The last decade in the iconic Need for Speed series has been largely crafted by Ghost Games, and has had some of the most divisive titles the series had ever seen. And although those games were much more ambitious and brought some really neat ideas (mostly NFS Heat), they were ultimately let down by lackluster execution and lack of care in the form of post-release supports. In this article I'll be discussing one of the most annoyingly recurring issues with some of those games and how they plagued the overall gameplay experience.
And this has nothing to do with the driving model in those games (which is quite inaccurate and wonky in NFS 2015) or any other metric but the level designs themselves which often uses unfair and artificial ways to bump up the difficulty. In many of the races, the layout of the tracks and many of the objects around it have been positioned in such a way that if the player's car even slightly hits them during a race, it gets stuck in a corner and doesn't recover quickly, making the player lose way more time during the process than what should've been. I've experienced this in both NFS 2015 and Heat multiple times and it seems to be a staple level design choice in all the Ghost Need for Speed titles.
Not only is this incredibly frustrating (and can be downright infuriating at times) during a race but it also feels cheap and deceitful, something a racing game shouldn't ever do to it's players. Instead of encouraging you to get better at driving, this harshly penalizes the players for making even the slightest amount of mistake which ought to happen in games like these cause NFS is all about driving at dangerously high speeds and that's basically the whole USP of the franchise. So having this sort of approach where the cost of even a split-second mistake can be way too high can drain all the fun from the races and does go against what Need for Speed is supposed to be.
This also makes the resulting gameplay feel far more arcade-y and fragile, than what they should've been in a modern NFS title, or even any modern racing game for that matter. As far as I know, other popular racing franchises like Forza Horizon never use these kind of 'dirty' moves against it's players, and offer a far generous experience.
The Traffic in these games are also designed in ways that they become more of a hindrance to the player during races than something that's just taking place on it's own----as I've seen cars slowly moving sideways while driving which serves no other purpose but only increases the chances of colliding with your car. After experiencing these instances so many times, they do not seem emergent but rather deliberate design choices by the developers, which does turn up the difficulty but in ways that are artificial and contrived.
What's worse is that the Traffic behaves erratically during cop chases as well and at times it feels like as if those other cars are intentionally trying to run over your car, which makes the Traffic no less of an obstacle while you're trying to shake off the cops that are quite unfair by themselves.
Games should play fair, and sports-based games more so than others. This kind of underhanded design choice should've been corrected as soon as it's discovered but Ghost Games had allowed them to be present in multiple NFS titles and did absolutely nothing about them. That's not being fair to the players and is just plain disingenuous, but at least no one has to deal with this issue anymore as now we're well into the post-Ghost era of Need for Speed with Unbound and beyond, where hopefully this sort of design choice has gone long extinct.
Although the Ghost NFS titles did a lot of things right like the environments and the whole vibe of underground racing and even visuals (NFS 2015 is one of the most breathtakingly realistic looking racing game ever made and is unmatched even to this day), but core gameplay issues like this hurt the games in the long run, in ways that just can't be overlooked or glossed over.
I've yet to play NFS Unbound but if you have and found the same issue in the game (which I sincerely hope not), do let me know in the comments below.
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