If Slightly Mad were given freedom, how much better would Shift have been?

[Golfman]

Slightly Mad, the developer of NFS: Shift for EA, have gained reputation in the PC world for making quality, realistic racing sims. EA should have allowed them more freedom instead of putting restraints on them to tailor it to the NFS franchise. Call it NFS, yes, but make it a racing sim to challenge GT.

 

[Jimmy_apex]

Actually if you are setting and playing Shift in a realistic way (right steering wheel settings, play with the glutch, etc...) and play stock car with stock setup, this game provide one of the best driving handling that you could expect in a video game.

One thing wich is really intesting with this game is that you could play it with an arcade style if you love to play like this. Or play the game as a sim if you are stilling fair with physics engine.

I have bought my first Playstation to play the first Gran turismo and the 2nd. I have bought my PS2 to play the 3rd and 4th. I have bought my PS3 to handle GT5. But i have to admit, Shift bring to your hands an exceptional driving experience that i had never felt while playing Gran turismo.

 

[ItsHim]

Well, RacePro was never really fixed and thus couldn't meet the higher sim racer standards as 60 fps or flawless online play.

So one could say they did the right thing to switch to a genre where smaller issues are more likely to be accepted.

 

[boxox]

Race Pro selling <50k units would suggest that the market for 'real sims' on consoles is rather a lot smaller than certain advertising slogans would like to suggest.

I dunno, if you want EA out of the equation then you are pretty much left with most or all of:

SMS never recovers from Blimey! administration
No car licenses
No publisher gruntwork (little things like distribution and publicity and whatnot)
Quite likely no multiplatform release

So if you would prefer there to be no Shift, or for the cars to be all from some cheaply licensable series and a bunch of nobody car(e)s, or for everyone to go bankrupt on it, or for there to be no PS3 version I guess you could take EA out

I wouldn't have minded if they had got SMS to do the UI in-house rather than farming it out to Black Box though. That thing stinks.

 

[Golfman]

Actually if you are setting and playing Shift in a realistic way (right steering wheel settings, play with the glutch, etc...) and play stock car with stock setup, this game provide one of the best driving handling that you could expect in a video game.

One thing wich is really intesting with this game is that you could play it with an arcade style if you love to play like this. Or play the game as a sim if you are stilling fair with physics engine.

I have bought my first Playstation to play the first Gran turismo and the 2nd. I have bought my PS2 to play the 3rd and 4th. I have bought my PS3 to handle GT5. But i have to admit, Shift bring to your hands an exceptional driving experience that i had never felt while playing Gran turismo.

Even the original GT on the PS1 has far better handling than Shift. GT5 prologue eats Shift for breakfast. The handling in Shift, on its most basic level, is too arcadey. On the most realistic setting(like you suggest) it is just messy. I wish EA would just give up with the NFS franchise. There hasn't been a decent one since Hot Pursuit 2 on the PS2. That was meant to be unrealstic and fun, and it worked.

 

[addictions]

So why did you just not post all this in the compare Shift to GT5 thread?
And if it's to messy for you on pro mode your doing something wrong.

 

[boxox]

And over on the PC sim sites Shift cops it for being too much like those "arcade" console racing games like GT

 

[ItsHim]

Well, I do get jealous if I see some fancy sim setups with working gauges and dials and dashboards...

 

[Imari]

Shift is different to GT5P, I'm not entirely sold that it's worse. Bugs aside, which I'm willing to bet would have been fixed had they not had a set-in-stone release date, the game does a lot of things right.

The force feedback is excellent, and gives far more information than in GT5P. I feel much more of a difference in grip levels in Shift being on the racing line and off it, as it should be with all the extra rubber laying on the track. The sounds in Shift are for the most part spectacular. There's a bigger range of cars that I'm interested in driving in Shift, if you're going to only include a hundred or so then they all need to be special in some way.

I think if you're seriously comparing Shift to GT1, then there's something wrong with your setup or your system. It's a far more complex game, and while it will coddle you at the higher levels of assists once you strip those away you find a surprisingly competent racing game. It's supposed to be messy and difficult to drive at that level, because that's what driving a real car is like. Driving anything from Tier 3 up at race speeds is going to be a nightmare for anyone who isn't a trained racing driver.

 

[niky]

The biggest issue with Shift is the built-in arcade aspect (and yes, they have stated from the onset that they intended it to be "simcade" )... it's a shame because there's a truly fantastic engine underneath it, and with all the assists off, in the most realistic driving mode and in a stock car... as long as you don't purposely initiate drifts... it's incredibly good.

One hopes that they release a "pro" version of Shift, or a patch that will allow you to take it that last 5% from "simcade" into "sim" territory. (for us PS3 users... PC users can already do this at will).

 

[boxox]

I think if you're seriously comparing Shift to GT1, then there's something wrong with your setup or your system. It's a far more complex game, and while it will coddle you at the higher levels of assists once you strip those away you find a surprisingly competent racing game. It's supposed to be messy and difficult to drive at that level, because that's what driving a real car is like. Driving anything from Tier 3 up at race speeds is going to be a nightmare for anyone who isn't a trained racing driver.

I think the biggest error they made was not leaving in an option for an active steering aid similar to gt/forza at pro level. It's a huge source of complaints. Occasionally very funny complaints where apparently turning off assisted driving and making people deal with power/trail/weight induced effects is arcade. But still - lots of griping centred around that which could have been avoided if they had just caved in and done it the same way everyone else on consoles does.

There's rather a lot of things Shift does a lot better than SMS's previous games (gtr2/gtl) which are pretty easy to notice if you have them sitting on the same machine, particularly the tyre effects, FFB, and track accuracy. And it's not like GTR2 and GTL don't have a lot of issues of their own either, you can google "gtr2 wreckers" or "gtr2 @#$%@$ AI" or whatever and get a pretty healthy set of results

I have to say the basic premise strikes me as a big flawed - that somehow if SMS had their way you would have something more like GT. There's really not a lot in the general behaviour of the cars or the 'game' portion of racing that resembles GT in their previous games for Simbin. SB just have a different perspective on what a race sim is. I remember some guy came into the GTR Evo forum at RSC or RD or somewhere complaining that Evo was unrealistic compared to GT because he couldn't buy parts and put them on the car...

 

[Imari]

I think any developer would have to be slightly mad to try and produce a GT clone at this point. With the money that GT has thrown at it and the fanbase it has you'd never compete, even if your game was twice as good.

The only real alternative is try and make something more specialised and try and capture that corner of the market and then try and chip away at GT from there. GT always feels very focused on the cars to me, whereas in Shift it felt like the cars were a lot less important and the racing was emphasised more.

I'm actually hoping there's a Shift 2 where they just take Shift as it is now, add a few new cars and tracks and fix all the things that are wrong with it. It's not GT, but it's not pretending to be and it is good fun. When the bloody thing works properly.

 

[addictions]

Imari: I think any developer would have to be slightly mad to try and produce a GT clone at this point.

At this point we've been waiting for GT5 for over 2 years someone had to do it. Shift 2 will be with us before GT5.

Imari: it's not GT, but it's not pretending to be and it is good fun. When the bloody thing works properly.

I agree on this a few more little problems added since the v1.03

 

[darkos]

It's NFS! What do you expect? A perfect Sim? NFS never was game close to sim, more to arcade style. Quick game for one night, maybe two. but that's it. People all over the world still play it because there is no other game that good right now. You can swallow all the mistakes and bugs and still have fun with it.

 

[ItsHim]

It's NFS! What do you expect? A perfect Sim? NFS never was game close to sim, more to arcade style.

The first NFS and later NFSorsche had a very strong sim aspect. Maybe they didn't meet individual standards, but they were regarded rather "sim" back in the days.

NFSorsche was a real gem on the PC, not so much on the consoles. I seem to remember they had two different developers working for the different versions.

If you dig even deeper, the roots of NFS lay with Test Drive 1&2, two games I played for hours on end. TD1 even feature a fully manual gearbox, you could blow the engine and had to select gears with the joystick. And it had cockpit view as default and a working rear view mirror and if I'm not totally mistaken, even working gauges.

So no, NFS is not only of arcade fame if you look at its pedigree. And I'm more than happy to enjoy a descendant of the original game over 20 years later and still enjoy it. Most marriages don't last that long.

 

[Viktor Navorsky]

I think this NFS has evolved a lot , compared to the others. Its a good starting point for the series... I hope NFS Shift 2 get more SIM than it is right now, and that should be enough...

Like some already said ... theres no other racing sim game right now, and a lot of us are tired of playing DEMO ...so thats the alternative ( a very fun one indeed ).

 

[mindwise]

Shift is much much more of a sim then is the NFS norm.

I am sure of this because i like playing it, and a lot more then the 4 hours NFS normally holds my attention...... whereas my 16 yo son, who normally loves NFS, does not like it at all

If that is not a biased opinion, i'll stop having one.

 

[scleeve]

I can't see why they didn't cater for both acrade and Sim?.......99% of the buying market want a flashy acrade game which is where Shift delivers, and EA make their money as a result so they are happy, but SMS should of put in a Sim extreme side as an option, most users would avoid it I know but its at a least there for us people who want a realistic race (like the sim side in SBK for example, most people avoid it online but its still there).

Shift's handling sits inbetween arcade and sim but playing online reminds me its just arcade in nearly all of its elements......there are many users who will drive to ram you off, use you to brake at full speed, use the handbrake at full speed to get stupid fast laps, cut across large sections of track, ride walls 20ft in the air, and move blue tyres to block your way.

Why can't they use decent lobbies (not random) and then add that sim element as an option in there somewhere?.....it could include getting rid of the reset, getting rid of the cheating like full throttle hand brake activities, making sure 2 wheels are on the track at all times, and as a result changing the penalty time to way over the current ones (like 30secs instead of just 5secs) or even adding black flags for punting or off track activities. If a host could choose this as an extreme setting then most of the cheats or arcade players wouldn't enter the lobbie leaving the sim and clean drivers to get on with what they enjoy.

Until that's in there it will never reflect a sim, never mind the handling, surely SMS could of done that?

 

[boxox]

They already did that 3 times and noticed how much work it was to produce and how many people actually use it. Lots and not many.

PS the whole SimBin series, LFS and iRacing all let you reset the car

 

[Golfman]

Okay. I don't hate Shift 100%, im just so dissappointed that they chose to go the simulation route but not make it fully sim-handling. I agree that there is a realistic, muscley racing game in there, but it's full potential has been held back by the ***** at EA. The NFS series should be stopped.

 

[Golfman]

The first NFS and later NFSorsche had a very strong sim aspect. Maybe they didn't meet individual standards, but they were regarded rather "sim" back in the days.

NFSorsche was a real gem on the PC, not so much on the consoles. I seem to remember they had two different developers working for the different versions.

If you dig even deeper, the roots of NFS lay with Test Drive 1&2, two games I played for hours on end. TD1 even feature a fully manual gearbox, you could blow the engine and had to select gears with the joystick. And it had cockpit view as default and a working rear view mirror and if I'm not totally mistaken, even working gauges.

So no, NFS is not only of arcade fame if you look at its pedigree. And I'm more than happy to enjoy a descendant of the original game over 20 years later and still enjoy it. Most marriages don't last that long.

Yeah i remember NFSorsche on the PS1. The console versions were made by the same people who made the V-rally series. Can't remember their name. But it wasn't good at all.

 

[Golfman]

Eden studios! Now i remember. A french company. With some bloke called Bruno Bonnell appearing at the start of every one of their games. Who he?