NFS Dev Talks About Development Cycles And The Waning Racing Genre

A few years ago, after the dismal failure that was Need For Speed: Undercover — and the prior critical failure that was Need For Speed: Pro Street — the decision was taken by EA to bring in multiple studios to develop the Need For Speed games while still releasing annual updates, thereby allowing each studio sufficient development time.

What followed was arguably a successful slew of releases with the excellent Need For Speed: Shift, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit and Need For Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed titles.

Now, once again it is the turn of Black Box, the company that first put Need For Speed at an all time high with titles like Underground, its sequel and Most Wanted, and then brought it to an all time low with the aforementioned garbage in the first paragraph.

In their attempts to once again reach the highs of previous years, they’ve come out with what has been globally shunned by gamers who feel like they know better.

Need For Speed: The Run has been in development for a number of years now. Pretty much since Undercover was released, and quickly was sent under covers itself on account of pathetic shitness (not really a word).

EA Black Box’s Jason DeLong who is a senior producer on The Run, has recently spoken about the game and the impact of the publisher’s decision to break out of the yearly development cycle, calling it a huge step that allows Black Box to take the necessary steps to ensure The Run is the highest quality of product that it can be, when people the world over decide to shun it at retail. Okay I added in that last bit.

“It was huge for us and I think that was the great thing the company recognised, Black Box was doing Need For Speed year over year between Underground, Underground 2, Most Wanted and so on,” he said. Admittedly, we too lost interest in naming the games beyond that point.

“At a certain point when you have to put these games out year after year you don’t have time to reinvest in yourself, neither in your team or your technology.”

He went on to praise EA for recognising that the extra time is a necessity by adopting “a split studio development, similar to what Activision did with Call of Duty and Treyarch and Infinity Ward.”

DeLong went on to speak of the declining racing genre in the face of studios like Bizarre Creations (of PGR game) and Black Rock being closed down, expressing discontent at the enforced ‘evolution’ of the genre.

“I think one of the issues with racing developers is that they felt that things needed to change in order for things to continue to do well and as a result there’s been a lot of quote / unquote ‘innovations’ in the racing space, which maybe was not necessarily the focus,” he said.

“I think that at the end of the day a successful racing game is one that makes someone feel like a hero. Being able to pick up a controller, get behind the wheel of a 500 horsepower car that costs $200,000 and just drive it masterfully across an amazing landscape, that is what people want. If you deliver on that promise then I think you’re three-quarters of the way there.”

We’re going to hope that the other quarter does not imply quick time events.

Name: Caveshen Rajman
Location: Durban
Position: Former Managing Editor

Caveshen has published 2177 posts. Read all of Caveshen's posts.

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