Need for Speed Most Wanted: Burnout in a Helmet

You may not be wondering why the drivers in Need for Speed Most Wanted are wearing helmets. You may not have even noticed, actually.

If you have noticed, however, you may be wondering what a bunch of reckless hoons are doing rocking stack hats while they cruise around town. The exceedingly boring motive is simply licensing reasons confirms Leanne Loombe, producer at Criterion, during a preview event in Sydney. I’m reminded of a chat I had with Driver: San Francisco creative director Martin Edmondson a few years back when he mentioned they deflected a similar demand, insisting helmets on drivers outside the context of a racetrack would look ridiculous.

Car licensing clearly still has its hurdles, but Loombe claims Criterion’s experiences have been otherwise smooth.

“Yeah, we don’t really find any problems with the licensing guys,” she says. “We have to get things approved by them and go through the approval process but we haven’t had issues at all, really.”

Most Wanted is Criterion’s follow-up to its hugely well-received 2010 reboot of Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, but it’s being described by many as more like a spiritual sequel to Burnout Paradise. It’s not far from the truth; the flame of Criterion’s cult-classic racer is burning hot beneath Most Wanted’s bonnet. The preview experience is more or less as it was when we played a similar series of races at E3, and our impressions remain just as positive.

We ask Loombe about the most useful bit of feedback that’s surfaced since the team began showing off Most Wanted.

“So obviously we showed it at E3, and when we showed it at E3 we hadn’t done having all the cars open from the start, and it did come across as quite a conventional racing game,” explains Loombe. “We wanted to break away from that convention so that’s when we decided, ‘Hey, why can’t I just drive whatever car I want to drive, whenever I want to drive it?’ And that’s why all the cars are available at the start.”

“We’ve obviously tried to act on all feedback that we get when we show the game because it’s really important that we maintain perspective, that we’re making the game the best that it can be... especially with multiplayer. At Gamescom there was a lot of stuff about meet up and how you get to the meet up and just making sure that the game was conveying exactly what you were supposed to be doing as well as giving you the freedom to play the way you wanted to play.”

The Vita version of Most Wanted, which looks sleek on the Vita’s fantastic screen and handles pleasantly well, isn’t being outsourced like many other Vita ports. We press Loombe regarding the resources Criterion has allocated Most Wanted on Vita considering there’s an argument that, despite the fact it’s a great device, it may not be worth the investment.

“Well, we’re super excited about the Vita; as you said, we’re doing it in house and it’s a direct port of the game, so everything is still the same, the visuals, the open-world, the events, so we're really excited about it coming out,” says Loombe. “Obviously we’ve got a dedicated team in house that are dealing with the Vita version but it’s all the same codebase, so it’s really easy for us to just port that across. There’s 10 extra events for the Vita as well.”

Your progress can be shared across the Vita and PS3 versions too.

“Yes, Vita is all run by Speed Points as well,” says Loombe, “So when you’re playing on the PS3 and you’re getting Speed Points for that, you can then go onto the Vita version.”

In April this year Sumo Digital's Gareth Wilson, formerly design manager at Bizarre Creations, told OXM UK that he feels it’s tough to push new racing games this late in the generation.

“We need a new console,” he said. “Racing games always do well when a new console comes out, and you do a new physics engine and improved graphics, but towards the end of a console cycle it's always quite hard to push racing games, I think, because if you've DiRT 1 do you need DiRT 3? If you've got PGR3 do you need PGR4? I'm not so sure. It really relies on technology, the racing genre. Maybe more than other genres.”

It’s an interesting point; in late 2011 we also discussed whether the racing genre had peaked this generation. Since then, however, 2012 has gone from being a dry year for petrolheads to host to two of the most impressive looking racers this generation:Need for Speed Most Wanted and Forza Horizon. It's a one-two punch in the wedding vegetables from the UK's world-leading racing dev scene for anyone who thinks the flag has fallen on driving games this generation. We ask Loombe for her thoughts.

“Well, the big thing for us is not abiding to convention; that’s why we’re making all the cars available at the start and it’s not just grinding through to unlock all the cars,” she says. “Also in 2012 it’s important for us that it’s all connected gameplay and it’s all about your friends.”

“I just think racing games are evolving. It IS about being all connected. It IS more about the multiplayer side of things as well; you know, FPS and massively-multiplayer online, that’s becoming really, really important in the games industry and making sure racing games can fit into that criteria as well is where we’re heading. I mean, everything’s connected now; you just can’t get away from that. I think as racing games evolve they will become more connected, like Most Wanted is. It’s probably the most-connected of its generation... That’s where we want to take it.”