They admit the Need for Speed journey is ”a little bit of trial and error,” given the brand size. DICE’s Frostbite 2 let’s them ”tell the story” in the right way.
Not too long ago the Need For Speed franchise was split between Black Box and Criterion to give each studio ample time to build quality instalments. The racing IP has undergone something of an overhaul in recent years as it even dabbled in simulation with Shift.
Criterion released Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit which was hailed as a great return for the long-time racing series, and it introduced a social component called Autolog to encourage multiplayer races, and to compete with the achievements of friends.
Need For Speed: The Run is Black Box’s latest but they’re using DICE’s Frostbite 2 engine, which gives them a great edge they say, especially for story telling experiences being kept in-game and not resorting to live action cutscenes.
”Obviously with technology limitations in the past, we couldn’t tell a story really effectively,” said executive producer Jason DeLong in an interview.
”We would film these cutscenes where the guys talk to the camera, which has an inherent cheesiness, if you will, that made it hard to really convey the seriousness of the story that we wanted to do. So in moving to Frostbite 2, that allowed us to really for the first time tell the story in a way that was effective and was relevant to games.”
Black Box want us caring why we’re racing across the US. ”We’re really excited about the direction; the testing that we got back so far has been very, very promising.”
”That people want some sort of motivation behind why they’re racing, especially when you’re racing for an extended period of time. And with the size of what these games are now, it’s easy to sort of just get lost in race after race. So time and motivation behind it and having the story with it – a cross-country journey – was really important for us,” he said.
Frostbite 2’s involvement with Need For Speed, which was created by DICE for the Battlefield series, began when EA split the racer IP between Black Box and Criterion. It gave the developer time to think about and invest in new and better engine technology.
”So we looked at several options: do we advance the engine that we currently have? What other third party ones are out there?” continued DeLong.
”And when we realized the game that we wanted to make, which we knew was based in a cinematic kind of Hollywood story telling fashion, we looked at Frostbite and it seemed like, “Well, it’s internal; we can work closely with the dev team” and it was the right choice.”
”So it allowed us to get a character in the game, have incredible, believable characters in addition to amazing worlds and amazing looking cars. Their visual effects work is second to none, the world destruction, their audio is incredible.”
”And most importantly, one of the nice side benefits was that it’s an incredibly content-driven tool, which allowed us to create more content than we’ve ever done before.”
Check out the full interview between Jason DeLong and Gamasutra. Need for Speed: The Run releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC November 15th in the US, 18th in Europe. Have you enjoyed story fuelled Need For Speed titles, or are you just about the race?
