Need for Speed: The Run Preview
Back at E3 this last June, Electronic Arts took the wraps off of their latest racing game, Need for Speed: The Run for the first time for many of us journalists, and I came away mildly disappointed. The game felt a little shaky and just a little schizophrenic, what with its arcade racing and on-foot adventures out in Quick Time Event-land. But at a recent EA event, we got the chance to see The Run in its near-final form, and while it wasn't all sunshine and roses, the game looks, feels, and plays much more like a complete package than I remember. I'm still skeptical, but a lot of that is because other racing game developers have been upping the ante in huge ways over the last year or so.
The Run has you playing as an actual character with a name this time, a first for Need for Speed. Jack Rourke is the protagonist, and he's got one of those young, tough-guy sneers that is perfectly at home in one of the Fast & Furious-type movies. He's not exactly likable, but I think that's actually the point. He's invited to join a race to win millions of dollars, but it's not your normal, everyday jaunt around a closed track: it's an illegal cross-country stint from San Francisco to New York (yes, like a movie you may have heard of). There are no laps or time attack runs in this game's single player mode: it's just taking to American highways to drive at ridiculously unsafe speeds in some of the world's most impressive cars.
The game is structured in ten stages, each representing an area of the US, like the Rocky Mountains or the farm roads of Illinois on the way to Chicago. Each stage is broken up into multiple events, and the idea is that Jack had a bit of a bad start in San Francisco, so he's catching up and passing just enough racers as he progresses to stay in it - for example, everyone after 250th place gets kicked out of the race in Vegas, so from California into Nevada, he's trying to make it above the cutoff. Some events have you passing other racers and making sure you keep them in your rearview when you cross that stage's finish line; others have you battling specific tougher racers, some of which you're introduced to through cutscenes, as you travel across the country. Still others involve the cops, and some will actually take Jack out of the car - although these sections make heavy use of Quick Time Events, and I really feel like these would have been better simply as cutscenes.
The racing is pretty much exactly what you'd expect out of Need for Speed: arcade-style racing, nitrous boosts, and ridiculous speeds up to and over 200mph. Players now increase their driver XP and level up in any mode they're playing in, and new level-ups reward you more cars as well as new abilities. One such ability is drafting, where you can get in the slipstream behind a car, and if you stay in it long enough, a meter fills up and you then slingshot out at a higher speed so you can pass them. In both single player and in mutliplayer modes, this ability was immensely powerful, giving me huge boosts in speed; I questioned producer Jason DeLong about this ability and whether it might have been too powerful, and his answer seemed to be in the realm of "it's fine". So there you go!
The Challenge Series is another set of events where the developers broke apart the story mode game and started having fun making up specific scenarios with cars and events. Take that Shelby with its terrible handling onto an icy mountain road where the guardrails break away upon being hit! Take on cops out in the cornfields! How about a tight city race through crowded streets? I didn't get too much of a chance to fiddle around with these events, but what I saw told me that this is where a lot of the Autolog back-and-forth will happen.
If you're not aware of what Autolog is, it's Need for Speed's way of doing a vastly-enhanced leaderboard system where you're constantly trying to beat the times of people on your friends list in the single player and Challenge modes. Now, you'll see constant updates of your opponent's time rather than having to wait until the end of a race to see if you beat him (although, curiously, there's no visual "ghost" indicator of what his car did on the track). There are other enhancements to Autolog this time around, but I was paying more attention to the furious multiplayer race that was going on when the developers talked about it. The reason? I was smoking Lamborghinis and Porsches in a 1981 Volkswagen Golf GTI.
Yep, The Run has a pretty wide range of cars in it, and as you play with specific "tiers" of cars online, you'll notice that some of the choices are a little out there. The best example I found was this little VW Rabbit-looking Golf GTI, which had been ridiculously tuned and over-engineered to have a top speed of nearly 200mph. I found its ability to corner and maintain grip to be even better than that of cars with reputations for great handling, like the Lancer Evolution X that's in the game. I also took the chance to try out a couple of Porsches, since the spat between EA and Microsoft caused Forza Motorsport 4 to lose the exclusive license for Porsche that EA had been leasing out to Microsoft. And, well, I guess they made good use of the license, because I hated driving the Porsches in NFS: The Run just as much as I've hated driving them in nearly every other racing game.
Multiplayer modes consist of playlists where you can join at any time. You can even join a race in progress - you'll be put in last place and given a full tank of nitrous to see if you can improve your position before someone hits the finish line. Each playlist has a particular theme to it, and it consists of three races, where you've got to stick with one car until the next playlist begins. Generally, online play was highly chaotic and fun, but I will tell you that if I was being very serious about trying to win, some of the things that happened would have made me rather angry. From disappearing traffic to strange physics when rumbling with other players, it was easy to make zero mistakes and still wind up slipping from first place to sixth when an opponent finally did collide with me.
The game is powered by DICE's Frostbite 2 engine, which has been seen (in this particular incarnation) in only one other game so far: the just-released Battlefield 3. EA Black Box picked this engine because The Run sends you through huge amounts of open road, and they needed the specific performance and streaming capabilities of Frostbite 2 to deliver high-speed racing without having the game fall behind. And while the developers were caught proclaiming The Run as various degrees of "best-looking" in the racing genre, I'm not sure I agree. Maybe it was a symptom of the game not running on final code, but I found that the detail on the road and on distant objects to lag a bit behind what I'd expect from a AAA game released in 2011, and I've never been really happy with the insistence on running Need for Speed games at 30 frames per second. I'd expect the visuals to be drastically better than what we've seen in other racing games to make up for the cut-in-half frame rate, but The Run and its wide open, cross-country vistas aren't enough for me to give this the seal of approval in the performance department.
Still, playing The Run was still a white-knuckle, intense and fun experience. While I did find a rather unsettling amount of annoyances and iffy things - some of which are very unlikely to be addressed before the November 15th release date - any fan of the last several Need for Speed games should be plenty happy with what EA Black Box will have for us this year.
