Electronic Arts released Need for Speed: Rivals, which became the first NFS on next-gen consoles. After the successful Most Wanted (2012), expectations for Rivals were quite high. However, the developers from Ghost Games attached a crocodile's tail to a dog's body, added a pelican's beak and an elephant's ears. The resulting Frankenstein was hastily held together with a slapped-on online component and sent off to roam the gaming community.
Otherwise, it's impossible to explain the huge number of questionable gameplay decisions present in Need for Speed: Rivals. Recently, Ghost Games has been emphasizing that under their direction, NFS would become a true multiplayer experience.
As it turned out, the game, built on the Frostbite 3 engine, can support no more than six players online. About the same number of AI opponents circle around the player in single-player mode.
Can you imagine that, at the end of 2013, the peak of technology allows for gameplay designed for just six players?! But that's not all. For example, in Most Wanted (2012), the EasyDrive system was perfect, while in Rivals, there's not a trace of it left.
Or rather, only torn-out fragments remain. If you want to change or upgrade your car, you have to drive to the garage, and even the drop-down menu itself is terribly illogical. It feels like the developers never even launched their own game. But let's go through everything step by step.
It all starts here
The first impression a player gets after a minute in Rivals is, "Oh God, my eyes!" The graphics in the game are actually even worse than in The Run. Back then, most of the locations looked great thanks to close-ups, large objects, and picturesque landscapes—all the things Frostbite is good at. Now, the world of Rivals is filled with small objects—trees, bushes, and so on—that look terrible.
But the main problem isn't in the details, but in the fact that the mountain textures load and unload right as you drive, and it's simply astonishing to see them flicker as your car passes by. The draw distance is also disappointing, only a couple of kilometers. Back in the day, EA Black Box polished the code in The Run so well that, despite the game's overall brevity, it never felt off-putting. Many players still remember its spectacular and detailed locations. But Ghost Games, it seems, worked with Frostbite for a very limited time, and all sorts of graphical artifacts keep popping up in the game.
This becomes especially noticeable in multiplayer mode. Not only does Autolog constantly disconnect, but also network lag makes it impossible to drive normally. Cars keep falling through textures and getting stuck in closed areas, only to continue driving as if nothing happened.
There’s no point in discussing the quality of the network code, so blaming the quality of the internet is pointless. Otherwise, you'd have to admit that six players online create such a colossal load on the network that it would require a 100-megabit connection.
As if that wasn’t enough, the developers set a 30 frames per second cap. As a result, multiplayer turns into a real mess. Players constantly crash into each other, end up in different places on the track, and can't always figure out how to control their cars.
And it all ends at the police station
The developers also made a "clever" move. To hide the short length of the roads and, overall, the small size of the game world, they used an inaccurate distance calculation system, which turns a 100-meter stretch over the road into 150 meters and slightly slowed down time. This is especially noticeable if, after two or three hours in Need for Speed: Rivals, you launch any other racing game. The latter will seem like a swift and intense stream rushing through city streets at lightning speed. In Rivals, in similar places, you find a sleepy kingdom. I enter the turn... I go through the turn... I exit the turn—this can be repeated every time you take a corner, that's how sluggish the game is.
With the above-mentioned tricks, the developers solved another problem: handling. In the new NFS, it's so simple that it's almost insulting. Whether you're driving a Porsche 911 or a Bugatti Veyron, the cars feel almost the same. For those who don't know, the Veyron is such a wild beast that you can only control it at full speed if you're really used to the car.
Perhaps this simplicity is the key to many of the rave reviews you can find online. Really, why brake in corners when you can just lift off the gas for a second? Why should AI opponents make evasive maneuvers when the player targets them with an EMP—it would only complicate the gameplay. Why give four "weapons" when it's easier for the player to have just two.
In Hot Pursuit (2010), let me remind you, racers and cops took desperate measures to avoid the player's attacks and, in turn, could seriously annoy you at close range. In Need for Speed: Rivals, they just drive straight.
You rollin' our streets. We and the homies find yo and kill
Just like in Hot Pursuit (2010), in Rivals you get to play as both a racer and a cop. If the latter makes some sense, racers have had their "rights" so restricted that only the most daring thrill-seekers would dare play as them.
Anyone who has ever wrecked their car just a few meters from the finish line will agree. Most races involve the police, so if you lose focus for a second and end up in a ditch, the vigilant law enforcers will immediately arrest you. The race will end, and all your earned "speed points" will be lost. To avoid this, you have to take extra steps—constantly going to the garage. As for enjoying free ro
So the life of a cop is much more interesting. Racers wandering around the game world are mostly dumb and clueless. There’s nothing difficult about arresting a dozen or two, and with the seized "speed points" you can buy even cooler upgrades and cars.
Speaking of cars, here’s another piece of bad news—there are very few of them, about 35, and they’re split between two factions and repeat. That’s even less than in Hot Pursuit (2010). As the developers promised, racers can paint and upgrade their cars. Cops, on the other hand, have a stock version of the car and two or three modifications for it. These can be unlocked by completing certain objectives.
In the garage, you can only make cosmetic changes. There’s no tuning available, and all upgrades only affect the car’s physics, not its appearance. Another "great" piece of news is the inability to pause the game in single-player mode. As the developers later explained, this was done to help players get used to the online mode faster. But this approach completely destroyed the single-player experience. You can’t relax or look at the map to find something interesting.
Instead of implementing this simple gameplay element properly, the developers slapped on the EasyDrive system, which just doesn’t fit given the need to quickly change direction and navigate the surroundings. The EasyDrive menu itself could have had far fewer items and lines. The developers didn’t even think about that, so players have to make unnecessary moves trying to set the right command in the GPS.
The infamous destructibility of Frostbite actually plays a cruel joke on players. At first glance, it seems great—you can take shortcuts by going off-road. But that’s obvious anyway. Shortcuts are meant to cut down travel time, so being able to smash through a fence or drive through a shed goes without saying. The real issue is that, for some reason, you can’t break through everything in your path, and it’s completely unclear where on the road there’s a rock or pole that will total your car on impact and where there aren’t any such treacherous obstacles.
***
Taking all of the above into account, one clear conclusion can be drawn. Most Wanted (2012) is the best NFS of recent years. The game is balanced, has incomparably better graphics, runs at a solid 60 FPS, and, with all DLCs, costs just 400 rubles. Oh, and the multiplayer supports 16 players, plus there’s the option for free roam online.
As for Rivals, it’s a hugely overrated product that’s very hard to get used to. There have never been so many blunders in the gameplay of an NFS game at once. Electronic Arts should seriously consider whether it’s worth entrusting a brand like Need for Speed to novice developers and releasing it annually at all.
