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By A-G on 20 Jun, 2012: published about 4 years ago
14 Comments

What Criterion Needs To Do With NFS: Most Wanted

What Criterion Needs To Do With NFS: Most Wanted

Coloureds around the world rejoiced when it was announced that Criterion Games was developing a reboot of the hallowed Need for Speed: Most Wanted. There were other people who were kinda excited too but I like to think it was mostly Coloureds, makes for a better mental image. Now, this is promising news considering that Criterion is not in the habit of making bad racing games but it is doubtful whether they can reincarnate Most Wanted as we remember it. Certainly, what we saw at E3 doesn’t exactly look like Most Wanted even if it does look good.

Now, the gameplay that EA showed wasn’t anything bad and it certainly wasn’t atrocious, as Caveshen described it, but he was onto something because it didn’t look like Most Wanted and that’s the main problem I can see with the game. Now, Criterion has a good record, they rarely put a foot wrong with the Burnout franchise and Burnout Revenge and Burnout Paradise were great games but the problem is that Criterion has a type. They don’t do diversity very well and are known for just making simple, no nonsense arcade racers with no frills; just races and some cars to choose from. That formula worked well when they did a reboot of NFS: Hot Pursuit because that game really was just a simple cops and robbers game with cars so Criterion nailed it and produced a fun but rather shallow game. You could play as a street racer or a cop and have a good arcade experience either way but that was really all there was to it.

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    That game was good because it combined the very basic premise of Hot Pursuit with the quality and entertainment value that Criterion brings to the party but Most Wanted comprises so much more than that.

    Need for Speed: Most Wanted took the whole cops ‘n racers concept to the next level with all-out police chases that escalated to levels which required real skill in order to evade the cops. It also introduced us to a more interactive environment with gas stations that could be blown up and various obstacles that could be used as Pursuit Breakers. Combine that with a story that was good enough to make some sense and give the game meaning and you’ve got something special. Let’s not forget that the game had a good spread of vehicles which ranged all the way from a Fiat Punto right up to an Aston Martin DB9, Lamborghini Gallardo and M3 GTR. Your car and the speeds you were travelling at changed greatly from the start of the game to the end and that’s something that’s been missing lately from NFS titles.

    One of the most memorable things from the game was of course the modification system with its bodykits and paintjobs and epic performance mods – I built up a GTI that could easily beat Gallardos and the like. I do still believe that the ultimate street racing game would take Most Wanted and simply swap out its modding system for the more expansive and technical system from Underground 2 but that’s a discussion for another day.

    Now, all that I’ve mentioned above is something that Criterion is out of its depth on, they do not have experience with these mechanics and certainly their games aren’t used to being so complex. It’s therefore doubtful whether Criterion will opt to take a stab at including a midifcation system or simply drop it in favour of a simplified Burnout Paradise-style open-world game. Something that troubled me last night was an article I read on Kotaku which claimed that Criterion’s reboot of Most wanted may as well be called Burnout Paradise 2. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Paradise and it was in fact the first game I ever played on my PS3 along with Assassin’s Creed so it’s got a special place in my heart but I’m not looking for Paradise 2, I’m looking for the second coming of Most Wanted and therein lies the problem with the gaming industry’s current trend of reviving old titles or series’.

    It’s the same problem Max Payne 3 had. It was a good action shooter and if you hadn’t played the previous two games then you would enjoy it but if you played its predecessors then Max Payne 3 came up short because it didn’t embody what Max Payne was about or at least struggled to do it properly. If I wanted an arbitrary 3rd person shooter that was good for action then I’d happily buy Random Action Shooter X but the minute you decide to dredge up an old IP, you better be prepared to encapsulate what that IP was all about and simply translate its formula to be applicable today.

    I’d love to see Burnout Paradise 2 get made but Criterion is on contract with EA to produce an NFS title every alternate year and so this year they’re making Most Wanted and I get it, they want to make Burnout Paradise 2 but don’t take this as an opportunity to do that. Rather call the game NFS: Paradise City or something but do not exploit the name of an old IP just because every NFS fan will immediately want the game if you call it Most Wanted. Ultimately all that’s going to come from doing this is that fans will meet the game with such venom and backlash and the game will be a sore disappointment because the title promised something and the developer gave us a game that was entirely different. Whether or not the game is good on its own merits will be irrelevant and that’s a pity because the game will likely be great by its own standards.

    What Criterion needs to do is realise that they are dealing with the revival of an title that means a great deal to fans of the NFS and many regard as the best in the franchise and that puts certain expectation on them developers. It’s also a recent game, having come out on PS2 just a few years before PS3 hit the scene so many of us have played and we do remember it and it is very easy to transplant the original game’s DNA into a modern release. Criterion needs to take heed of this and so far the cop chases seem good and the racing structure is cool with a free-roaming layout that isn’t governed by stupid invisible but rather checkpoints/markers that you have to pass. Criterion is not big on having a driving narrative on their games though and Hot Pursuit certainly just let you devise your own premise for why a bunch of high performance cars were racing each other while being chased by high performance police cars.

    I always liked to think that Durban Indians had taken over the world and in their short reign, a surplus of sports cars and exotic cars was produced such that when someone finally worked up the courage to tell them to stop misbehaving (he may have also threatened to call their mothers) all these previously expensive cars were worth next to nothing. The manufacturers couldn’t have this so they commissioned a group of racers and traffic cops to battle against each other in a fleet of these cars so as to write off as many of them as possible and thus reduce the number of Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghinis etc to regular volumes.

    My imagination may have just worked a little overtime with that one but you see what I mean, right? Hot Pursuit didn’t need a premise but then it did get a bit aimless halfway through and you had no drive to finish the game. Moral of the story: Criterion needs to have some half-decent plot going on in Most Wanted, something that’s good enough to keep us racing around the city for 7 or 8 hours or however long the game may be.

    Next on the list, that modification system is all important and it needs to be more than just paint colour, we need to be able to customise the look of the car and mod the performance to the point where GTI’s are keeping level with R8’s. This brings me to the last thing we need –  proper variation in the list of cars. Lately, NFS titles have narrowed the scope of cars you get in the games to only sports cars such as Porsches and anything above. This is all good and well and it’s in part due to the fact that you couldn’t modify your cars in those games but a significant difference between the car you start with and the car you finish with gives the game much greater and more prominent progression so that you don’t feel static the entire time as I did with Hot Pursuit and even The Run.

    Something that I think Criterion can get right is a much more dynamic world where anything, even other cars can be used as a Pursuit Breaker and where a lot more destruction is possible rather than simply at strategic points.

    It’s not a tough ask of Criterion to meet these demands but they are out of their depth on more than one of them and I certainly don’t expect Criterion not step out of their comfort zone. In fact, This will almost certainly be Burnout Paradise 2 under another name and that saddens me greatly because I’d actually like to see Paradise 2 but not in place of my beloved Most Wanted.

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    Name: A-G Sonday
    Location: Cape Town
    Position: Editor, Reviews

    A-G has published 3673 posts. Read all of A-G's posts.
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    • Pea_Peralta

      I was actually really excited when they announced NFS Most Wanted 2 but what the fudge was that at E3 its not at all like the previous titile. Criterion might make good racing games but they suck at any form of narrative which is bad since what made the first title soo fun was the ridiculously cheesy and fun actor cutscenes..

      • AG_Sonday

         Thought you were dead, glad to see you’re not :D.

        So far it looks just like a free-roam Hot Pursuit aka Burnout Paradise 2 but the minute they show a car being modded I’ll start having some faith in this game. Then again, what we saw of NFS The Run at E3 last year made it out to be absolute shit with those QTE’s and whatnot and yes, it turned out to mediocre but it kept looking betetr and better after E3.

        Let’s hope Most Wanted follows suit. Criterion can only do simple stripped-down racers that don’t have any of those additions that made the NFS street racing games so compelling. The narrative, the modification, the free-roam, the fact that you can outrun a Corvette with a Golf and epic police chases.

        I have no expectations of this being the Most wanted sequel I’ve always wanted (see what i did there?) and Criterion are unlikely to surprise me with the game, they only impress by making betetr versions of their tried and trusted blueprint.

    • http://www.facebook.com/brendon.bosch Brendon Bosch

      LOL Coloureds

    • sage of the six paths

      You forgot tot mention Speed Breaker!

      • AG_Sonday

        Speed Breaker is there if I saw right in the gameplay video but it’s not a make or break feature, personally. There’s a lot more to get right before that.

    • Richard Dubbeld

      it needs split-screen, it’s omission from Hot Pursuit (Criterion) was the deal breaker for me not to buy it.

      • AG_Sonday

        Racers seem to discriminate against split-screen these days because obviously no self-respecting gamer has real friends, right? I have great memories of jamming split-screen in Underground 2 and more recently on DiRT 3.

    • Trebzz

      What they need to do is stop releasing a NFS year after year after year after year

      • AG_Sonday

        You know they’re actually pulling a CoD now where Black Box and Criterion will alternate each year to make an NFS title? If the franchsie had any sort of revival with Hot Pursuit, EA is eager to run it into the ground at warp speed and kill once and for all.

      • http://egamer.co.za/author/cavie Caveshen “CaViE” Rajman

        Hot Pursuit 2 – 2002
        Underground – 2003
        Underground 2 – 2004
        Most Wanted – 2005
        Carbon – 2006
        Pro Street – 2007
        Undercover – 2008
        Shift – 2009
        Hot Pursuit – 2010
        Shift 2, The Run – 2011
        ————-
        Call of Duty – 2003
        Call of Duty 2 – 2005
        Call of Duty 3 – 2006
        Call of Duty 4 – 2007
        Etc etc.

        I’m sorry, WHO pulled a WHAT?

        Bitch please. Hipster Need For Speed was doing annual releases from alternating studios since way before it was cool.

      • AG_Sonday

        I know that Cavie and it was actually the same studio producing the games but up until around 2006 or thereabouts, you could have annual releases and still put out great games. :P
        The Sands of Time trilogy released in a 3 year period and I regard it as one of the greatest trilogies to ever exist.

        Shift is now a separate entity essentially because EA wants to differentiate between the track racing and street racing titles. So it’s only now with Hot Pursuit that they officially adopted that CoD model of two studios alternating with an annual release. They stopped using just one studio for annual releases because it was killing the franchise and I just used CoD as an example since I know how much Trebzz loves that franchise :P

    • http://egamer.co.za/author/cavie Caveshen “CaViE” Rajman

      Two other things that NFS:MW did right:

      1. It had a great soundtrack which meant that even after a solid twenty, thirty, forty hours of play time through multiple career modes, you never tired of it. Even now I can listen to that soundtrack and enjoy it.

      2. This is a big one: Drive. No pun intended. In Most Wanted we had drive, we had purpose, we had a reason to do what we did. Razor made a fool of us and stole our ride and with Mia’s help, we were going to deliver retribution upon his doorstep. THAT was why we raced. Becoming Most Wanted wasn’t simply a case of being the best, but of getting back what was rightfully ours and putting an end to a reign of tyranny. Like beheading Joffrey in Game of Thrones, defeating Razor in a 1v1 race and winning back our beloved M3 was the dream. Effectively that means Most Wanted’s story element was its strength, because at various points during our trek through the blacklist it showed us a cutscene or a message perhaps, that drove home the fact that we’re out for Razor’s blood. Regardless of what Cross does to try and stop us.

      This is why I liked Carbon as well. It tried to have a story, even if it was an ultimately forgettable one.

      I don’t dislike Criterion. In fact I quite like them, I see their calibre for making great racing titles that bring fun to gamers the world over. I just don’t enjoy how they’re slapping such titles as ‘Hot Pursuit’ and ‘Most Wanted’ onto Burnout spinoffs and, in my opinion, bastardising the iconic titles I grew up with. Where I worked my ass off to unlock the El Nino and then drove it around each track, setting track records. Where I fell from grace and then rose to the top again to defeat my greatest rival. Games that will live on in my memory for years more. And Criterion just takes the name and slaps it onto something else. Black Box might fail at making great racing titles recently and Slightly Mad may only ever make broken simulators with impossible difficulty curves, but at least they achieve success on their own, not on the backs of prior iconic names in a series.

      That’s my beef here. I don’t want Criterion making Burnout Paradise 2 and calling it Most Wanted because THAT’S NOT what Most Wanted is about, in my memory. Nor was 2010’s version of Hot Pursuit. Sure it was a great game. Fun. Arcadey. But NOT a Hot Pursuit title like the two I remember from yester-year.

      Criterion can only make one game, it seems. There’s term for this in my degree.

      • AG_Sonday

        I forgot about the soundtrack actually and come to think of it, that was one solid playlist because recent racing titles either have a shitty soundtrack or such a short one that the songs you kinda like become annoyingly overplayed. I downloaded some of tracks from the soundtrack and listen to them when I need to be pumped up a bit.

        Completely agree with your punniness too, the game had that narrative which kept us going and gave all that racing some purpsoe. It was a cheesy, silly plot but it would’ve been good enough for a Fast ‘n Furious movie so it was more than good enough to motivate you through 8 hours of racing. The Blacklist was also genius because it kept you motivated towards that immediate goal – squaring up against the next number on the Blacklist since the big goal of beating Razor obviously woudln’t be enough to keep you going the entire time.

        I liked what Criterion did with Hot Pursuit because it fit in with the type of game they make but they are way out of their depth on Most Wanted and the problem is that this is not a developer that is willing to try new things so far as I can see, they just improve a little bit on that blueprint they’ve had since the first Burnout. Bastardising is a good way of putting it though, wish I’d thought of that.

        What I struggle to understand is why EA is insistent on forcing Criterion to keep the NFS franchise afloat when we all know the studio only really does Burnout? Surely we could let Black Box and Slightly Mad alternate with one streetracer and one track sim in a two year span or just let Black Box put out an NFS every two years and let Criterion make teh Burnout games they so desperately want to. It’s all published by EA so they’ll end up with all the money anyway.

    • http://www.facebook.com/nanonyous Theo Lubbe

      Y’know what Criterion needs to do to make Most Wanted good?
      Get the fuck off of developing it.

      Seriously. They need to fuck off. They fucked up Hot Pursuit enough already, now they want to fuck up Most Wanted? No thanks. Looks like I won’t be playing any EA racers anymore…

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