafting in order to shave seconds off the time as they go forward. It's an additional user skill that we've employed that's really beneficial to help shave time off the clock in the end.
AG: Let's talk about multiplayer. It's very chaotic, and it can be a complete Charlie Foxtrot, but you guys are still working on some of the traffic and the weirdness we saw?
JDL: Sure, this event we're running right now, there's still some tweaks we need to do with [the multiplayer]. The idea is that we do want it to be very quick-hit, not entirely Charlie Foxtrot, but at the same time we do want to have an element of chaos in it. The idea is that each one of these races in the playlists is relatively short; it's two-and-a-half to three minutes. It's quick-hit, get in and get out. You're not waiting in lobbies - you choose to join a playlist and a session, and you're in [the race] right away. You're in last place, but you have some tools at your disposal to help you remain competitive. It allows you to get more XP for the game as you're playing, as both single player and multiplayer give you XP and driver levels.
The idea is that it does want to be a little bit chaotic and you'll also see, that when you finish a multiplayer session we give accolades out to people. They're based on any number of things; it could be you had the fastest top speed, passed the highest number of racers, avoided contact with the traffic, or traded paint with people the most. The idea is that your bragging rights for how much you've played on multiplayer is seen in these accolades and badges you're rewarded as you play.
AG: We did some online play and I was in a little 1980s Volkswagen Golf GTI, and it was super-fun because it was just as fast as all these other supercars. I didn't go through the full list, but how many older, sort of goofy-looking cars are there? Because those seem to be the favorites in online play in other games like Forza. Everybody's putzing around in Rabbits.
JDL: Yeah! The car culture in general is very broad. In our game we wanted to touch on how in a cross-country race you'd expect to see everything from the garage-tuned Golf GTI to the Bugatti Veyron. So each one of these cars is special in its own way and is representative of car culture and what people think are cool. We do have the exotic supercars, we do have, as I mentioned, things like the Bugattis and Lamborghinis, but we also have cars like Golf - the 1981 Golf GTI is, amongst tuners and car fanatics, considered one of those cars that people really have a strong affinity for. Obviously you can't put the two head-to-head and expect the type of victory that one would hope for with the GTI, so we have to bend the rules a little bit and have things like the Need for Speed edition of a GTI. It's hyper-tuned to be a little bit faster. But for us, it's really important that Need for Speed is about cars first and foremost, so we want to make sure that we are always being very representative about car culture as a whole. Make sure that all "factions" of car culture, if you will, are feeling represented.
AG: We were just playing a pre-release version with everything unlocked; in the full game, how do you unlock cars in the full game?
JDL: The unlock system is based on several things. You have a fair suite of cars out of the gate; when you play The Run [in single player mode], you get to choose from a series of fairly high-tier cars. Jack Rourke, the main character in the game, is a car collector, so he has pretty good cars. It's not the idea of starting with Tier 1 and working your way up. But you unlock cars through playing The Run, so obviously, you get further into the game, you see new cars, those get unlocked for play in multiplayer and in the Challenge Series. You also unlock more in the Challenge Series itself, so as you're playing through, you're getting higher tiers of cars. You also unlock cars through the Driver XP system, so as you level up you get special cars awarded to you, and through playing online as well, so in the multiplayer playlists, you unlock cars by completing objectives. There are lots of different ways you can unlock all the cars. And it keeps people coming back and trying to get further and further.
And when you beat Autolog recommendations, [you get cars, too]. So if you have a friend who beats one of your times, you get a recommendation that says, "this person beat you, now play to take the title from him". When you beat a certain recommendation, you get rewards as well. You unlock certain cars only through Autolog as well.
AG: For everyone out there that hasn't been keeping up, what's the release date?
JDL: November 15th in North America and November 18th in Europe.
AG: That's a crowded day.
JDL: It is! It's a busy quarter.
AG: There's no Tuesday that's going empty from here on out until early December.
JDL: Yeah, it's a busy time, but we're really pleased with where we've ended up with the game. We think the quality is really high, and I think people that aren't sure what to expect with this game will be very surprised with what they see.
AG: That's all I've got for you. Thanks, Jason!
JDL: Alright, thanks for coming out!
Thanks to Jason DeLong, Black Box, and EA for giving us the chance to find out more about Need for Speed: The Run ahead of its November 15th release date for 3DS, PC, PS3, 360, and Wii.
