Need For Speed Heat - General Discussion
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HyperSpeeder
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I played this game for a bit with my EA Access Trial option. I have mixed feelings about it TBH.
On one hand, the gameplay saw some nice improvement over the previous titles. I think Rivals actually had ok physics, better than MW12 and HP10 at least, but NFS15 was a disaster and Payback although an improvement ended up sucking for other reasons. On the other, the police kills you too easily at the beginning, still feels more Criterion than Black Box.
As a matter of fact, the biggest problem with all of the NFS games of the 2010s is that the rotten, corrupted soul of Criterion's Hot Pursuit still resides within them, in varying degrees. That game wasn't horrible, but the praise it got meant EA would push the franchise in that direction, with that driving model. Black Box's failure with The Run only cemented Criterion as the premier NFS studio, which made them abandon Burnout... which is what they did best.
I find it sad this was the case, because Criterion never really got the idea of what made the classics great. Criterion (and Ghost, which is Criterion but in Sweden) has always tried to forcefully slide a bit of Burnout into NFS and the two franchises don't mix well at all IMO. They're also fond of increasing difficulty by punishing the player instead of favoring smart gameplay.
Let's take Most Wanted for example (the real one, not... not the 2012 one). That game set the standard for police in open world NFS games. In MW your heat level would not escalate until you climbed a few spots in the Blacklist. Between #15 and #13 you could only reach Heat Level 2. In NFS Heat on the other hand you can reach Level 3 and beyond from the very beginning, as in the more recent games, and this means you die really fast to police, since the Chargers are indestructible and there's no Pursuit Breakers nor cheese to save your ass.
In Most Wanted, and in pretty much every Black Box-era game (I don't count The Run), you have walls with arrows telling you which way to go. In the recent games this is not the case. You can be trolled by picking wrong exits in overpasses and lose a ton of time going back to the right path. Forza Horizon does not use walls in Street Scene races either, but most of these routes are much better designed and Playground does their best to avoid such situations (only Ashbrook Apex has one such issue). The Goliath-style tracks in Fortune Island, and Goliath itself in FH4 mainland, are all tracks that could pass as if created with the route creator (which lacks props), and they're all excellent.
Ironically, most people have issues with B2D (brake to drift) and I do not. If you go back all the way to the classics, you'll find that NFS2's Arcade mode had B2D and in NFS3 and High Stakes the car would do power slides most of the time, with braking under cornering creating a sharp slide much akin to what the car does when you use the handbrake in the recent NFS games. In both NFS3 and HS, which on PC share the same physics model, navigating tight corners was also difficult (best seen in Country Woods, Aquatica, Summit, Durham Road and Snowy Ridge). B2D is, thus, truer to the franchise's ethos than Black Box's model.
Speaking of the physics in Underground-era games (made by Black Box), they were far from perfect. In NFSU2 the best drift car was the Golf GTI in all its FWD glory, the best grip car was the AE86 by far (yeah, a starter car) and AWD cars were extremely penalized with understeer, which made the Skyline GT-R, Evo VIII, WRX, Eclipse and especially 3000GT almost useless. In Carbon the grip cars would be easily defeated by the Corvette, which would slide around as a muscle car but retained its light weight and good chassis (as opposed to the Viper for example). In all of these games the cars were magnetically attached to the track and would always have trouble negotiating tight corners, unlike in more realistic racers such as Forza.
Customization was also largely inferior in Black Box era, with a ton of rice parts. MW actually did not have good customization at all. You were limited to only a few bodykits, fake roof scoops, terrible wings and only one vinyl layer (in UG2 there were 4 at least, I think). Carbon edges Heat out with Autosculpt, chop top and blowers, and that's it. Today we have name parts, lots of cool wheels, APR wings and fresh bodykits from modern car culture. And we have Ferrari. It's better than before!
Still, even though they were flawed, the games from the old studios (going all the way back to the 90s) have always felt more fun to me, because they felt like NFS in varying degrees. NFS has always been about street racing, the difference is that post-The Fast and the Furious a different form of street racing became popular, and now this form has developed into more or less what we've seen in NFS15.
The old games, HP2 aside, did not have police bombing you with EMPs, jammers and other ridiculous stuff, nor helicopters that dropped spike strips. The last Racer mission in Rivals plays as if I was a wanted terrorist against the US Army, not a racer with an insatiable Need for Speed. It's vehicular combat, not racing. It's Burnout. Police in NFS proper, on the contrary, is meant to be outdriven, outpaced and outplayed, not destroyed. Even Black Box with all its destruction understood this.
And that's why I think NFS will remain stuck in its rut until another studio, with completely different people, takes over. If there's any consolation... Except for the Shifts and The Run (and the side stuff like World), all of the NFS games between 2009-2019 had Craig Sullivan, one of Criterion's major figures, as creative director. The moment he leaves (2017, prior to Payback's release), NFS releases their best rated game in almost a decade. It can't be a coincidence.
The move back to the UK will also do them good since that's where most of the racing game studios are. Makes it easier for them to scout for talent.
/rant
On one hand, the gameplay saw some nice improvement over the previous titles. I think Rivals actually had ok physics, better than MW12 and HP10 at least, but NFS15 was a disaster and Payback although an improvement ended up sucking for other reasons. On the other, the police kills you too easily at the beginning, still feels more Criterion than Black Box.
As a matter of fact, the biggest problem with all of the NFS games of the 2010s is that the rotten, corrupted soul of Criterion's Hot Pursuit still resides within them, in varying degrees. That game wasn't horrible, but the praise it got meant EA would push the franchise in that direction, with that driving model. Black Box's failure with The Run only cemented Criterion as the premier NFS studio, which made them abandon Burnout... which is what they did best.
I find it sad this was the case, because Criterion never really got the idea of what made the classics great. Criterion (and Ghost, which is Criterion but in Sweden) has always tried to forcefully slide a bit of Burnout into NFS and the two franchises don't mix well at all IMO. They're also fond of increasing difficulty by punishing the player instead of favoring smart gameplay.
Let's take Most Wanted for example (the real one, not... not the 2012 one). That game set the standard for police in open world NFS games. In MW your heat level would not escalate until you climbed a few spots in the Blacklist. Between #15 and #13 you could only reach Heat Level 2. In NFS Heat on the other hand you can reach Level 3 and beyond from the very beginning, as in the more recent games, and this means you die really fast to police, since the Chargers are indestructible and there's no Pursuit Breakers nor cheese to save your ass.
In Most Wanted, and in pretty much every Black Box-era game (I don't count The Run), you have walls with arrows telling you which way to go. In the recent games this is not the case. You can be trolled by picking wrong exits in overpasses and lose a ton of time going back to the right path. Forza Horizon does not use walls in Street Scene races either, but most of these routes are much better designed and Playground does their best to avoid such situations (only Ashbrook Apex has one such issue). The Goliath-style tracks in Fortune Island, and Goliath itself in FH4 mainland, are all tracks that could pass as if created with the route creator (which lacks props), and they're all excellent.
Ironically, most people have issues with B2D (brake to drift) and I do not. If you go back all the way to the classics, you'll find that NFS2's Arcade mode had B2D and in NFS3 and High Stakes the car would do power slides most of the time, with braking under cornering creating a sharp slide much akin to what the car does when you use the handbrake in the recent NFS games. In both NFS3 and HS, which on PC share the same physics model, navigating tight corners was also difficult (best seen in Country Woods, Aquatica, Summit, Durham Road and Snowy Ridge). B2D is, thus, truer to the franchise's ethos than Black Box's model.
Speaking of the physics in Underground-era games (made by Black Box), they were far from perfect. In NFSU2 the best drift car was the Golf GTI in all its FWD glory, the best grip car was the AE86 by far (yeah, a starter car) and AWD cars were extremely penalized with understeer, which made the Skyline GT-R, Evo VIII, WRX, Eclipse and especially 3000GT almost useless. In Carbon the grip cars would be easily defeated by the Corvette, which would slide around as a muscle car but retained its light weight and good chassis (as opposed to the Viper for example). In all of these games the cars were magnetically attached to the track and would always have trouble negotiating tight corners, unlike in more realistic racers such as Forza.
Customization was also largely inferior in Black Box era, with a ton of rice parts. MW actually did not have good customization at all. You were limited to only a few bodykits, fake roof scoops, terrible wings and only one vinyl layer (in UG2 there were 4 at least, I think). Carbon edges Heat out with Autosculpt, chop top and blowers, and that's it. Today we have name parts, lots of cool wheels, APR wings and fresh bodykits from modern car culture. And we have Ferrari. It's better than before!
Still, even though they were flawed, the games from the old studios (going all the way back to the 90s) have always felt more fun to me, because they felt like NFS in varying degrees. NFS has always been about street racing, the difference is that post-The Fast and the Furious a different form of street racing became popular, and now this form has developed into more or less what we've seen in NFS15.
The old games, HP2 aside, did not have police bombing you with EMPs, jammers and other ridiculous stuff, nor helicopters that dropped spike strips. The last Racer mission in Rivals plays as if I was a wanted terrorist against the US Army, not a racer with an insatiable Need for Speed. It's vehicular combat, not racing. It's Burnout. Police in NFS proper, on the contrary, is meant to be outdriven, outpaced and outplayed, not destroyed. Even Black Box with all its destruction understood this.
And that's why I think NFS will remain stuck in its rut until another studio, with completely different people, takes over. If there's any consolation... Except for the Shifts and The Run (and the side stuff like World), all of the NFS games between 2009-2019 had Craig Sullivan, one of Criterion's major figures, as creative director. The moment he leaves (2017, prior to Payback's release), NFS releases their best rated game in almost a decade. It can't be a coincidence.
The move back to the UK will also do them good since that's where most of the racing game studios are. Makes it easier for them to scout for talent.
/rant
Sage Ages
(Banned)
- 12,817
- Antarctica
The ramps that are spread across the map are supposed to fill a pursuit breaker type of role. Personally not a fan of them since they can be reused constantly whilst PBs were single-use only (as least until you drive away and unload the map chunk), but it's something.
Personally I think they could get away with simply rebalancing the heat levels in this game. Chargers and Vettes start spawning way too soon (Heat 2/3), whilst later heats kinda plateau in difficulty and aren't really enough for endgame players with Lv.300-400+ cars. Perhaps they could also increase the amount of "Heat" needed for the level to increase to slow things down for beginner players.
Not sure what you're on about here. 2015, Payback, and Heat all use barriers with arrows to direct the player. They may not be physical barriers in order to fix the wallriding issue of previous games, but they're there.
Funny thing about the pursuit tech/weapons...
...Criterion kinda got the idea from Blackbox.
- 123
- United States
I think that updates are coming
Sage Ages
(Banned)
- 12,817
- Antarctica
No because there’s still two many variables added into the mix. The fact only that you have two different drivers already throws the accuracy of your findings out the window.
- 123
- United States
I just did it with 5 different racers and I was just barely faster
- 2,442
- freedomland of freedomness
- ELmarctuff
- mightymufffin95
I think, what hes trying to say is, hes faster than all of you
HyperSpeeder
(Banned)
- 954
- Brazil
I haven't got that far, myself. I can see how they'd become useful, though. GTOs in MW wouldn't spawn until Heat Level 3, but they were easy to get rid of even then.
NFS15 didn't have barriers, it had the blue arrows on the road acting as a racing line of sorts. Problem is, at more than 200 mph, and running the events blind, you can miss an entry and it ruins your race, for nothing.
Heat does a similar thing to Forza Horizon: barriers on the Speedhunters events during the day and bright "guiding lines" on night events. But Heat, apart from the map and the physics, does so much stuff similarly to Forza Horizon that, if I wasn't bored of FH4 (due to the game's age and repetition of Playlist events), I'd rather play FH4!
It's not a bad game, though. In fact, it's headed into the right direction. Nothing against copying other franchises but you don't need to do it so blatantly and you most certainly don't need to copy everything. Offroad racing is not what NFS is about, despite most games letting you take shortcuts through dirt roads and grass.
I don't remember it but didn't Carbon have a cutscene at the start where the police shoots an EMP blast at the racers?
Still, Black Box's thing was the cinema stuff, the Fast and Furious imitations and the cringy storylines. All that money wasted on bad actors could've gone to Bomex, Veilside, RE Amemiya instead... lol
Though the M3 GTR would never have become so iconic if it wasn't for the story.
SestoScudo
(Banned)
- 3,000
- Australia
- Decepticon 47
Honestly the heat levels should go up also the Police should start using Aventadors, Ford GT and the Lamborghini Diablo Sv for nostalgia purposes.
For cars like fxxk evo, p1 gtr and the keonigsegg should warrant a hennesey venom gt or a bugatti veyron or chiron being used.
Despite these cars not being in the game it should be dlc or in an update. I mean the henessey and the bugatti.
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Sage Ages
(Banned)
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- Antarctica
Even more outside variables. Wonderful. Very scientific.
That's really not why the car was iconic at all but okay.
- 1,377
- United States
- Firehound427
- CivicTypeR15
I think we need to settle this once and for all. This debate started over which car was faster than the other, right? Let’s nominate an impartial test driver, and get them to run a particular route multiple times with both cars to determine which car is truly better.
I volunteer as tribute.
I volunteer as tribute.
- 123
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- 1,377
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- Firehound427
- CivicTypeR15
Alright. Just let me know which cars to get and how to build them.
- 123
- United States
First do you remember the cars
- 1,377
- United States
- Firehound427
- CivicTypeR15
I think they are the McLaren P1 and P1 GTR?
Sage Ages
(Banned)
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- Antarctica
ISAD did them forever ago and made a spreadsheet. Can't remember where it's posted at the moment.
- 123
- United States
Yes both with the drag setup geared toward top speed
- 1,377
- United States
- Firehound427
- CivicTypeR15
Right. I’ll get on this tomorrow.
- 123
- United States
Nice thx
Any new updates
Any new updates
Last edited by a moderator:
- 123
- United States
Thank you like I said the p1 gtr is faster HAAAAAAAAAAA
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Are you six
HyperSpeeder
(Banned)
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- BABOBILIMBI
UTH on March update: https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed/need-for-speed-heat/news/under-the-hood-march-update
New Black Market that comes with 1 paid DLC car and a variant of an existing car is available for free (K.S. cars from last update I guess). Seems like there is some sort of challenge to complete for more rewards such as visual customization parts for your new ride, character outfits, and effects fitting the car’s theme (such as underglows).
Update will be released on March 3rd.
New Black Market that comes with 1 paid DLC car and a variant of an existing car is available for free (K.S. cars from last update I guess). Seems like there is some sort of challenge to complete for more rewards such as visual customization parts for your new ride, character outfits, and effects fitting the car’s theme (such as underglows).
Update will be released on March 3rd.
- 123
- United States
Exactly thankyou
- 7,959
- Wreckage, Turn 1
- PrecisionVI
That came out of nowhere... And I'm glad it did, because the lack of hype actually makes me quite excited for this update! I like the sound of having new challenges tied to the black market, hopefully they provide an incentive to play night mode beyond rep 50. 👍
And major thumbs up for the beat sync underglow, my inner ricer is satisfied!
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- HighWayStar_365
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