The developers had a really good chance at "continuing" the campaign by taking the structure of the first 4 week event, and just doing more 4 week events as a seasonal thing. Nearing the end of the campaign I actually thought that's how it was going to turn out, but I was very disappointed when I looked at the event screen after the final mission.
my thoughts EXACTLY! as insane as it is to say, the game's kinda getting bombed because there just isnt enough of it. its so lame that i have to dig into where my system keeps my game save and manually remove it if i wanna play the game again.
All due respect to you, this doesn’t say much. Just to give one general example, Elden Ring’s honeymoon phase also ended a long time ago, and that didn’t detract from its public perception one bit. I understand the drive to make snarky remarks, but this might take away from the value of the video you’re commenting, whose whole point is to give a more solid explanation than this.
@@ilbroducciore thank you for saying that lmao. and because this is the internet let me clarify that im not being sarcastic; saying shit like "hOnEyMoOn eNdEd" isnt constructive in the slightest, its just useless noise
@@JelliThePilot Its not even supposed to be snarky, its probably the best way to surmise the change in public perception. When Unbound came out I closely followed the community, its efforts and thoughts since its release on reddit, RUclips, rarely even Discord. I usually do that to see what hidden stuff and tricks the community find out I can use for my playthrough. Inbetween those of course are opinion pieces. At launch we went from: "This is the best NFS in years" "This is the most fun I‘ve had since Most Wanted/Carbon" "NFS is finally good again" To realizing that the game isn‘t that great and makes many of the same mistakes the predecessor do. Drifting still feels like flicking on/off a switch, event variety isn‘t that strong, online multiplayer is a regression from predecessors since it doesn‘t have dedicated Speedlists anymore…. Overall its a very barebones product. Post-launch updates can fix that of course but yet again do we have to wait months for that, unsure if Unbound is even gonna get those updates and life support will be cut early again.
Most wanted 2005 had a great post endgame feature: The police scoretab, making the full amount of money when you redo races and the police chases! I spent so much time building cars, earning money to buy new cars and terrorized Rockport PD!
And of course the challenge series, it also had more variety in race events compared to unbound Also you had reason to engage with the police while in unbound the police is just annoying and not as challenging as the most wanted ones The claim that unbound is better than most wanted is kinda ridiculous to be honest
Soon as I seen the complete cheese that was the cel-shaded tire smoke, I was out. Ill replay MW05 again before I drop even 10 bucks on unbound. Better yet wait on Night Runners, 1 dude making it and it already looks more promising. Hopefully itll have options to turn off effects. Also try out Art Of Rally for a no frills different experience.
This game feels great the first 2 weeks… then you start to see all bs and it settles in. 1. It’s bare bones, online is wash rinse repeat grind to unlock cars. 2. You unlock the fastest cars by just “showing up” you don’t even have to leave the line. You quickly notices players staying at the line in races 3. Winning doesn’t even matter, the money between 1-5 is only a few grand. There’s very few (like 4-5 cars) that require you to come in 1st or 2nd 4. Pop in. There’s a ton of pop in that happens online, cars textures just pop in on high speed parts of the game (I’m on ps5) 5. The crashes are over the top and aren’t consistent. You swipe a fender in a race and get sent flying for some reason. 6. Critiacal damage doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t slow you down and simply reset when you crash again….what’s the point?? 7. The FUCKING UI!!!!!!!! your building your car and a race invitation comes in at it completely blocks the stats on the screen so now you have to wait out the 30sec. There’s no way decline from inside the build menu
#7 is so retarded, it has bugged me from day 1 of online play. Like dont they let people test games anymore? And why do they have people working on game design that obviously dont know jack shit about it. Its just so weird
All facts, and the car list is very boring and so is the map. The map isn’t even fully utilized and the race diversity is so boring none of them really feel any different except for a select few and there’s just not enough races.
In Most Wanted you could endlessly play chases that were always fun and different and get bounty after your career. The cop chases in unbound are the only ones in the series people actively avoid.
@@J.PC.Designs Tbf, what made MW2005 cops hard was their numbers and the game's shitty physics/handling, they weren't that hard to hide from (sometimes in plain sight) or outrun
Few things for me: -Not a fan of the limited number of tracks in the game; especially breaking down into specific car classes. Racing on the same circuits/sprints get old very quickly; and I'm pretty sure all the tracks in total don't even use half the map. Ended up with so much of the map left unexplored which also resulted in a huge pain going for all the collectables/activities having to find on your own. Definitely begging for a race editor of some sort. -Pursuits just aren't that fun the engage in half the time. During the campaign they're more/less of an annoyance, but afterwards it's more grieving. When you car can easily wipe out and high speeds from a simple graze, trying to interact with the mechanics becomes a huge pain. Shame 'cause I like the idea how specific cop cars has different strengths/weaknesses you have to deal with using different strategies. -Obviously the car balance online is completely out of wack (*cough* B Class Pista). While the customization is great, the engine swaps prices are absolutely ludicrous at times. Kinda discourages you from taking lower class cars and building them up. And I really don't like how only the cars you've won in the SP transition over to MP. Having to grind while getting smoked by guys who put in more time is not a fun experience. -Like another comment said, they did not take advantage of the week-by-week structured they started with. They could have done generated events for specific classes or certain types of cars for the week and have more reward cars for said events. Definitely would have help with the post-campaign content. And I'd love if all the side characters you raced against were more fleshed out, or have something like SSX had with a rivalry system where ramming/wrecking guys will change relationships with. Maybe villains/rivals you make will put up higher bets in pre-race. Hell, combine those two ideas; bet with them enough by the end of the week you'll have a change to race for their car like Rocky's.
I remember in Midnight Club 3 we had the option to create our own courses. And there were 3 different maps..... and capture the flag..... and a story mode that wasn't annoying....... and it WASNT $70.......
The tracks. I agree I played the 10h trial and even within first 4 days I had to race on the same tracks which was not a great outlook for a full game. I get they after a while you might do the same one but not within a first few hours.
I think the most overlooked point in this is game is: re-playability. The BlackBox era games may not offer more story content in it of themselves, but you still get the want to re do the story every one and a while. I have replayed NFS Prostreet, MW '05, Carbon, Underground multiple times and every time I just go : man this is a good game. Hell even The Run is more re-playable than Unbound. I actively didn't go for the newer NFS because they didn't look as fun to play, the exception being MW 2012, which the online was actually a shit load of fun making you use different cars for each playlist (and from my experience, the "meta cars" weren't as OP as the likes of the B class 488 Pista and S+ Regera). The story in Unbound is sure fun, but I don't want to replay it, and the online is so repetitive that grinding for better cars is just that : a grind. And for what? so that you can buy the OP cars and have a slightest chance of winning events. I waited 10 years to buy a new NFS and I come back to this... thats 70€ I'll never be getting back...
People love saying "After the story the game is dead." I agree with you 100%. The game isn't dead. It's just completed. Replayability and gameplay are the #1 and #2 priorities to making the greatest games of all time for all genres. Especially racing games.
yeah, unbound is still a stellar arcade racer, but its insane that for $70 we didnt get a new game+ (which this campaign is BEGGING for) or cops/night freeroaming in multiplayer at launch. unfortunate to have to twiddle our thumbs letting the reviews encrust this game in Mid while the devs put out post-launch updates.
Know the problem with unbounded is just a bunch of small things like a newer game with bugs you know. Like one giant bug and a game isn't anywhere as bad as a game with a shitload of small bugs scattered throughout the game. Like there's just so many small issues with some bigger issue sprinkled on top. The cop chases are just terrible the drifting is odd and bad and weird at the same time
it really isn't a good racing game at all, the cornering is shit, all the customization nfs heat added was taken away, and if you crash you are forced into a dogshit animation that takes away your ability to control your car instantly losing you the race, heat adds nothing to the game no money multiplier or rep leveling system and you can no longer enter any race you want you are forced to a shit rating system and you cannot race out of that with a high rated car, again nfs heat allowed you to do this with zero issues, nfs unbound is such a massive downgrade compared to heat.
New Game+ and maybe a few more tracks? As much as I love my first playthrough I'm sure every track in this game is engrained into my head. I can't believe I'm saying this but Need for Speed 2015 for all its faults pretty much had one new track for every mission (and even if you do run the same track in the next mission, it might be in a different race type or the layout has been slightly altered).
The only reason I haven't gotten back into it is that I already dread how much grinding it's going to take to do what I really want without cheating: build cars.
That's a very weird way to say I want the game to gift me cars like Forga does I could get it, if you would've asked to increase the payouts for the playlists in MP though
@@ashar8192 I would rather be gifted variety than have to slave to obtain a sliver of surplus in my options; personally. You can always choose to limit your intake when in a position of privilege, you can seldom make the acquisition of something intentionally scarce easier tho. I'll choose; well... choice every single time over grind. Just my two cents tho.
@@PheliciaBG A Sensible progression thats rewarding isnt something too far fetched. When this topic gets brought up anywhere players like you act as if everyone wants some hardcore grinding progression and thats just not true. And that is being used just so you can pull the finger towards others that having progression that takes efford is bad. I honetsly dont understand it. As if previous horizon games 1-3 didnt offer exactly that. A sensible progression, that is rewarding but not absurdley rewarding and properly difficult without being too grindy. Ive honestly lost hope trying to speak sense into players like you. Completely brushing off anyone who tries to say that horizon needs difficulty and proper rewarding progression. You've no idea how indiffernet it is to play a game that doesnt feel challanging and giving everything in abundance.
The monthly content point and comparison to Forza was dead on. Modern games have a precedent of continuous post launch content and nfsu not having that sets it apart from most other games. Not to mention that the pista and similar exploits still aren't fixed, but Forza saw the raeser tachyon banned *overnight*.
@@Messerschmitt_BF_109G_10 the raeser was banned from online and rivals literally overnight. Don joewon song couldn't even get his video out before it was banned. The trans swap issue itself isn't fixed, but it no longer has any effect on pvp so it's fixed for all intents and purposes.
@@yol_n yes and no. Leaderboards were only half the reason it was banned. The real problem is that, just like the pista, it ruined online racing. But the leaderboards are a different problem of their own. Since day one, they've been plagued by hackers, glitches, and other exploits. The devs have recently taken rather large steps towards cleaning them up, but if leaderboards were the only reason to ban the raeser, I'm sure it wouldn't have happened overnight. Reasoning being and an example of how the leaderboards aren't a huge priority, about a month after the game launched, the devs changed the way drift points are counted. This resulted in about a 20% nerf to the overall point gain, meaning if your scores were within 20% of the optimal score, you couldn't beat your old score. They only just fixed this issue by clearing the old scores out just last week, 14 months after the nerf. To give the devs some credit, they were likely busy with the 2 dlcs as well as cleaning the other leaderboards and dealing with the massive amount of tiny bugs the game has, so it's not like they just didn't want to fix it, but the leaderboards aren't a super high priority. The game is mostly single player focused after all.
The problem is the handling model is awful and not fun to drive compared to NFS:MW and Underground, so on those games you had fun just driving the cars around and replaying the story. With the Modern NFS driving is just awkward and not really fun on its own
yes exactly. the whole tuning feels completely wrong. even underground 2 was able to have an arcade physics with still more or less proper ecu, suspension, and drivetrain tuning. you really know a company fucked up the handlingmodel when they need an option for brake to drift etc.
Totally agree! It's just the same shit they used in heat. Handling in Payback was also breake to drift, but somehow it felt more smooth and the point from grip to drift was much smoother and better to control. But in Unbound the Handling is as shit as it was in NFS2015. Another major issue in Multiplayer is the awful Serverperformance. AI traffic cars accelerate and stop just anywhere and are completely unpredictable.
i disagree, only because i explicitly remember with vivid clarity my impressions on NFSU2 and MW handling; it felt clunky, heavy and slow. My familiarity with NFS up to that point was with NFS 2 & 3, and later on with PS2 racing games like MX vs ATV Unleashed. With the older NFS games the cars were all really light and nimble, and in MX vs ATV the handling feels very direct and immediate. By comparison, U2 and MW felt incredibly heavy. it felt like I had just finished driving a Caterham, and was now tasked with racing in a dump truck and managing the same or faster speeds. Don't get me wrong, Frostbite NFS handling models have been a complete mess in their own right, and I'm not a fan of it. But the older games also felt chunky and heavy. I think we're all trying to look at older NFS games not only with rose tinted glasses and forgetting all the things we didn't like about the game as kids, but we're also completely forgetting that we played those games as children; we were much easier to impress back then than we are now as adults, and i think the cynicism a lot of people have towards the world around them is also affecting the way we enjoy new games today.
I mean it's entirely commonplace for people to alter/update opinions after the "honeymoon phase" of a game has ended. Also if perception of something changes; people absolutely adore their minds being made up for them so they don't have to form an opinion of their own on a subject (regardless if the new opinion is "right" or not, the less the general person has to think about how they feel about something, the easier/better for them)
Carbon had the best customization in the world . Being able to scale/size every body modification to your liking was revolutionary , how you can bend and curve your splitters , spoilers , completely rescale all hoods … like wtf can we get that system back
autosculpt was featured in several nfs titles but carbons was the best. but the only reason why it was such a decline from that point forward was because the manufacturers had to agree upon every zone of the autosculpted part which made things significantly more tedious for licensing agreements.
@@MasterOfTruck If I'm not mistaken, Autosculpt was introduced in NFS Carbon. Really a game changer in car customization. Multi layered vinyls and decals made me think NFS Carbon was pretty on par with NFSU2 in customizing cars.
@@gamtax it was, and it was the best iteration. autosculpt was also present in undercover and prostreet. however undercover's was far more limited in what you could do. and pro street practically made autosculpt worthless because sculpting was tied to vehicle performance. going ham with the zones made drastic changes to lift and drag. so autosculpting was no longer only a visual aesthetic and not doing it "properly" yielded poor vehicle performance as a result.
@@MasterOfTruck damnn that makes sense why they got rid of that feature . Well they need to find some way to make a a green to bring it back . Thanks for the info
@@MasterOfTruck that’s how I feel towards this ! Auto script was so mind blowing, that’s why carbon is hands down the best in my opinion compare to old most wanted . Cool to see everyone loving that feature
"It's a good game when it stands alone, But it doesn't stand out from the others in the franchise." I like that sentence. The game isn't bad at all, but the problem is that Criterion has done greater in the past with games like Hot Pursuit. I paid $20 to own that game, and the music, the environmental events, the police, the level design X car handling, and even the unskippable cutscenes were more engaging. You could even play as a cop in a parallel campaign. Compare that to this..... "Bro, Bro, Bro / Need For.... uhhhhhhh" campaign. I know EA had many internal complications, but 3 years is still 3 years. That's way too long to be paying FULL PRICE for something as underwhelming as NFSU. I remember how worried I was when they confirmed a 2022 release date and started pumping out marketing. I was hoping they'd get another year to flesh out the experience like Midnight Club 3 did, immersive environment, a story mode that actually makes freaking sense and extra gameplay features to keep the game from being so boring.
like, i dont know if anyone remembers the "Capture the Flag" and "Race Editor" modes from MC3, but I wish Need for Speed would try to have variety for the player like that.
I didn't like Hot Pursuit remastered. It felt like Burnout. And Unbound has alot of Burnout aspects in it. The nitrous boost (and how to get it), the finish race camera, alot of it reminds me of Burnout Revenge. Let NFS be NFS and Burnout be Burnout.
Why!? Why!!!!? Just tell me why everyone keeps Hot Pursuit 2012 in such high regard? The main menu music was fire, and after Undercover we really needed a throwback out of the Black Box open world formula, sure. But Hot Pursuit majorly messed up the handling. At least Criterion had the smarts to design a map fitting for their BS, which fell apart during Ghost-era. But the shit handling still started with Hot Pursuit and it took Until Unbound to get out of it.
yes price is an issue. Lot of people who bought it at full price felt they were backstabbed when the game went on sale so soon after release, so they changed the review to negative.
They dropped the ball. The game just needed steady content updates, but by choosing to wait until March for _News_ about the first content update they shot themselves in the foot.
Blackbox era NFS kept my attention for so long after because i would spend HOURS playing vehicular dress-up. My brother told me he saw me playing "pro-street fashion week" for at least 3hrs at a time.
After playing Heat, this is exactly what I expected. I hope they continue to provide support by fixing multiplayer and adding story DLC's - something something rally week something something classics week, etc. so you can actually make use of their massive car list.
⬆️ definitely agree with this. There's absolutely no reason they can't like you say put out challenge weeks with a particular car group to used and you get a sick (NEW TO THE GAME) Legendary custom rally, classic or hyper car etc etc
@Indraft was it midnight club? I slightly remember something back in the day when u could flash a NPC racer and have a quick city race. That would be cool.
The thing is times have changed.. back when playing underground 2 or most wanted playing with a friend meant going to one's house doing races one by one and online racing wasn't a big thing. Nowadays the online aspect of a game carries a lot more weight than it did back then and especially so for racing games where most fun for many is competitive fun racing WITH friends and others online.
Probably EA stopped paying for good reviews or paying for the removal of bad user reviews under the guise of "review bombing". Metacritic did say they will remove "review bombs" and with the marketing blitz that EA did during launch, probably all negative user reviews were removed during the launch window. But now that they stopped the marketing ads, so did Metacritic stopped removing the "review bombs".
Lets be real here who the fuck gives a crap about Reviews most of them are sad idiots that cant play the game right or they are just bored on there ass and just only hate for no resone
That's kinda my thinking. Either that or the only people initially buying the game were "consumers", due to how mid previous titles were. Others saw the surprisingly high reviews and bought the game, realized it was shit, and left their negative reviews
I think the game would've benefited from a more serious story, aiming it at teens (nothing wrong with that) made the story kinda stupid and lighthearted and it wasn't bad but I wasn't invested in it, I wanted cops, I wanted rivals, I wanted to take down bad guys and run from the police, I don't know lol it feelt kind of repetitive. But Like I said it's still fun. I would've liked to be able to fight between classes but not as an option, but in order to get specific unique cars or upgrades, I think modern games are wrong in one aspect: they give the player everything, and old games made you work hard if you wanted to get that special car or upgrade if you wanted it.
Interesting video. I can see some of your points but I think context matters. Underground and Most Wanted are so beloved cause they brought something new or revolutionary to the genre. Yes there is nostalgia involved but I think those titles were successful because they had something that wasn't present anywhere else (as far as I know, correct me I am wrong, thanks). Customization in UG series and cop chases in MW were, at that time, some of the best features that only they could provide(atleast at that level). That's why they were successful. And ofc the time they were released. They took advantage of it. Fast and Furious and street culture irl heavily impacted the success of these games. The music and even the piss filter in MW was consistent for its time as many music videos for these Nu metal and rap rock bands had these filters. Now look at new games. Unbound is doing exactly what new in terms of the genre? Is it capturing the vibes of 2023? Does anyone cares about the vibes or know about it? Good graphics, sure but it isn't anything unique. I see last 4-5 games of NFS and other franchises and I can't tell which is which cause of "realistic" graphics so they looks very similar. There is no charm. I can easily recognize older games cause they represent something for the time. I think Heat was a fine game. What does Unbound do to separate itself from Heat? ok the effects are definitely trademark I guess. But does anyone care? And what it represents? The story is pretty bad imo. Again, old NFS stories weren't exactly good either. But they were a trademark for their time. Cheesy over the top dialogues and acting was intentionally bad and funny. Cause for that time it was acceptable. People loved them and they have been remembered and memed to death. Would anyone remember Unbound's story? Let's see. Again I know that nostalgia plays a huge role and it is a problem. But it's unfair to just blame nostalgia for it(not talking about the video but some comments that I saw). Setting aside my personal issues (handling feels weird, city is not memorable at all), Unbound is just another new game in NFS, unlike the phenomena that were UG and MW. And no I am not saying it out from pure nostalgia, as the video stated, NFS has to build on some things, anything, to stand out. I just can't seem to enjoy driving in a racing game as I used to. Just my 2 cents.
Also for example: In MW, taking down every list member and getting their cars feels so good, the cars feel important, not just some artifact that you can get and it looks cool, the CARS are the MAIN FOCUS of the story. And in NFS Unbound, cars are secondary, there is no legendary M3 GTR that they take away from you (giving you motive), there aren't any other in game iconic cars. (I'm aware they take away the car you choose at the beginning but it just doesn't have the same weight as the M3 GTR because those are just generic cars, not a special unique car that isn't available otherwise, the story in MW just has more weight to it).
I mean, I think the car you chose helps somewhat. The Countach with the modern body kit helped to replicate (almost but not quite) that feeling of having the M3 taken. Honestly was one of the more creative ones.
@@Blackw1ng yeah it was something similar and that was nice but I think the story could've put higher stakes on getting your car back, Most Wanted 05 works because we're so invested in the story that it becomes almost like an obsession to take the others down and finally recover the GTR. It's hard to explain but the story and the campaign structure really really work.
It's not about motive. Its about strong atmosphere presentation, soundtrack and first and foremost handling and physics. Sound design, nie varied feeling map. We got none of those things in last 12 years of Criterion/Ghost made NFS games, instead we get same boring brake to drift model that sucks, and they slap new coat of paint over this mess. It sucked in Rivals, in NFS 2015, Payback and Heat and it sucks now. People literarily want game that feels and sounds like Most Wanted, Carbon or ProStreet to play. Not the same reheated garbage from 2012 onwards. Yes there is another part of motivation in MW05 but that doesnt matter when you replay the game. People keep replaying those and then more and more, then with mods like Pepega or Carbon Battle Royale. Not because of something as petty as "oh he took my GTR", but because the game's mechanics were inherently fun and soundtrack made you pumped no matter which time it is you hear it. They constantly ignore this while nostalgia baiting kids with M3 GTR from MW05 in every single damn game since nfs 2015(and MW2012) and its lame. They are not trying to make their own identity while making gameplay what people want, they keep the gameplay the same while paying lipservice to making their own identity. ProStreet didnt have M3 GTR, Carbon only had the car for sake of continuity of the story. Yet those games were popular. UG1 and UG2 didnt have such motivation either, and people love these too.
My one argument I think you failed to acknowledge was the importance, at least for me as a kid in 2005-2008, that the Pink Slip mechanic had on replayability and I personally think it should have been mentioned. What kept me hooked into Most Wanted as a kid for WELL LONGER than just 25 hours, but up to a few months, was the challenge of trying to earn all the pink slips before beating the game. As far as I'm aware, does Unbound have something like that? I personally think this was one of the things that kept me constantly coming back to Most Wanted to play because not only was the challenge straightforward, just earn all the pink slips, it was extremely difficult for my 6 to 8yo self to do. I'm now 21 and still haven't got them all and I've been revisiting that game on my laptop for that very reason.
- Cops spamming everywhere - Horrible AI, even on "relaxed" diff - Economy : Buy-ins, part costs, garage costs and earnings - Handling: cars randomly spin out or "trip" over nothing, causing them to flip - The absolute disgrace of a soundtrack - EA Play subscription and Palace Edition are a scam (M3 GTR is online only plus many players didn't get it and Palace cars require in game purchase) - Awful update schedule - Not an online player but it sucks according to, well... everyone Edit : It still sucks...specially for EA giving Single-player mode the middle finger.
I got it on sale and enjoyed it. I don't really plan on playing online, but when I get a car customization itch it's definitely the game I'll boot up, run some races, and throw a cool bodykit on the JDM car I feel like messing with at the moment. It doesn't need to be some endless live service game, I'm not expecting some masterpiece.
Well from the first picture leak they gave us( the Porsche) game was supposed to look miles better than what was released. Along with the time development they took a year or so to not release yearly to "work" on this game. Tbh it should've been a masterpiece based on what they did/ told us
Problem is, the customization hasnt changed much since NFS2015 and Payback, nor has the Car list. I played NFS 2015, Payback and Heat, so i already know over 80% of the Cars and Customization of them. The list of cars looks good for new players, but for its 80% recycled shit only. They don't even update Cars like the VW Golf or BMW M4 where newer Models are available.
The score dropping that much tells me there's something more going on that just the honeymoon phase ending. Honeymoon phase ending happens to all games and yet Unbound, to my knowledge, is the only one where that resulted in perception going from overwhelmingly positive to mixed and negative that quickly.
It's because the multiplayer is not good and super grindy. Related to honeymoon phase ending, but also a full game mode that SHOULD be good. I still gave it a good review, but I stopped playing after like 3 mp sessions. Just wasn't fun enough
Modern reimagining is the best description of Unbound. I'm gen Z and grow up on Most Wanted and as soon as I saw cel shaded NPCs I knew I won't like the game. If your last game was unfinished and you cut the development it means you have to focus on getting the fundamentals right not focus on visual Design. And don't get me started on the music and dialogue. I like some of the artists featured but the songs don't fit into a NFS game. Modern reimagining indeed. Tries to be hip but ends up being cringe.
All I really want from the game is just a way to race against my own times. I could have entertained myself for dozens of hours building different cars and competing against my own times on all the levels, but there's just no way to do that. I'm just baffled that they would leave out what's in my mind such a basic yet extremely important feature. As far as I can tell, there's not even a way to keep track of your best times. Even if you wanted to wait an in-game week between each attempt, which is just as rediculous, you can't even see how your time compares without keeping track for yourself. Seriuosly, why you don't get infinite resets, at very least after beating the entire story, is lost upon me. I'm even fine without global leaderboards because those are liable to be filled with cheaters anyways, just let me see my own times! I really don't understand what they want you to do after you beat the game. They put all these collectibles everywhere and you'll probably only have bought a couple car by the end game, so do they really think I'm going to waste that much time grinding for new cars when there's nothing left to do? The CPUs are not even remotely a challenge with an S+ car, so basically all I can do is handicap myself so I can still have a challenge. I ended up just cheating for money post game even though I wanted to grind for it, but there was just nothing fun left to grind. Heat had very similar problems, but even in heat you could at least see your best times and even your friend's times. Even if stuff like nitro refills not refilling until you go back to a garage made it terrible to grind for best times, you could still do it. I'm just imagining how cool it would be if the game kept track of your top times and showed which car you used for them. Just that little addition would make the game a 9/10 for me instead of like a 7 as it is currently.
I got the game for $44. It’s now on sale again for 34 not a good sign I don’t really blame the developers. I blame the publisher yet again if it’s not madden or FIFA they don’t put financial backing behind it. There is no Content and that’s unfortunate. I bought it for a rainy day so it makes no difference to me.
They don't even put money back into their multi-billion-dollar cash cows, it's not surprising they don't spend enough money on NFS... I took one look at the car list pre-launch and knew it was gonna be a lazy refresh of Heat
Just my two cents: I did not play this game, nor am I planning to. I have seen enough videos to be able to decide on skipping. My biggest issue is the physics. At some point there was a change in NFS games where they introduced this stupid drifting mechanism. It just feels so unreal in NFS games, physics-wise. Also, the transition from drifting to gripping is ridiculous. As one of the other commenter said, it is like a binary thing, you are either drifting or gripping, but no inbetween. Super unrealistic, even for an arcade game. Drift is never supposed to be a faster way of cornering, just like how it was in older NFS games. Those ones got it right. And not to mention that instant speed decrease when drifting starts... the car should smash into the wall, but instead decelerates crazily and drifts around the corner. Gosh... Another big thing is car variety. I cannot speak on behalf of other people, but I personally don't need 15 different variations of Lamorghini Huracan. Same with all the Porsche and BMW and whatnot. Instead I would like to see more common cars used in everyday life. I am living in Europe, I want to see cars from here. People use Suzuki, Skoda, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, Opel, Renault, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo and the list could go on. I would love to pimp these cars! A hundred times more exciting than all the Lamborghinis. I have a Skoda Octavia, and I have never seen this car in a racing game. Why? This also applies to Forza, even though it has tons of cars, still no European everyday cars. These are the things I check first when a new NFS (or any racing game) is released. If I see drifting and boring cars, I am just not interested in the game at all, regardless of how good other aspects are. Thanks for reading!
Need for Speed has had issues with its physics since the introduction of Frostbite way back on the Xbox 360/PS3 release of Undercover. The pre Undercover games were by no means perfect, but they made more sense than everything after. EA has the money and means, I don't know why NFS doesn't have its own specific game engine like Forza, GT and Dirt.
I would definitely love my real life car in another NFS game... MW12 has an Alfa Romeo Mito in the Velocity DLC.. Being chased by cops in an upgraded car, that I have the keys for feels great...Too bad the devs only care about supercars...
As someone who has been playing NFS since NFS II SE, one thing I think you fail to mention in your comparison between Most Wanted 2005 and Unbound is the physics of the cars and how they feel to drive, along with the overall style and character of the game itself. Sure, Unbound might be the best modern take an NFS game can be nowadays with all the customization options and all that. But the reason why most people like Most Wanted 2005 and why people look back at it as being the best game in the series is due to how it feels to drive cars there. All of them feel grippy and planted. it feels satisfying to take a racing line within the game and hitting apexes around the corners. Unbound however? While it has improved its grip handling since Heat, it still suffers the game mechanic of brake to drift/ tap handbrake to drift. Sure you can go full on grip handling, but it isn't the fastest when racing with everyone. Doesn't help as well that the Frostbite engine they use was never meant to be used for a racing game in the first place. Which can cause some weirdness at highspeed. (Just look at how many cars can go pass 240mph in Unbound over old Most Wanted 2005 as well.) Secondly, the character and style of the game itself. NFS Most Wanted 2005 was, despite the piss yellow filter the game had, brash and loud. With a soundtrack that you can easily jam into and fit in well with what you were doing in game. Unbound? Apart from the interesting choice of cell shaded characters, lacks that style and tries its best to be cool by giving you all these snazzy visual effects that can be more than disruptive than anything. It doesn't also help that the soundtrack isn't good at all. This alone I feel contributes to people not liking the game as well. Oh, don't forget sound design. Cars in NFS Mostwanted 2005 or any of this era of NFS had raw sounding cars. Cars that were loud and were a symphony to listen to go through the gears. Now? Most if not all of the current NFS games suffered here. Apart from choice sound effects from Hot Pursuit 2010, sound design in Ghost Games era NFS titles have cars that sound restricted. While the turbo flutters are nice, they don't hold the same feeling that older titles have.
You can grip and drift on Heat. I'm enjoying Heat's handling alot more and better than Unbound. Heat's pro parts are best for drift and super parts for grip
@@sambeezy007 That still doesn't change the fact that to be fast in modern NFS games, you have to resort to brake to drift tactics around corners still. While grip driving is indeed possible for Heat (and feels really nice) in the end, unless you're brake to drifting, you're going to be left behind in online lobbies or online based activities. It's something I wished they'd just completely cut out instead of having a middle ground in terms of the handling that you can setup to be one way or another. They literally could've done what older NFS titles have done so it doesn't compromise one thing for another. Where Drift has its own physics/handling model and would feel good and normal driving would have its own handling/physics model and would feel good.
I like a LOT about the game... but the cop system and weekly structure really killed it for me. I wanted so bad to make a full Let's Play series for it on my channel, but I've recorded about 7 episodes of it, and I honestly do not want to boot it up again... 1 race -> 20 minutes of boring, repetitive cop chases -> another race -> another cop around every bend -> rinse and repeat. Just lost me. And I hate not having the freedom to race as much as I want, whenever I want. I know the weekly system is a big positive for some players, but killed the game for me, personally.
Yup. Uninstalled after experiencing that annoying gameplay loop and went back to GT7. And I have been playing nfs since 1998. Never seen cops so annoying.
@@kjrwalters I feel ya for sure! My friend is a week or so ahead of me in the game's career and he said every day he has 5* pursuits. Which are just a cop on every single street corner, and take forever to finally evade. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I genuinely don't understand how people finish the campaign like this. I had 1 day of 5* heat and I wanted to uninstall the game and get a refund. And I'm only like 20% through the game, I still have dozens of hours left of this slog. I'm very disappointed.
@@CrNcHyFROG5 yea the cops got old fast. Can’t drive 3 min without getting into a pursuit so u don’t explore/test your cars without being pestered. I’d say wait for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown for your arcade/simcade fix. As along time fan, I feel like I’m outgrowing the NFS series nowadays. I’ll come back to it once it’s back to need for speed hot pursuit with high end exotics and open roads.
This game desperately needs updates ESPECIALLY in multiplayer where it’s just endless racing through the same tracks over and over. This makes it extremely difficult to grind money along with the fact that the most you can earn from winning a race playlist is like 20k, and some of the best cars in the game cost well over 1 million dollars. I really hope the devs try to get some sort of legitimate content out sometime soon. Honestly it pains me to admit it but this game is seriously getting irritating to play, which is a shame because I was so hyped for this game when it was announced.
Not every game has to be a Live Service once you finish the campaign (like Horizon), but a game should have enough content to keep you interested for a little while... Especially, racing games where racing against others online should be the logical priority. This is where NFS is floundering because Unbound launched with an unfinished MP. Period. They don't even try and hide this fact which is another reason why there is so much resentment toward EA and Criterion given the $70 price tag. Also, the driving physics are still terrible even for an arcade racer. They separate drift and grip into a literal binary trigger and that's why it doesn't feel remotely realistic even compared to other arcade racers. Lastly, it's hard for older fans to admit, but any recent game in a long-running franchise isn't meant for them. It's meant for new players, but not even Criterion, or EA is getting that right. That's another reason NFS is on life support compared to other racing games.
Lol so explain why the game is amazing to play and look at lmaooo this game looks phenomenal, plays good and sounds great like wtf do you want?? As a car enthusiast this game slaps... and I play sim games like asseto corsa gt7, Arcade games like forza horizon etc..
I agree with most of what you said, but I disagree with the physics. I think for the most part they're great, a significant improvement over heat and the last few entries. That being said they do need a little tweaking particularly more on the drift side of things. I mean you can't ignore that grip racing is finally possible and actually good for the most part. And lastly is an arcade racer, a lot more so than horizon is so you can't expect that mix of sim and arcade. I do think you're right in what you're saying about EA/criterion making it for the wrong people, but you're also wrong because I'm fairly certain that at least 2/3 of need for speed players are 30 and older. Might seem like a bold claim, but logically to have played all the old nfs games from the golden era they'd have to have been born no later than very early 90's. 🤔
You're right bringing up that the black box era games had the same issue where there's nothing to do when you complete the campaign, but people still loved it back in the day when nostalgia wasn't a thing yet, why is that? Because of the replay value, Unbound has 0 replay value while to this day you see a lot of people revisiting UG1-2, MW, Carbon, etc. Unbound lacks variation in the races, before you had things like Drag and Drift races that significantly changed how you were meant to play unlike Unbound (when in drift events you either change your car for a drift build or lose), or other optional things like Outrun, then Carbon lacked Drag races but introduced Territories and Canyon events bringing a whole new vibe. Unbound is like most wanted 05 with better graphics, worse handling model, worse cop system and less content overall. The need for speed saga literally just needs to release either Underground 3, Most Wanted 2 or Carbon 2, hell you could even be lazy and just remake those games changing nothing but the graphics and people will still love it. The feature set of older games are better
As for BB era games, people just replay the game from the start over and over, because gameplay/handling of Most wanted and ProStreet and others being so enjoyable. Then you have mods like Carbon Battleroyale or Pepega mod. They want the handling, physics and atmosphere or those games, not same brake to drift mess we got for last 12 years. They are not listening and keep doing the same game over and over. Yes they should add more end game and variety but on top of basis as good as Most Wanted, ProStreet or Carbon were. Not reskinned NFS Heat/Payback/2015.
I didnt make it more than 3h into the game. I get thats an arcade racer, but that doesnt mean that any racing skill ive build in previous games should be irrelevant, because for this game you need to know how to drift an unresposive brick. The old NFSs definetly did it better, even the in mario kart 8 you feel more connection to the road.
I was an idiot and believed all the initial positive reviews. I picked the game up and from the first race everything just felt a little off, the driving physics weren't as smooth as everyone was praising them to be, the AI was easy to beat and the cops were as useless as ever. I'm honestly glad that the community started to turn around on their thoughts and realize the game isn't really all that good. Today's gaming industry as a whole really is just about giving it the bare minimum and slapping an already established name onto the product, it's sad to see and all that we can do is reminisce and replay the old classics when there was actual effort put into game design and the developers cared about how their product turned out
Over here, and I did like NFS heat enough to put in over 100+ hours into it. The fact it is basically the same engine but yet somehow wheel support is there but not implemented while having a 3 year gap between heat and Unbound is jarring. I haven't played much of Unbound (like 7+ hours due to how busy I am) but I already know something is wrong with the game structure and SP progression. It's a shame.
Another thing are the cop chases, in MW, you don't get 5 star chases until later in the game, and in Unbound early game chases are a nightmare and later in the game they're so easy it's stupid
Thank you! Why is no one mentioning this I had a level 4 heat with Z08s ramming my shitty Civic five hours into the game. And after every few races I have to worry about shit like that so it just made the game annoying to play for me.
My issue with this game are several. Bouncy physics, lack of multiplayer content, cringe worthy dialogue, atrocious soundtrack, not cops or night-time in multiplayer, cops being more annoying and worse than intimidating, and the health bar system. Starting with the health bar, they seriously need to drop it. I want to be able to have 30 minute cop chases and the ability to fend off police by smashing into them. With the removal of the healthbar they can easily increase the cops difficulty. Or make a dedicated setting called "psycho" where the cops are relentless for the players who want that experience. They also could have easily implemented pursuit breakers. It's so funny how technology has come so far, yet all the gamemodes we get are just drift, races, circuits, and takeover events. There are SO MANY GAMEMODES that are so EASY to implement that would make this game 30 times BETTER. For example, Where are the bounty events? highway battles from undercover? Drag races? They Even could implement a cops Vs racers for multiplayer. The missed opportunities are endless.
The crash "physics" and the high probability of a wipeout are a big no for me. You can be going straight without touching anything or anyone and then suddenly your car flies into the nearest wall/truck and you get stuck in a long cutscene that basically loses you the race. One thing I liked about heat is that you can scrap stuff without instantly dying for 10s. Also grinding money online is WAY TO HARD for no reason, playing 10min to get only 15k is tiring, especially when car prices haven't been adapted to the online economy. Also dividing online from offline without even given an option for us to "buy" our sp rides is stupid. There are minor things like race variety and soundtrack being shit, vehicle grind not having a buy out option which locks half of the game behind hours of (not fun) grinding and EA messing with everyone hard grinded builds while still making the gameplay broken. There are no cops online and DRIFTING IS DECIDED BY DISTANCE, mind you the drift physics is this game are beyond shit, they should just stop trying to implement drift as a way to race and get the mods guys like the Slidewinders and Unite have given us. At this point I'm done buying NFS games, I'll just wait for them on game pass if they are even playable. I loved the game on lunch but the lack of updates, lack of decent fixes and repetition of the same stupid mistakes combined with new fuck ups that shouldn't even be possible made me lose faith. I hope they at least try to make new content for unbound and we don't end up having Heat pt 2 but at this point I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm assuming the main reason it was doing well during its launch season is because everyone was just happy to get a new NFS after 3 years of nothing. I never got it because I'm on ps4, but after a few weeks, I myself realized that I still prefer NFS Heat.
Heat had a well built structure and art direction, but in Unbound the art direction is just tact-on with cel shaded smoke and player models and everything else is looking realistic and recycled from the last game. They tried but it was just a weak jab than a full on swing, aka just lazy.
Funny how in a Need for Speed review, the police aren't mentioned once. The whole reason Most Wanted is the best in the series is the police. Even to this day it still holds up nearly 20 years later.
What the original Forza Horizon did right was have enough that you missed during the campaign that you could spend a few weeks completing it all. There was a sensible amount of collectibles and achievements that you could reasonably do.
The whole "Actually, players DO want single player games!" argument falls apart here. ... /s For real though, I think the main issue with the game doesn't come from the quality of it, but the lack of time we spent with the quality. It's very unfortunate that people really like playing this game, but after completing the main story, there's not much of a gameplay loop or progression left at all. Personal opinion, but matchmaking for races would be SO good for this game, instead of being forced to race with only the 16 people in your lobby, all of whom are doing something different.
@SkelitonLord227 You made a typo. NFS Most Wanted was released in 2005. 2006 was the release year of NFS Carbon. Also, both games shares the same storyline. The reason why the cops A.I of recent NFS games are worse than the older NFS games with police chases is because they have less tactical, have less features and ack ruthlessness/smartness. Also, the current devs didn't focus on the cops A.I since they're lazy and prefers prioritze clothing brands instead of the core gameplay. Surely because of EA with their mandatory deadline meet which are illogical and also because these games are released too early. The fact there's also no pursuit breakers and a badly designed damage bar which can't be turned off doesn't help and it's a massive disadvantage. There's also the fact NFS Unbound has only 18 new cars and the rest of them are from NFS Heat since NFS Unbound is NFS Heat 1.5 and feels more like than a DLC of NFS Heat than a full standalone game. That's the main reason why the cops from NFS Heat and NFS Unbound are unbalanced and an annoyance instead of a threat. Anyway, the cops featured in old NFS games with police will be always better than the newer cops since they're well made and smarter.
@@hawken796 Exactly. Instead, they should added a difficulty level for cops. There's 1 on NFS Unbound but they should have thought of that feature in the earlier games. In NFS Unbound, cops are more an annoyance than a threat. And the fact that the Heat Level is tied to your character instead of your car is stupid idea + the Heat Level goes too fast since it increases after each race.
No where near enough content , far too many SuperCars again and still not enough car customisation IMO the game has good music especially when compared to Heat but still not groundbreaking.
Let me address the most important & Biggest Elephant in the Room of Unbound. Its name is Horrible Drifting Experience not a single corner gives a fulfilling drift . Definitely the first thing they need to fix is drifting which is a staple feature of NFS games . @HokiHoshi You really forgot this most important issue man , u made great points though especially the neeed to satisfy in a world where Forza Horizon exists . NFS needs updates. NFS Rivals has better drifting on most cars. God knows about post launch content just I need fix for drifting.
And the most insane part is these two legends are still being played even tho they are over a decade old is just mind blowing. Sooo yeah dont ever compare them to this worthless mistake.
All the 30 year olds who played most wanted are going to cry when a new need for speed game isn’t like most wanted. It’s how it’s been for like 6 years
The difference between this and the Black Box game is to be found in the state of online gaming back then. In 2004 online gaming was not a thing, if not for some FPS games; in 2023 people expect to have more content constantly for months after the release. It might be a fun game, but it's not even in the same league of those games, which stood way better the test of time.
"Black box" era is over a decade old. games like most wanted and underground are nearing 2 decades. Is it that hard to imagine that players want something more effort to be put into a game in 2023?
The thing is those games were fun and accessible in a way NFS games have yet to be again. I will say Unbound is the closest they've gotten to that from what I've seen but still a long way off. The guy talks about how there was nothing to do after beating Underground 2, but that's not true, you can play with a bunch of cars on a track and tune them to see the fastest lap you can get which I spent a ton of time doing. This game doesn't have any of that.
7:28 - There was VERY little customization in NFS Unbound man! And that REALLY sucked.. There was more customization options in NFS Heat! I was very disappointed when I noticed MANY cars only had 2 options of aftermarket front bumpers, back bumpers, side skirts and other parts.. Not to mention 95% of the vehicles were the same ones from Heat. It was very copy and paste.
To be honest it kinda surprises me that so many people praised this game like crazy when at best it's average. They still need to completely scrap this awful handling system. Drifting in this title is the worst they ever had. Grip handling wise they only band-aided the problem of the handling system by giving better steering before entering the drift. As soon as you lose "grip" you back in this horrible drift lock from the brake to drift handling and it feels awful. I'm not saying it needs to be like Forza but at least be head to head with Blackbox era handling. Then there's also the problem with balancing in multiplayer and alot of races that are just endless boring highway. I'm fine with the tuning and i like that you risk your money from the races you won by getting busted before going to an safe house. I'm also fine with it being an one and done campaign even tho they should at least try to make an interesting story. They could make so much more of the multiplayer like co-op police chases, ranked, custom route races, car meets etc and all we got is this shitty lobby system. NFS could easily be back where it once was, if only they would solve their problems.
The problem is online has a very demanding grind to get money also there is not a lot of track variety or event different types of events (drift, time trails, takeover, ...). The races classes (from B to S+) have a very insane meta car focus were you can't even come close to others if you don't have the proper car and also has issues with balancing like the Ferrari in B races. Also Online has a traffic problem a lot of cars (npcs) just stop right from 100 to 0 in 1 second in the middle of a highway or a intersection which often causes crashes. Speaking of crashes oftentimes in the online mode you get a heavier punishment for not driving properly around a corner (drifting 2 hard) compared to someone who just crashes out in that same corner and gets reset more quickly than you can possible recover from that drift. Also there is the problem of resets working in an odd way. Sometimes you crash and you get reset instantly with a speed start sometimes you get reset without it sometimes the person that crashes into you on purpose gets a better reset than you eventho you didn't do anything wrong which would justify a punishment. Sometimes you and someone else crashes into the exact same pillar at the exact same time and someone gets preferential treatment of the game.
I didn't want or ask for a modern reimagining of the old greats, I I wanted a remake. The old games had a few things the new ones don't, primarily the old ones had great soundtracks and the *chefs kiss* impeccable atmosphere and soul that comes with those soundtracks.
A remaster of Underground 2 and Most Wanted 2005 will probably never happen plus remember this if they were to remaster some cars and possibly soundtracks would be removed due to license
The problem is... People want classics like 2005 Most Wanted and Underground remastered (or games a lot like them). The thing is with that, people have nostalgia with the Blackbox era games which cannot be captured again since we are no longer that young anymore.
The thing is, those old games are pretty amazing. People nowadays would be shocked how much better Underground and so on is and how much more content there is compared to newer games.
@@TheProfessionalDrift That is also true. They have huge replayability. Most Wanted in particular pushed the boundaries of the consoles of it's time. It was the golden age of gaming (in general) imo
@@riojones9959 Yeah. And also how there were different shops for different types of customization in Underground 2. Details like this just make the game more „alive“, you know and give it an incredible atmosphere, which is lacking in newer games. The only new NFS with a good atmosphere was NFS 2015. I’d say that was the best NFS game in the last decade (!). The only problems that game had was the fact that drifting was OP and that the cars were unbalanced. It was a very solid foundation they could have built upon but the games got worse lol
@@TheProfessionalDrift Very true. However, me myself disliked that NFS and after the reboot of MW (made by Citroen Games), for me, the franchise just fell off. The series has always had great potential with knowing how cars are customised, knowing what the clients/gamers want from the franchise should have made it easy for them to build upon. I still play Underground 2 and 2005 MW to this day and much more than NFS Heat. It is a great shame
@@riojones9959 I agree. I also think that racing games (especially arcade racers) went downhill in the last decade as well. Back in the day there were so many good ones like Juiced, Midnight Club etc. Maybe EA thinks that an NFS game won’t sell that good anyway so they cut budgets for it year after and we’re left with this :/ I actually think the best arcade racer right now (except the older games of course) is gta online LOL. If it had more players it would be so much better… But it’s awesome that you still play these older games.
I agree on what you said, I notice this as well with GT7, FH5, etc. My take is the majority of the racing game community is expecting the game to have live service style content like say Fortnite, COD to have something do or else they get mad and bored. I don't see this type of expectations from players when compared to other single player game genres I play. As for me, as long as the game delivers on its beginning to end, and had a great time, I'm satisfied and got mo money's worth. This is my mindset since I grew up on the PS2 era.
Needs more content. Its great for a base game but we expect it to be more of a live service like The Crew 2 or FH5 for that price point. If it was sold for $30-40, then I'd say it's okay.
Because longevity is something very important for a game. People have waited long time for this, and to spent $70 on a game that only offers at most 30-50 hours on playtime (Talking about story) is ridiculous. That is not at all worth the price. Imagine buying a part for a car or your PC and it only lasts 50 hours. Do you think that's worth it?
@@carlovergts02 I think if the experience of those 30-50 hours is profound then yes, it is absolutely worth it. Everyone has different expectations for a product tho so that is entirely subjective. I for one absolutely do not want a continued service game that I have to keep up with. I want an experience with a beginning, middle and end. Then I want to look back on that journey, take it in and move onto another NEW journey. Not agreeing or disagreeing with your stance one way or the other, just providing a viewpoint that I personally have with my gaming. (Haven't played this game, just a Devil's advocate sort of comment to shed light on a different opinion on what someone can desire from a game)
it says alot about you if you are confused why people want end game content. We dont spend lots of money on a game just to be able to play and have fun for less then a week. We want more for our money then just a campain. I know it has multiplayer too, but lets be honest. The Multiplayer is trash.
@@trautsjYou bring out a valid stance, I can't really argue against this. As someone who likes competitive games, I normally look at longevity as something very important. But I also understand the views of someone like you. So, I'll say this, if you are perfectly fine with spending that much for a fullfilling yet short experience, that's fine. But, judging from the reviews and all the complaints, it seems like a majority of people don't think that way.
The single player campaign is very very repetitive and dull. I dont understand how some even enjoy it. Even just for the single player its not really worth it
I really didn't like the main campaign, it was a chore and a slog to get through and my god it's repetitive once Jaz rejoins the crew. As bad as payback was with microtransactions and such I still go back to play that campaign. Ghost gave us better campaigns bar none. I want something new, no remakes, no remasters. Let the Black Box Era stand on it's own as the greats they are we need to stop chasing nostalgia and let them go wild with the franchise.
Honestly? It's the way the story for Campaign was structured and how Online was made. The character of Yaz and Tyrell was fine, but there was so much that could've been developed more especially since it was essentially slammed that "Alec", which by the way we don't even see in the game at all, was behind the theft of the cars. It could have been a mashup between NFS Carbon and Most Wanted in story-wise, but it was just bare. There's a reason why people loved Caleb Reece, Eddie, Razor, and Darius from the older games they gave you a purpose on what you need to work towards. This could've been resolved if they actually made Alec a threat in the game like Razor, Caleb, Eddie, and Darius, and where someone like Asap Rocky could be a big role in the game since he was always in the marketing. After the story, you basically have nothing to do.
I think something else to add is that you can't easily just start a new campaign. That's what I did when I was done with an older title like MW and U2 game. With resource scarcity necessitating decision making, maybe the game could have made it more replayable that way. Multiplayer should be different though to allow for more experimentation.
Seems to me a big expectation issue, once upon a time we bought a game and played it till we got bored or got a new one. Now people expect a game to be eternally supported with new content all the time, without any DLC of course, no fees or car packs. Keep adding to my game forever!
I agree with you but I think people have these expectations as games are costing a lot more compared to back then. But yeah, I do agree that there’s this unreasonable expectation for years and years of support
Comparing Unbound to Most Wanted (2005) is like comparing Saints Row (2022) to Saints Row 1 or 2. Reviews being low are probably because of people like me who listened to surpisingly good reviews and bought that piece of mediocre game. Game has essentialy just 2 race mods and one of them (drift) doesn't even plays enjoyable, so you get pretty bored after 1 ingame week. Gameplay against cops is just ResidentSleeper, you don't want in any way, shape or form to trigger cop chases because there is not much to do with those guys - you just drive behind the corner and suddenly you're Houdini. Cop chases in Most Wanted were cool because there was like 10+ cars chasing you down, trying to get you in the "box", you could use pursuit breakers or send them flying with a proper hit, also you could boost the ammount of force with speedbreaker. TL;DR: It looks like shit, it plays like shit and it sounds like shit - it's shit.
Honestly this video made me consider this game even more than before. 25 hours is great, i don't really have that much time to play anymore, definitely picking this up when it reaches like $30
That's true, but Black Box assisted in the development, so they still had influence in the game and I personally consider it part of the "black box era"
@@HokiHoshi That makes sense. In my case, i consider NFS games made entirely by Black Box being part of the Black Box era. Meanwhile, NFS Shift was overseen by Black Box producer Michael Mann and senior vice-president of EA Games Europe Patrick Soderlund. So by saying "part of the Black Box era" and even if it's an indirect link, you're also right.
I don't care about extra challenges outside of the story... Games like Test Drive Unlimited knew how to keep racing fans interested well after the story had ended. And even for a non open world game games like Street Racing Syndicate had features like Pink Slips in the game so you could have endless fun winning other cars from people online.
I said at the time that I thought you were overrating it Hoki, for the simple reason that its handling is _still_ appalling. The lack of updates, the short single player...none of that would've mattered to me if the game's cars were actually...y' know...enjoyable to drive. Seems like a fairly important part of a driving game, no? But lots of people didn't seem to care that it handles like a war crime. They liked the customisation and they like NFS, blindly. So they got caught up in the hype. And now that's done with, they've 'finished' the game, they're left with nothing but that terrible handling model. At the end of the day nothing else really matters in a racing/driving game. Let me put it like this: two months into release...this is the point at which, in a game like Forza Horizon, the new player would just be starting to dig into the depths that it has to offer. You might have a quarter of the cars. You probably haven't even tried drifting, maybe haven't gone online, or touched the livery system, and probably haven't tried tuning yet. I am not exaggerating here when I say I played Horizon every day for five years and was still learning new things about the handling until fairly recently. And because the handling was so well balanced and deep, all the other stuff like the customisation, the tuning, the livery editor, the photo mode, all of that becomes pleasurable, because it revolves around a driving model that you love. If NFS is to remain something that anyone cares about they just have to fix that handling system. They need to make it enjoyable to drive and satisfying to drive. Until they do that it will be nothing more than Unbound over and over again.
amen brother, the handling is just not good enough and havent been in nfs in ages, probably decades. Im not talking about full simulation or even simcade, nfs rivals was probably the last nfs game which had relatively decent arcade physics.
ever since 2015 I for some reason can just feel it when they're gonna have a fucking shit handling model. see trailers and watch the camera make these overexaggerated catch up movements added with the car's "happy" tail end. that instantly reeks of ghost/criterion's brand of shitty handling and i've been right everytime, they never tried to fix anything. my own mental note is when a racing game has a steady, non/less exaggerated catch up camera a la horizon, gran turismo, heck even old black box games, they usually fare better. the only ones with ghost/criterion's brand of over-exaggerated camera is well... basically asphalt (yes, the mobile game)-like.
I personally really enjoyed the main campaign, but it`s honestly far from perfect, and in hindsight I probably enjoyed more than I realisticly should`ve. My main problem with it (now that I`ve beat the game and haven`t played it since around Christmas), is that as you progress through the calander, you`ll find yourself constantly repeating the same small set of tracks, and even more so if you get confident enough in your ability to run fron the cops, that you`ll always aim for the high risk/reward events, or just streight up clear out every event available each time you head out. This makes the game feel vary repetitive, and the lack of variation in race types doesn`t help. The not at all generous race payouts and the lack of full offroad races also makes the large car list feel redundant, since most people will probably just stick to a small handfull of cars that they`ll buy and upgrade... The multiplayer in it`s current form is also loughable tbh... From what I`ve experienced of the multiplayer (in b class anyway), all the playlists/championsips i would get always has the same tracks, just in a different order, and with 1 track being different each time. This for me is the single biggest turn off from a racing game... The payouts are pathetic too... Compare Unbound to the blackbox era games all you want, but their campaigns were much more varied and replayable, and their multiplayer, while bare bones by today`s standards, were great for the time, and offered a level of local multiplayer fun that unbound can only hope to achieve (since there`s that stupid 4 person party limit, and I don`t even think that you can set up custom races in unbound, though I might be wrong, and I apologize in advance if I am) Also, Unbound`s handling still has those moments of odd...
The game is bad: the physics are horrible and it is the main source of how bad this game is. It's horrible to drive on it, the physics doesn't make any sense, the world seems too tight for the cars, no sense of speed. And of course there are the cartoonish visuals that you can't turn off, are pretty but gets in the way of the gameplay too much. The story is not good either. The grind for online is way too much. This reimagination of the Underground/Most Wanted series have been pretty bad executed with Unbounb. I could pass all over this if the game physics were actually good. But the cars feels horrible. It's mashup of GRID and NFS Payback that is horrible to see.
what made the 25hr career mode from nfsu2 and mw enjoyable was the ability to start again and make different choices in cars to make it a bit more challenging like tuner only runs, muscle only runs, specific brand cars only it a lot like how people made nuzlockes for Pokémon games after beating it to add a bit more difficulty to it. Nowadays once you've started these games that's it that's your one and only career and you cant make a new one unless you make new accounts for the actual service your using or buy it on a new system. Personally I beat the career mode in less then a day (on the hardest difficulty not that it matters) then went to play the multiplayer for about a fortnight before I had unlocked the crazy BMW m1 body kit that required you to find all the collectables and beat the challenges and honestly I didn't find it fun to do so it was boring. I've had more fun going and playing an emulator version of underground with crappy graphics and small car lists simply because there was less busy work and a more rewarding feeling from winning events.
This is a personal opinion. It is incredibly far from the era that NFS Saga was excellent. The characters have the mental age of an 8 year old. A very marked descent of the WOKE line. The soundtrack is a disaster, other franchises have radios or even NFS had different genres (rock, metal, hip-hop, electronic, pop, indie), here they only play Trap. The cars they chose are closer to Tik Tok than to a car fanatic, something that other franchises understood and NFS did not. Putting the same car but convertible and counting it as another car, is a total lack of respect to the people who love the car culture. I consider it a car game for people who don't know anything about cars. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they put a Tesla in it.
I'll tell you the real issue -The balance is Garbage -Physics are garbage -Story was ok but campaign felt weird! -Heavy cars have no chance at being good -Cops are absent -Multiplayer is dry and broken --Nerfing the gti and the Regera was dumb when the 488 was the most broken car in the game -Handling physics Need to be separated between Racing and Drift! Combining the 2 is literally making the game feel like it's having an identity crises!
Why in the world did they close down Ghost Studio, they kept inching closer and closer when fans wanted and finally Heat delivered. I heard a rumor it was that they refused to put microtransactions in Heat but I don't know if it's true.
U expect EA of all company's to do post launch content for a game that makes em no money, I saw a comment down below saying "they wont put financial backing for a game that isnt title madden or fifa" n it's true EA only cares bout games that'll get em more money through transactions rather than actual game sales. Best case scenario for nfs imo is to get away from EA n make a new game under a new publisher if not then every nfs game will be like heat in post game content until EA puts this series in the dirt
It's kinda sad... I've had a lot of fun on Unbound and now I'm just grinding the last day over and over to buy more cars. But I don't feel the need to launch the game again.
This is absolutely true. I think Unbound is a great game and I've always loved NFS, but honestly the multiplayer absolutely needs some work. I don't think it's anything unfixable, and Criterion seems to be interested in fixing it, but as it stands right now, it's just not up to par with other franchises. Hopefully they build upon it tho!
if we're talking post game content i think a good idea would be a end of week championship made up of random races with a randomised vehicle requirement a vehicle class and a specific car. it'd incentivise car building with the championship giving a massive payout that'd also feed into the following week to repeat the process over again
Honestly I have really enjoyed Unbound yes it does have its flaws but I felt that it did a lot more than what 2015, Payback, and Heat all did and you have to admit it’s a solid game and more enjoyable than even FH5 It’s the closest thing to all of the classic arcade games we all have loved in our childhood and I’m glad that this is the direction Criterion took I’m just hoping that this is a small blunder and that Criterion has more to make up for down the line yes this was a letdown and a disappointment but I have faith in Criterion for their post release content as they have for many years almost a decade now so let’s give them some time Hopefully it all gets better from here
The main issue I have with modern NFS games is not the game itself, it's the experience. Old games had a dark tone with rock/rap music. Modern games are basically fortnite clones with bright colors and happy themes, and emotionless music. It kills the deal for me. Often times, I shut down the soundtrack on NFS Heat and it gets like 20% better. I understand I'm old and they are trying to reach a new generation now. It is what it is, but doesn't change the fact that I don't enjoy these games as I used to due to these issues.
why fear it when it's been highly irrelevant for years and lost many games over the years lol sorry but unless iRacing and Forza fall off drastically (which they won't) there is 0 competition in the racing genre so of course nobody is going to try
The developers had a really good chance at "continuing" the campaign by taking the structure of the first 4 week event, and just doing more 4 week events as a seasonal thing. Nearing the end of the campaign I actually thought that's how it was going to turn out, but I was very disappointed when I looked at the event screen after the final mission.
This ^
Yeh definitely agree with you there. They could have done exclusive cars and other rewards.
my thoughts EXACTLY! as insane as it is to say, the game's kinda getting bombed because there just isnt enough of it. its so lame that i have to dig into where my system keeps my game save and manually remove it if i wanna play the game again.
At first, I was like "Yess, no rep level"
Once I was done with the story, I missed them
@@lukamilic rep was stupid
Honeymoon Phase ended.
Fr.
All due respect to you, this doesn’t say much. Just to give one general example, Elden Ring’s honeymoon phase also ended a long time ago, and that didn’t detract from its public perception one bit.
I understand the drive to make snarky remarks, but this might take away from the value of the video you’re commenting, whose whole point is to give a more solid explanation than this.
@@ilbroducciore thank you for saying that lmao. and because this is the internet let me clarify that im not being sarcastic; saying shit like "hOnEyMoOn eNdEd" isnt constructive in the slightest, its just useless noise
@@JelliThePilot Its not even supposed to be snarky, its probably the best way to surmise the change in public perception.
When Unbound came out I closely followed the community, its efforts and thoughts since its release on reddit, RUclips, rarely even Discord. I usually do that to see what hidden stuff and tricks the community find out I can use for my playthrough.
Inbetween those of course are opinion pieces. At launch we went from:
"This is the best NFS in years"
"This is the most fun I‘ve had since Most Wanted/Carbon"
"NFS is finally good again"
To realizing that the game isn‘t that great and makes many of the same mistakes the predecessor do. Drifting still feels like flicking on/off a switch, event variety isn‘t that strong, online multiplayer is a regression from predecessors since it doesn‘t have dedicated Speedlists anymore….
Overall its a very barebones product. Post-launch updates can fix that of course but yet again do we have to wait months for that, unsure if Unbound is even gonna get those updates and life support will be cut early again.
Just like mom and dad
Most wanted 2005 had a great post endgame feature: The police scoretab, making the full amount of money when you redo races and the police chases! I spent so much time building cars, earning money to buy new cars and terrorized Rockport PD!
You can't help mentioning that shit can you
@@not_kjb what? He is speaking facts.
And of course the challenge series, it also had more variety in race events compared to unbound
Also you had reason to engage with the police while in unbound the police is just annoying and not as challenging as the most wanted ones
The claim that unbound is better than most wanted is kinda ridiculous to be honest
@@PandyTimBR 👍
Soon as I seen the complete cheese that was the cel-shaded tire smoke, I was out. Ill replay MW05 again before I drop even 10 bucks on unbound.
Better yet wait on Night Runners, 1 dude making it and it already looks more promising. Hopefully itll have options to turn off effects.
Also try out Art Of Rally for a no frills different experience.
This game feels great the first 2 weeks… then you start to see all bs and it settles in.
1. It’s bare bones, online is wash rinse repeat grind to unlock cars.
2. You unlock the fastest cars by just “showing up” you don’t even have to leave the line. You quickly notices players staying at the line in races
3. Winning doesn’t even matter, the money between 1-5 is only a few grand. There’s very few (like 4-5 cars) that require you to come in 1st or 2nd
4. Pop in. There’s a ton of pop in that happens online, cars textures just pop in on high speed parts of the game (I’m on ps5)
5. The crashes are over the top and aren’t consistent. You swipe a fender in a race and get sent flying for some reason.
6. Critiacal damage doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t slow you down and simply reset when you crash again….what’s the point??
7. The FUCKING UI!!!!!!!!
your building your car and a race invitation comes in at it completely blocks the stats on the screen so now you have to wait out the 30sec. There’s no way decline from inside the build menu
#7 is so retarded, it has bugged me from day 1 of online play. Like dont they let people test games anymore? And why do they have people working on game design that obviously dont know jack shit about it. Its just so weird
All facts, and the car list is very boring and so is the map. The map isn’t even fully utilized and the race diversity is so boring none of them really feel any different except for a select few and there’s just not enough races.
8. Worst soundtrack in the series (...so far)
the game is ASS!!
Spot on!
In Most Wanted you could endlessly play chases that were always fun and different and get bounty after your career.
The cop chases in unbound are the only ones in the series people actively avoid.
I would give that title to Heat. In Unbound at least you won't lose half of your HP when police car hits you.
@@vvgr409 heat has daytime.
I had fun hiding from the cops in Unbound but I'd rather have great chases like in MW
@@J.PC.Designs Tbf, what made MW2005 cops hard was their numbers and the game's shitty physics/handling, they weren't that hard to hide from (sometimes in plain sight) or outrun
FACTS!!
Few things for me:
-Not a fan of the limited number of tracks in the game; especially breaking down into specific car classes. Racing on the same circuits/sprints get old very quickly; and I'm pretty sure all the tracks in total don't even use half the map. Ended up with so much of the map left unexplored which also resulted in a huge pain going for all the collectables/activities having to find on your own. Definitely begging for a race editor of some sort.
-Pursuits just aren't that fun the engage in half the time. During the campaign they're more/less of an annoyance, but afterwards it's more grieving. When you car can easily wipe out and high speeds from a simple graze, trying to interact with the mechanics becomes a huge pain. Shame 'cause I like the idea how specific cop cars has different strengths/weaknesses you have to deal with using different strategies.
-Obviously the car balance online is completely out of wack (*cough* B Class Pista). While the customization is great, the engine swaps prices are absolutely ludicrous at times. Kinda discourages you from taking lower class cars and building them up. And I really don't like how only the cars you've won in the SP transition over to MP. Having to grind while getting smoked by guys who put in more time is not a fun experience.
-Like another comment said, they did not take advantage of the week-by-week structured they started with. They could have done generated events for specific classes or certain types of cars for the week and have more reward cars for said events. Definitely would have help with the post-campaign content. And I'd love if all the side characters you raced against were more fleshed out, or have something like SSX had with a rivalry system where ramming/wrecking guys will change relationships with. Maybe villains/rivals you make will put up higher bets in pre-race. Hell, combine those two ideas; bet with them enough by the end of the week you'll have a change to race for their car like Rocky's.
This!
I remember in Midnight Club 3 we had the option to create our own courses. And there were 3 different maps..... and capture the flag..... and a story mode that wasn't annoying....... and it WASNT $70.......
The tracks. I agree I played the 10h trial and even within first 4 days I had to race on the same tracks which was not a great outlook for a full game. I get they after a while you might do the same one but not within a first few hours.
I think the most overlooked point in this is game is: re-playability. The BlackBox era games may not offer more story content in it of themselves, but you still get the want to re do the story every one and a while. I have replayed NFS Prostreet, MW '05, Carbon, Underground multiple times and every time I just go : man this is a good game. Hell even The Run is more re-playable than Unbound. I actively didn't go for the newer NFS because they didn't look as fun to play, the exception being MW 2012, which the online was actually a shit load of fun making you use different cars for each playlist (and from my experience, the "meta cars" weren't as OP as the likes of the B class 488 Pista and S+ Regera). The story in Unbound is sure fun, but I don't want to replay it, and the online is so repetitive that grinding for better cars is just that : a grind. And for what? so that you can buy the OP cars and have a slightest chance of winning events. I waited 10 years to buy a new NFS and I come back to this... thats 70€ I'll never be getting back...
People love saying "After the story the game is dead." I agree with you 100%. The game isn't dead. It's just completed. Replayability and gameplay are the #1 and #2 priorities to making the greatest games of all time for all genres. Especially racing games.
yeah, unbound is still a stellar arcade racer, but its insane that for $70 we didnt get a new game+ (which this campaign is BEGGING for) or cops/night freeroaming in multiplayer at launch. unfortunate to have to twiddle our thumbs letting the reviews encrust this game in Mid while the devs put out post-launch updates.
The cornering must be unbearable though.
New game plus sounds so good I played the campaign twice and had to delete my save data to do so! Not likely to play online because of that now
Know the problem with unbounded is just a bunch of small things like a newer game with bugs you know.
Like one giant bug and a game isn't anywhere as bad as a game with a shitload of small bugs scattered throughout the game.
Like there's just so many small issues with some bigger issue sprinkled on top.
The cop chases are just terrible the drifting is odd and bad and weird at the same time
it really isn't a good racing game at all, the cornering is shit, all the customization nfs heat added was taken away, and if you crash you are forced into a dogshit animation that takes away your ability to control your car instantly losing you the race, heat adds nothing to the game no money multiplier or rep leveling system and you can no longer enter any race you want you are forced to a shit rating system and you cannot race out of that with a high rated car, again nfs heat allowed you to do this with zero issues, nfs unbound is such a massive downgrade compared to heat.
New Game+ and maybe a few more tracks? As much as I love my first playthrough I'm sure every track in this game is engrained into my head. I can't believe I'm saying this but Need for Speed 2015 for all its faults pretty much had one new track for every mission (and even if you do run the same track in the next mission, it might be in a different race type or the layout has been slightly altered).
The only reason I haven't gotten back into it is that I already dread how much grinding it's going to take to do what I really want without cheating: build cars.
in forza we have people complaining about how EASY it is to do what you mentioned...
That's a very weird way to say I want the game to gift me cars like Forga does
I could get it, if you would've asked to increase the payouts for the playlists in MP though
@@ashar8192 I would rather be gifted variety than have to slave to obtain a sliver of surplus in my options; personally. You can always choose to limit your intake when in a position of privilege, you can seldom make the acquisition of something intentionally scarce easier tho. I'll choose; well... choice every single time over grind. Just my two cents tho.
@@trautsj exactly, I'm a freaking adult and I have things to do. I wont choose a game who requires a full time job to unlock the stuff I paid for.
@@PheliciaBG A Sensible progression thats rewarding isnt something too far fetched. When this topic gets brought up anywhere players like you act as if everyone wants some hardcore grinding progression and thats just not true. And that is being used just so you can pull the finger towards others that having progression that takes efford is bad. I honetsly dont understand it. As if previous horizon games 1-3 didnt offer exactly that. A sensible progression, that is rewarding but not absurdley rewarding and properly difficult without being too grindy. Ive honestly lost hope trying to speak sense into players like you. Completely brushing off anyone who tries to say that horizon needs difficulty and proper rewarding progression. You've no idea how indiffernet it is to play a game that doesnt feel challanging and giving everything in abundance.
The monthly content point and comparison to Forza was dead on. Modern games have a precedent of continuous post launch content and nfsu not having that sets it apart from most other games.
Not to mention that the pista and similar exploits still aren't fixed, but Forza saw the raeser tachyon banned *overnight*.
raeser bug wasn't banned overnight, it was more like nearly a month of PGG not doing shit
@@Messerschmitt_BF_109G_10 the raeser was banned from online and rivals literally overnight. Don joewon song couldn't even get his video out before it was banned.
The trans swap issue itself isn't fixed, but it no longer has any effect on pvp so it's fixed for all intents and purposes.
@@0xGRIDRUNR isnt that because forza has leaderboards?
@@yol_n yes and no. Leaderboards were only half the reason it was banned. The real problem is that, just like the pista, it ruined online racing.
But the leaderboards are a different problem of their own. Since day one, they've been plagued by hackers, glitches, and other exploits. The devs have recently taken rather large steps towards cleaning them up, but if leaderboards were the only reason to ban the raeser, I'm sure it wouldn't have happened overnight.
Reasoning being and an example of how the leaderboards aren't a huge priority, about a month after the game launched, the devs changed the way drift points are counted. This resulted in about a 20% nerf to the overall point gain, meaning if your scores were within 20% of the optimal score, you couldn't beat your old score. They only just fixed this issue by clearing the old scores out just last week, 14 months after the nerf.
To give the devs some credit, they were likely busy with the 2 dlcs as well as cleaning the other leaderboards and dealing with the massive amount of tiny bugs the game has, so it's not like they just didn't want to fix it, but the leaderboards aren't a super high priority. The game is mostly single player focused after all.
The problem is the handling model is awful and not fun to drive compared to NFS:MW and Underground, so on those games you had fun just driving the cars around and replaying the story. With the Modern NFS driving is just awkward and not really fun on its own
yes exactly. the whole tuning feels completely wrong. even underground 2 was able to have an arcade physics with still more or less proper ecu, suspension, and drivetrain tuning.
you really know a company fucked up the handlingmodel when they need an option for brake to drift etc.
Totally agree! It's just the same shit they used in heat. Handling in Payback was also breake to drift, but somehow it felt more smooth and the point from grip to drift was much smoother and better to control. But in Unbound the Handling is as shit as it was in NFS2015. Another major issue in Multiplayer is the awful Serverperformance. AI traffic cars accelerate and stop just anywhere and are completely unpredictable.
Underground was their best game. In almost all aspects
And the stupid animations. I just wanna burn out normal and drift with the animated stuff
i disagree, only because i explicitly remember with vivid clarity my impressions on NFSU2 and MW handling; it felt clunky, heavy and slow. My familiarity with NFS up to that point was with NFS 2 & 3, and later on with PS2 racing games like MX vs ATV Unleashed. With the older NFS games the cars were all really light and nimble, and in MX vs ATV the handling feels very direct and immediate. By comparison, U2 and MW felt incredibly heavy. it felt like I had just finished driving a Caterham, and was now tasked with racing in a dump truck and managing the same or faster speeds.
Don't get me wrong, Frostbite NFS handling models have been a complete mess in their own right, and I'm not a fan of it. But the older games also felt chunky and heavy.
I think we're all trying to look at older NFS games not only with rose tinted glasses and forgetting all the things we didn't like about the game as kids, but we're also completely forgetting that we played those games as children; we were much easier to impress back then than we are now as adults, and i think the cynicism a lot of people have towards the world around them is also affecting the way we enjoy new games today.
I mean it's entirely commonplace for people to alter/update opinions after the "honeymoon phase" of a game has ended. Also if perception of something changes; people absolutely adore their minds being made up for them so they don't have to form an opinion of their own on a subject (regardless if the new opinion is "right" or not, the less the general person has to think about how they feel about something, the easier/better for them)
Carbon had the best customization in the world . Being able to scale/size every body modification to your liking was revolutionary , how you can bend and curve your splitters , spoilers , completely rescale all hoods … like wtf can we get that system back
autosculpt was featured in several nfs titles but carbons was the best. but the only reason why it was such a decline from that point forward was because the manufacturers had to agree upon every zone of the autosculpted part which made things significantly more tedious for licensing agreements.
@@MasterOfTruck If I'm not mistaken, Autosculpt was introduced in NFS Carbon. Really a game changer in car customization. Multi layered vinyls and decals made me think NFS Carbon was pretty on par with NFSU2 in customizing cars.
@@gamtax it was, and it was the best iteration. autosculpt was also present in undercover and prostreet. however undercover's was far more limited in what you could do. and pro street practically made autosculpt worthless because sculpting was tied to vehicle performance. going ham with the zones made drastic changes to lift and drag. so autosculpting was no longer only a visual aesthetic and not doing it "properly" yielded poor vehicle performance as a result.
@@MasterOfTruck damnn that makes sense why they got rid of that feature . Well they need to find some way to make a a green to bring it back . Thanks for the info
@@MasterOfTruck that’s how I feel towards this ! Auto script was so mind blowing, that’s why carbon is hands down the best in my opinion compare to old most wanted . Cool to see everyone loving that feature
"It's a good game when it stands alone, But it doesn't stand out from the others in the franchise."
I like that sentence. The game isn't bad at all, but the problem is that Criterion has done greater in the past with games like Hot Pursuit. I paid $20 to own that game, and the music, the environmental events, the police, the level design X car handling, and even the unskippable cutscenes were more engaging.
You could even play as a cop in a parallel campaign. Compare that to this..... "Bro, Bro, Bro / Need For.... uhhhhhhh" campaign.
I know EA had many internal complications, but 3 years is still 3 years. That's way too long to be paying FULL PRICE for something as underwhelming as NFSU.
I remember how worried I was when they confirmed a 2022 release date and started pumping out marketing. I was hoping they'd get another year to flesh out the experience like Midnight Club 3 did, immersive environment, a story mode that actually makes freaking sense and extra gameplay features to keep the game from being so boring.
like, i dont know if anyone remembers the "Capture the Flag" and "Race Editor" modes from MC3, but I wish Need for Speed would try to have variety for the player like that.
With a Race Editor people could male races them self for other players to try, that for sure keeps the game alive for much longer
I didn't like Hot Pursuit remastered. It felt like Burnout. And Unbound has alot of Burnout aspects in it. The nitrous boost (and how to get it), the finish race camera, alot of it reminds me of Burnout Revenge. Let NFS be NFS and Burnout be Burnout.
Why!? Why!!!!? Just tell me why everyone keeps Hot Pursuit 2012 in such high regard?
The main menu music was fire, and after Undercover we really needed a throwback out of the Black Box open world formula, sure. But Hot Pursuit majorly messed up the handling. At least Criterion had the smarts to design a map fitting for their BS, which fell apart during Ghost-era. But the shit handling still started with Hot Pursuit and it took Until Unbound to get out of it.
yes price is an issue. Lot of people who bought it at full price felt they were backstabbed when the game went on sale so soon after release, so they changed the review to negative.
That makes more sense
That's why I will wait until it's on game pass.
They dropped the ball. The game just needed steady content updates, but by choosing to wait until March for _News_ about the first content update they shot themselves in the foot.
Damn everyone is like wanting shit instantly and can never wait.
Criterion is too busy fixing 2042 with DICE
@@SakurakoLover ????
@@ashar8192 isn't they're support dev for BF2042? and it's the reason why NFS got delayed back then
nfs heat all over again
Blackbox era NFS kept my attention for so long after because i would spend HOURS playing vehicular dress-up. My brother told me he saw me playing "pro-street fashion week" for at least 3hrs at a time.
After playing Heat, this is exactly what I expected. I hope they continue to provide support by fixing multiplayer and adding story DLC's - something something rally week something something classics week, etc. so you can actually make use of their massive car list.
⬆️ definitely agree with this. There's absolutely no reason they can't like you say put out challenge weeks with a particular car group to used and you get a sick (NEW TO THE GAME) Legendary custom rally, classic or hyper car etc etc
If I gotta be honest I just want better for multiplayer. Reason 1 being heat just had me and now I find unbounds multiplayer boring asf
There should be NPC racers on the map that you can challenge to a race.
SEMPERFI
Like midnight club? That would be lit and if they added heavy traffic
@Indraft was it midnight club? I slightly remember something back in the day when u could flash a NPC racer and have a quick city race. That would be cool.
@@JG-SemperFi yessir that’s definitely midnight club
@@indraft7812 underground 2 has that
@@tturi2 well, so did nfs 2015 and payback
The thing is times have changed.. back when playing underground 2 or most wanted playing with a friend meant going to one's house doing races one by one and online racing wasn't a big thing. Nowadays the online aspect of a game carries a lot more weight than it did back then and especially so for racing games where most fun for many is competitive fun racing WITH friends and others online.
Probably EA stopped paying for good reviews or paying for the removal of bad user reviews under the guise of "review bombing". Metacritic did say they will remove "review bombs" and with the marketing blitz that EA did during launch, probably all negative user reviews were removed during the launch window. But now that they stopped the marketing ads, so did Metacritic stopped removing the "review bombs".
EA ignores noobs now, they just cry bullshit online here !
Why should EA listen to you crying ?
@@lucasRem-ku6eb I'm laughing at EA, because they are a joke.
Lets be real here who the fuck gives a crap about Reviews most of them are sad idiots that cant play the game right or they are just bored on there ass and just only hate for no resone
That's kinda my thinking. Either that or the only people initially buying the game were "consumers", due to how mid previous titles were. Others saw the surprisingly high reviews and bought the game, realized it was shit, and left their negative reviews
I think the game would've benefited from a more serious story, aiming it at teens (nothing wrong with that) made the story kinda stupid and lighthearted and it wasn't bad but I wasn't invested in it, I wanted cops, I wanted rivals, I wanted to take down bad guys and run from the police, I don't know lol it feelt kind of repetitive. But Like I said it's still fun. I would've liked to be able to fight between classes but not as an option, but in order to get specific unique cars or upgrades, I think modern games are wrong in one aspect: they give the player everything, and old games made you work hard if you wanted to get that special car or upgrade if you wanted it.
Interesting video. I can see some of your points but I think context matters. Underground and Most Wanted are so beloved cause they brought something new or revolutionary to the genre. Yes there is nostalgia involved but I think those titles were successful because they had something that wasn't present anywhere else (as far as I know, correct me I am wrong, thanks). Customization in UG series and cop chases in MW were, at that time, some of the best features that only they could provide(atleast at that level). That's why they were successful. And ofc the time they were released. They took advantage of it. Fast and Furious and street culture irl heavily impacted the success of these games. The music and even the piss filter in MW was consistent for its time as many music videos for these Nu metal and rap rock bands had these filters.
Now look at new games. Unbound is doing exactly what new in terms of the genre? Is it capturing the vibes of 2023? Does anyone cares about the vibes or know about it? Good graphics, sure but it isn't anything unique. I see last 4-5 games of NFS and other franchises and I can't tell which is which cause of "realistic" graphics so they looks very similar. There is no charm. I can easily recognize older games cause they represent something for the time. I think Heat was a fine game. What does Unbound do to separate itself from Heat? ok the effects are definitely trademark I guess. But does anyone care? And what it represents? The story is pretty bad imo. Again, old NFS stories weren't exactly good either. But they were a trademark for their time. Cheesy over the top dialogues and acting was intentionally bad and funny. Cause for that time it was acceptable. People loved them and they have been remembered and memed to death. Would anyone remember Unbound's story? Let's see.
Again I know that nostalgia plays a huge role and it is a problem. But it's unfair to just blame nostalgia for it(not talking about the video but some comments that I saw). Setting aside my personal issues (handling feels weird, city is not memorable at all), Unbound is just another new game in NFS, unlike the phenomena that were UG and MW. And no I am not saying it out from pure nostalgia, as the video stated, NFS has to build on some things, anything, to stand out. I just can't seem to enjoy driving in a racing game as I used to. Just my 2 cents.
Also for example: In MW, taking down every list member and getting their cars feels so good, the cars feel important, not just some artifact that you can get and it looks cool, the CARS are the MAIN FOCUS of the story. And in NFS Unbound, cars are secondary, there is no legendary M3 GTR that they take away from you (giving you motive), there aren't any other in game iconic cars. (I'm aware they take away the car you choose at the beginning but it just doesn't have the same weight as the M3 GTR because those are just generic cars, not a special unique car that isn't available otherwise, the story in MW just has more weight to it).
I mean, I think the car you chose helps somewhat. The Countach with the modern body kit helped to replicate (almost but not quite) that feeling of having the M3 taken. Honestly was one of the more creative ones.
@@Blackw1ng yeah it was something similar and that was nice but I think the story could've put higher stakes on getting your car back, Most Wanted 05 works because we're so invested in the story that it becomes almost like an obsession to take the others down and finally recover the GTR. It's hard to explain but the story and the campaign structure really really work.
It's not about motive. Its about strong atmosphere presentation, soundtrack and first and foremost handling and physics. Sound design, nie varied feeling map. We got none of those things in last 12 years of Criterion/Ghost made NFS games, instead we get same boring brake to drift model that sucks, and they slap new coat of paint over this mess. It sucked in Rivals, in NFS 2015, Payback and Heat and it sucks now.
People literarily want game that feels and sounds like Most Wanted, Carbon or ProStreet to play. Not the same reheated garbage from 2012 onwards. Yes there is another part of motivation in MW05 but that doesnt matter when you replay the game. People keep replaying those and then more and more, then with mods like Pepega or Carbon Battle Royale.
Not because of something as petty as "oh he took my GTR", but because the game's mechanics were inherently fun and soundtrack made you pumped no matter which time it is you hear it.
They constantly ignore this while nostalgia baiting kids with M3 GTR from MW05 in every single damn game since nfs 2015(and MW2012) and its lame. They are not trying to make their own identity while making gameplay what people want, they keep the gameplay the same while paying lipservice to making their own identity.
ProStreet didnt have M3 GTR, Carbon only had the car for sake of continuity of the story. Yet those games were popular. UG1 and UG2 didnt have such motivation either, and people love these too.
I like the extreme car modding on this, we need to keep this, a more interesting story (Driver SF) levels, new/different stuff to do.
better music too, and a better story that gets you invested in cars, CARS should be the focus
@@JLchevz music really is everything in racing games.
Biggest reason why I like some weird titles like MC LA, Burnout PC and NFS HP
My one argument I think you failed to acknowledge was the importance, at least for me as a kid in 2005-2008, that the Pink Slip mechanic had on replayability and I personally think it should have been mentioned. What kept me hooked into Most Wanted as a kid for WELL LONGER than just 25 hours, but up to a few months, was the challenge of trying to earn all the pink slips before beating the game. As far as I'm aware, does Unbound have something like that? I personally think this was one of the things that kept me constantly coming back to Most Wanted to play because not only was the challenge straightforward, just earn all the pink slips, it was extremely difficult for my 6 to 8yo self to do. I'm now 21 and still haven't got them all and I've been revisiting that game on my laptop for that very reason.
- Cops spamming everywhere
- Horrible AI, even on "relaxed" diff
- Economy : Buy-ins, part costs, garage costs and earnings
- Handling: cars randomly spin out or "trip" over nothing, causing them to flip
- The absolute disgrace of a soundtrack
- EA Play subscription and Palace Edition are a scam (M3 GTR is online only plus many players didn't get it and Palace cars require in game purchase)
- Awful update schedule
- Not an online player but it sucks according to, well... everyone
Edit : It still sucks...specially for EA giving Single-player mode the middle finger.
I got it on sale and enjoyed it. I don't really plan on playing online, but when I get a car customization itch it's definitely the game I'll boot up, run some races, and throw a cool bodykit on the JDM car I feel like messing with at the moment. It doesn't need to be some endless live service game, I'm not expecting some masterpiece.
Well from the first picture leak they gave us( the Porsche) game was supposed to look miles better than what was released. Along with the time development they took a year or so to not release yearly to "work" on this game. Tbh it should've been a masterpiece based on what they did/ told us
That's also what you got on NFS Heat and with the Unite mod, Heat feels so much better to play than Unbound.
Problem is, the customization hasnt changed much since NFS2015 and Payback, nor has the Car list. I played NFS 2015, Payback and Heat, so i already know over 80% of the Cars and Customization of them. The list of cars looks good for new players, but for its 80% recycled shit only. They don't even update Cars like the VW Golf or BMW M4 where newer Models are available.
if you're getting an open world game these days you expect more than 25 to 30 hours of fun gameplay
The score dropping that much tells me there's something more going on that just the honeymoon phase ending.
Honeymoon phase ending happens to all games and yet Unbound, to my knowledge, is the only one where that resulted in perception going from overwhelmingly positive to mixed and negative that quickly.
Looks right and plays OK, I think the game decisions are what people don't like.
Onestly game is good but the lack of things to do after you finish the story is just a joke
It's simple, the most loyal players even purchase when they see those stupid toon graphics... now they gave it a go, and hate it, just like me.
@@lucasbispodossantos5074Finished the story and everything and a long time nfs fan. Still like it 🤷🏽♂️
It's because the multiplayer is not good and super grindy. Related to honeymoon phase ending, but also a full game mode that SHOULD be good. I still gave it a good review, but I stopped playing after like 3 mp sessions. Just wasn't fun enough
Modern reimagining is the best description of Unbound. I'm gen Z and grow up on Most Wanted and as soon as I saw cel shaded NPCs I knew I won't like the game. If your last game was unfinished and you cut the development it means you have to focus on getting the fundamentals right not focus on visual Design. And don't get me started on the music and dialogue. I like some of the artists featured but the songs don't fit into a NFS game. Modern reimagining indeed. Tries to be hip but ends up being cringe.
I'm shocked there's no new game+ mode, especially for a singleplayer focused game like this
there are no New Game+ for any racing game at all bruh, you speakin shit
All I really want from the game is just a way to race against my own times. I could have entertained myself for dozens of hours building different cars and competing against my own times on all the levels, but there's just no way to do that. I'm just baffled that they would leave out what's in my mind such a basic yet extremely important feature. As far as I can tell, there's not even a way to keep track of your best times. Even if you wanted to wait an in-game week between each attempt, which is just as rediculous, you can't even see how your time compares without keeping track for yourself. Seriuosly, why you don't get infinite resets, at very least after beating the entire story, is lost upon me. I'm even fine without global leaderboards because those are liable to be filled with cheaters anyways, just let me see my own times!
I really don't understand what they want you to do after you beat the game. They put all these collectibles everywhere and you'll probably only have bought a couple car by the end game, so do they really think I'm going to waste that much time grinding for new cars when there's nothing left to do? The CPUs are not even remotely a challenge with an S+ car, so basically all I can do is handicap myself so I can still have a challenge. I ended up just cheating for money post game even though I wanted to grind for it, but there was just nothing fun left to grind. Heat had very similar problems, but even in heat you could at least see your best times and even your friend's times. Even if stuff like nitro refills not refilling until you go back to a garage made it terrible to grind for best times, you could still do it.
I'm just imagining how cool it would be if the game kept track of your top times and showed which car you used for them. Just that little addition would make the game a 9/10 for me instead of like a 7 as it is currently.
I got the game for $44. It’s now on sale again for 34 not a good sign I don’t really blame the developers. I blame the publisher yet again if it’s not madden or FIFA they don’t put financial backing behind it. There is no Content and that’s unfortunate. I bought it for a rainy day so it makes no difference to me.
They don't even put money back into their multi-billion-dollar cash cows, it's not surprising they don't spend enough money on NFS... I took one look at the car list pre-launch and knew it was gonna be a lazy refresh of Heat
Just my two cents:
I did not play this game, nor am I planning to. I have seen enough videos to be able to decide on skipping.
My biggest issue is the physics. At some point there was a change in NFS games where they introduced this stupid drifting mechanism. It just feels so unreal in NFS games, physics-wise. Also, the transition from drifting to gripping is ridiculous. As one of the other commenter said, it is like a binary thing, you are either drifting or gripping, but no inbetween. Super unrealistic, even for an arcade game. Drift is never supposed to be a faster way of cornering, just like how it was in older NFS games. Those ones got it right. And not to mention that instant speed decrease when drifting starts... the car should smash into the wall, but instead decelerates crazily and drifts around the corner. Gosh...
Another big thing is car variety. I cannot speak on behalf of other people, but I personally don't need 15 different variations of Lamorghini Huracan. Same with all the Porsche and BMW and whatnot. Instead I would like to see more common cars used in everyday life. I am living in Europe, I want to see cars from here. People use Suzuki, Skoda, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, Opel, Renault, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo and the list could go on. I would love to pimp these cars! A hundred times more exciting than all the Lamborghinis. I have a Skoda Octavia, and I have never seen this car in a racing game. Why? This also applies to Forza, even though it has tons of cars, still no European everyday cars.
These are the things I check first when a new NFS (or any racing game) is released. If I see drifting and boring cars, I am just not interested in the game at all, regardless of how good other aspects are.
Thanks for reading!
Need for Speed has had issues with its physics since the introduction of Frostbite way back on the Xbox 360/PS3 release of Undercover. The pre Undercover games were by no means perfect, but they made more sense than everything after. EA has the money and means, I don't know why NFS doesn't have its own specific game engine like Forza, GT and Dirt.
Well you can make a full grip build then
I would definitely love my real life car in another NFS game...
MW12 has an Alfa Romeo Mito in the Velocity DLC..
Being chased by cops in an upgraded car, that I have the keys for feels great...Too bad the devs only care about supercars...
As someone who has been playing NFS since NFS II SE, one thing I think you fail to mention in your comparison between Most Wanted 2005 and Unbound is the physics of the cars and how they feel to drive, along with the overall style and character of the game itself.
Sure, Unbound might be the best modern take an NFS game can be nowadays with all the customization options and all that. But the reason why most people like Most Wanted 2005 and why people look back at it as being the best game in the series is due to how it feels to drive cars there. All of them feel grippy and planted. it feels satisfying to take a racing line within the game and hitting apexes around the corners. Unbound however? While it has improved its grip handling since Heat, it still suffers the game mechanic of brake to drift/ tap handbrake to drift. Sure you can go full on grip handling, but it isn't the fastest when racing with everyone. Doesn't help as well that the Frostbite engine they use was never meant to be used for a racing game in the first place. Which can cause some weirdness at highspeed. (Just look at how many cars can go pass 240mph in Unbound over old Most Wanted 2005 as well.)
Secondly, the character and style of the game itself. NFS Most Wanted 2005 was, despite the piss yellow filter the game had, brash and loud. With a soundtrack that you can easily jam into and fit in well with what you were doing in game. Unbound? Apart from the interesting choice of cell shaded characters, lacks that style and tries its best to be cool by giving you all these snazzy visual effects that can be more than disruptive than anything. It doesn't also help that the soundtrack isn't good at all. This alone I feel contributes to people not liking the game as well. Oh, don't forget sound design. Cars in NFS Mostwanted 2005 or any of this era of NFS had raw sounding cars. Cars that were loud and were a symphony to listen to go through the gears. Now? Most if not all of the current NFS games suffered here. Apart from choice sound effects from Hot Pursuit 2010, sound design in Ghost Games era NFS titles have cars that sound restricted. While the turbo flutters are nice, they don't hold the same feeling that older titles have.
Grip IS fastest when done right.
You can grip and drift on Heat. I'm enjoying Heat's handling alot more and better than Unbound. Heat's pro parts are best for drift and super parts for grip
@@sambeezy007 That still doesn't change the fact that to be fast in modern NFS games, you have to resort to brake to drift tactics around corners still. While grip driving is indeed possible for Heat (and feels really nice) in the end, unless you're brake to drifting, you're going to be left behind in online lobbies or online based activities. It's something I wished they'd just completely cut out instead of having a middle ground in terms of the handling that you can setup to be one way or another. They literally could've done what older NFS titles have done so it doesn't compromise one thing for another. Where Drift has its own physics/handling model and would feel good and normal driving would have its own handling/physics model and would feel good.
@【DatOneCat】 I got ya. I'm enjoying Heat again but I might play MW on the PS2 tonight and see what's up
I like a LOT about the game... but the cop system and weekly structure really killed it for me. I wanted so bad to make a full Let's Play series for it on my channel, but I've recorded about 7 episodes of it, and I honestly do not want to boot it up again... 1 race -> 20 minutes of boring, repetitive cop chases -> another race -> another cop around every bend -> rinse and repeat. Just lost me. And I hate not having the freedom to race as much as I want, whenever I want. I know the weekly system is a big positive for some players, but killed the game for me, personally.
Yup. Uninstalled after experiencing that annoying gameplay loop and went back to GT7. And I have been playing nfs since 1998. Never seen cops so annoying.
@@kjrwalters I feel ya for sure! My friend is a week or so ahead of me in the game's career and he said every day he has 5* pursuits. Which are just a cop on every single street corner, and take forever to finally evade. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I genuinely don't understand how people finish the campaign like this. I had 1 day of 5* heat and I wanted to uninstall the game and get a refund. And I'm only like 20% through the game, I still have dozens of hours left of this slog. I'm very disappointed.
@@CrNcHyFROG5 yea the cops got old fast. Can’t drive 3 min without getting into a pursuit so u don’t explore/test your cars without being pestered. I’d say wait for Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown for your arcade/simcade fix. As along time fan, I feel like I’m outgrowing the NFS series nowadays. I’ll come back to it once it’s back to need for speed hot pursuit with high end exotics and open roads.
This game desperately needs updates ESPECIALLY in multiplayer where it’s just endless racing through the same tracks over and over. This makes it extremely difficult to grind money along with the fact that the most you can earn from winning a race playlist is like 20k, and some of the best cars in the game cost well over 1 million dollars. I really hope the devs try to get some sort of legitimate content out sometime soon. Honestly it pains me to admit it but this game is seriously getting irritating to play, which is a shame because I was so hyped for this game when it was announced.
Probably not gonna update it that much. NFS has some of the worst post launch support compared to its rivals
Not every game has to be a Live Service once you finish the campaign (like Horizon), but a game should have enough content to keep you interested for a little while... Especially, racing games where racing against others online should be the logical priority. This is where NFS is floundering because Unbound launched with an unfinished MP. Period. They don't even try and hide this fact which is another reason why there is so much resentment toward EA and Criterion given the $70 price tag. Also, the driving physics are still terrible even for an arcade racer. They separate drift and grip into a literal binary trigger and that's why it doesn't feel remotely realistic even compared to other arcade racers. Lastly, it's hard for older fans to admit, but any recent game in a long-running franchise isn't meant for them. It's meant for new players, but not even Criterion, or EA is getting that right. That's another reason NFS is on life support compared to other racing games.
*Gasp* ,arcade racer are not realistic anymore
Lol so explain why the game is amazing to play and look at lmaooo this game looks phenomenal, plays good and sounds great like wtf do you want??
As a car enthusiast this game slaps... and I play sim games like asseto corsa gt7,
Arcade games like forza horizon etc..
I agree with most of what you said, but I disagree with the physics. I think for the most part they're great, a significant improvement over heat and the last few entries. That being said they do need a little tweaking particularly more on the drift side of things. I mean you can't ignore that grip racing is finally possible and actually good for the most part. And lastly is an arcade racer, a lot more so than horizon is so you can't expect that mix of sim and arcade. I do think you're right in what you're saying about EA/criterion making it for the wrong people, but you're also wrong because I'm fairly certain that at least 2/3 of need for speed players are 30 and older. Might seem like a bold claim, but logically to have played all the old nfs games from the golden era they'd have to have been born no later than very early 90's. 🤔
I disagree about the handling, they got grip right but they messed up the drifting tho.
NFS Underground 2 had basically nothing after the campaign. Unbound is the same.
You're right bringing up that the black box era games had the same issue where there's nothing to do when you complete the campaign, but people still loved it back in the day when nostalgia wasn't a thing yet, why is that? Because of the replay value, Unbound has 0 replay value while to this day you see a lot of people revisiting UG1-2, MW, Carbon, etc.
Unbound lacks variation in the races, before you had things like Drag and Drift races that significantly changed how you were meant to play unlike Unbound (when in drift events you either change your car for a drift build or lose), or other optional things like Outrun, then Carbon lacked Drag races but introduced Territories and Canyon events bringing a whole new vibe. Unbound is like most wanted 05 with better graphics, worse handling model, worse cop system and less content overall. The need for speed saga literally just needs to release either Underground 3, Most Wanted 2 or Carbon 2, hell you could even be lazy and just remake those games changing nothing but the graphics and people will still love it. The feature set of older games are better
As for BB era games, people just replay the game from the start over and over, because gameplay/handling of Most wanted and ProStreet and others being so enjoyable. Then you have mods like Carbon Battleroyale or Pepega mod. They want the handling, physics and atmosphere or those games, not same brake to drift mess we got for last 12 years. They are not listening and keep doing the same game over and over. Yes they should add more end game and variety but on top of basis as good as Most Wanted, ProStreet or Carbon were. Not reskinned NFS Heat/Payback/2015.
When have EA ever listened, though? They make too much money to care, and we keep buying their shit hoping they've changed.
I didnt make it more than 3h into the game. I get thats an arcade racer, but that doesnt mean that any racing skill ive build in previous games should be irrelevant, because for this game you need to know how to drift an unresposive brick. The old NFSs definetly did it better, even the in mario kart 8 you feel more connection to the road.
I was an idiot and believed all the initial positive reviews. I picked the game up and from the first race everything just felt a little off, the driving physics weren't as smooth as everyone was praising them to be, the AI was easy to beat and the cops were as useless as ever. I'm honestly glad that the community started to turn around on their thoughts and realize the game isn't really all that good. Today's gaming industry as a whole really is just about giving it the bare minimum and slapping an already established name onto the product, it's sad to see and all that we can do is reminisce and replay the old classics when there was actual effort put into game design and the developers cared about how their product turned out
Over here, and I did like NFS heat enough to put in over 100+ hours into it. The fact it is basically the same engine but yet somehow wheel support is there but not implemented while having a 3 year gap between heat and Unbound is jarring. I haven't played much of Unbound (like 7+ hours due to how busy I am) but I already know something is wrong with the game structure and SP progression. It's a shame.
Another thing are the cop chases, in MW, you don't get 5 star chases until later in the game, and in Unbound early game chases are a nightmare and later in the game they're so easy it's stupid
Thank you! Why is no one mentioning this I had a level 4 heat with Z08s ramming my shitty Civic five hours into the game. And after every few races I have to worry about shit like that so it just made the game annoying to play for me.
@@jebril exactly it makes it really stressful instead of fun lol
My issue with this game are several. Bouncy physics, lack of multiplayer content, cringe worthy dialogue, atrocious soundtrack, not cops or night-time in multiplayer, cops being more annoying and worse than intimidating, and the health bar system.
Starting with the health bar, they seriously need to drop it. I want to be able to have 30 minute cop chases and the ability to fend off police by smashing into them. With the removal of the healthbar they can easily increase the cops difficulty. Or make a dedicated setting called "psycho" where the cops are relentless for the players who want that experience. They also could have easily implemented pursuit breakers.
It's so funny how technology has come so far, yet all the gamemodes we get are just drift, races, circuits, and takeover events. There are SO MANY GAMEMODES that are so EASY to implement that would make this game 30 times BETTER. For example, Where are the bounty events? highway battles from undercover? Drag races? They Even could implement a cops Vs racers for multiplayer. The missed opportunities are endless.
The crash "physics" and the high probability of a wipeout are a big no for me. You can be going straight without touching anything or anyone and then suddenly your car flies into the nearest wall/truck and you get stuck in a long cutscene that basically loses you the race. One thing I liked about heat is that you can scrap stuff without instantly dying for 10s.
Also grinding money online is WAY TO HARD for no reason, playing 10min to get only 15k is tiring, especially when car prices haven't been adapted to the online economy. Also dividing online from offline without even given an option for us to "buy" our sp rides is stupid.
There are minor things like race variety and soundtrack being shit, vehicle grind not having a buy out option which locks half of the game behind hours of (not fun) grinding and EA messing with everyone hard grinded builds while still making the gameplay broken. There are no cops online and DRIFTING IS DECIDED BY DISTANCE, mind you the drift physics is this game are beyond shit, they should just stop trying to implement drift as a way to race and get the mods guys like the Slidewinders and Unite have given us.
At this point I'm done buying NFS games, I'll just wait for them on game pass if they are even playable. I loved the game on lunch but the lack of updates, lack of decent fixes and repetition of the same stupid mistakes combined with new fuck ups that shouldn't even be possible made me lose faith. I hope they at least try to make new content for unbound and we don't end up having Heat pt 2 but at this point I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm assuming the main reason it was doing well during its launch season is because everyone was just happy to get a new NFS after 3 years of nothing. I never got it because I'm on ps4, but after a few weeks, I myself realized that I still prefer NFS Heat.
Heat had a well built structure and art direction, but in Unbound the art direction is just tact-on with cel shaded smoke and player models and everything else is looking realistic and recycled from the last game. They tried but it was just a weak jab than a full on swing, aka just lazy.
Funny how in a Need for Speed review, the police aren't mentioned once. The whole reason Most Wanted is the best in the series is the police. Even to this day it still holds up nearly 20 years later.
Hopefully the update adds more detailed classes , drift events off road events truck events ect
people only do online races, never dirt ...
Getting rid of classes entirely vwould be even better. Gives you more freedom to drive whatever you want to drive.
What the original Forza Horizon did right was have enough that you missed during the campaign that you could spend a few weeks completing it all. There was a sensible amount of collectibles and achievements that you could reasonably do.
The whole "Actually, players DO want single player games!" argument falls apart here. ... /s
For real though, I think the main issue with the game doesn't come from the quality of it, but the lack of time we spent with the quality. It's very unfortunate that people really like playing this game, but after completing the main story, there's not much of a gameplay loop or progression left at all. Personal opinion, but matchmaking for races would be SO good for this game, instead of being forced to race with only the 16 people in your lobby, all of whom are doing something different.
The AI racers Rubber banding for NFS Unbound is ridiculous.
I just don’t get why they can never get the police AI up to the most wanted 2005* standard
Edit: fix year
because instead of playing Most Wanted 2005 you and many others are complaining about a game that isn't the one you want it to be
@SkelitonLord227
You made a typo.
NFS Most Wanted was released in 2005.
2006 was the release year of NFS Carbon.
Also, both games shares the same storyline.
The reason why the cops A.I of recent NFS games are worse than the older NFS games with police chases is because they have less tactical, have less features and ack ruthlessness/smartness.
Also, the current devs didn't focus on the cops A.I since they're lazy and prefers prioritze clothing brands instead of the core gameplay.
Surely because of EA with their mandatory deadline meet which are illogical and also because these games are released too early.
The fact there's also no pursuit breakers and a badly designed damage bar which can't be turned off doesn't help and it's a massive disadvantage.
There's also the fact NFS Unbound has only 18 new cars and the rest of them are from NFS Heat since NFS Unbound is NFS Heat 1.5 and feels more like than a DLC of NFS Heat than a full standalone game.
That's the main reason why the cops from NFS Heat and NFS Unbound are unbalanced and an annoyance instead of a threat.
Anyway, the cops featured in old NFS games with police will be always better than the newer cops since they're well made and smarter.
Heat had some hella challenging AI at launch and people kept complaining till they got nerfed. So here they nerfed it even more.
@@hawken796
Exactly.
Instead, they should added a difficulty level for cops. There's 1 on NFS Unbound but they should have thought of that feature in the earlier games.
In NFS Unbound, cops are more an annoyance than a threat. And the fact that the Heat Level is tied to your character instead of your car is stupid idea + the Heat Level goes too fast since it increases after each race.
@@MobDKGr agreed. Keep easy the way it is and they should buff challenging and intense difficulty.
No where near enough content , far too many SuperCars again and still not enough car customisation IMO
the game has good music especially when compared to Heat but still not groundbreaking.
Let me address the most important & Biggest Elephant in the Room of Unbound. Its name is Horrible Drifting Experience not a single corner gives a fulfilling drift . Definitely the first thing they need to fix is drifting which is a staple feature of NFS games . @HokiHoshi You really forgot this most important issue man , u made great points though especially the neeed to satisfy in a world where Forza Horizon exists . NFS needs updates. NFS Rivals has better drifting on most cars. God knows about post launch content just I need fix for drifting.
Keeping it 💯...I love unbound but that under the hood really killed my mood...I can see why people are pissed...and so am i
Saw it in Walmart for $40. Not good for being out for only a little while
And the most insane part is these two legends are still being played even tho they are over a decade old is just mind blowing. Sooo yeah dont ever compare them to this worthless mistake.
All the 30 year olds who played most wanted are going to cry when a new need for speed game isn’t like most wanted. It’s how it’s been for like 6 years
The difference between this and the Black Box game is to be found in the state of online gaming back then. In 2004 online gaming was not a thing, if not for some FPS games; in 2023 people expect to have more content constantly for months after the release. It might be a fun game, but it's not even in the same league of those games, which stood way better the test of time.
"Black box" era is over a decade old. games like most wanted and underground are nearing 2 decades. Is it that hard to imagine that players want something more effort to be put into a game in 2023?
The thing is those games were fun and accessible in a way NFS games have yet to be again. I will say Unbound is the closest they've gotten to that from what I've seen but still a long way off.
The guy talks about how there was nothing to do after beating Underground 2, but that's not true, you can play with a bunch of cars on a track and tune them to see the fastest lap you can get which I spent a ton of time doing. This game doesn't have any of that.
7:28 - There was VERY little customization in NFS Unbound man! And that REALLY sucked.. There was more customization options in NFS Heat! I was very disappointed when I noticed MANY cars only had 2 options of aftermarket front bumpers, back bumpers, side skirts and other parts.. Not to mention 95% of the vehicles were the same ones from Heat. It was very copy and paste.
To be honest it kinda surprises me that so many people praised this game like crazy when at best it's average. They still need to completely scrap this awful handling system. Drifting in this title is the worst they ever had. Grip handling wise they only band-aided the problem of the handling system by giving better steering before entering the drift. As soon as you lose "grip" you back in this horrible drift lock from the brake to drift handling and it feels awful. I'm not saying it needs to be like Forza but at least be head to head with Blackbox era handling. Then there's also the problem with balancing in multiplayer and alot of races that are just endless boring highway. I'm fine with the tuning and i like that you risk your money from the races you won by getting busted before going to an safe house. I'm also fine with it being an one and done campaign even tho they should at least try to make an interesting story. They could make so much more of the multiplayer like co-op police chases, ranked, custom route races, car meets etc and all we got is this shitty lobby system. NFS could easily be back where it once was, if only they would solve their problems.
The problem is online has a very demanding grind to get money also there is not a lot of track variety or event different types of events (drift, time trails, takeover, ...). The races classes (from B to S+) have a very insane meta car focus were you can't even come close to others if you don't have the proper car and also has issues with balancing like the Ferrari in B races. Also Online has a traffic problem a lot of cars (npcs) just stop right from 100 to 0 in 1 second in the middle of a highway or a intersection which often causes crashes. Speaking of crashes oftentimes in the online mode you get a heavier punishment for not driving properly around a corner (drifting 2 hard) compared to someone who just crashes out in that same corner and gets reset more quickly than you can possible recover from that drift. Also there is the problem of resets working in an odd way. Sometimes you crash and you get reset instantly with a speed start sometimes you get reset without it sometimes the person that crashes into you on purpose gets a better reset than you eventho you didn't do anything wrong which would justify a punishment. Sometimes you and someone else crashes into the exact same pillar at the exact same time and someone gets preferential treatment of the game.
I didn't want or ask for a modern reimagining of the old greats, I I wanted a remake.
The old games had a few things the new ones don't, primarily the old ones had great soundtracks and the *chefs kiss* impeccable atmosphere and soul that comes with those soundtracks.
So true!
A remaster of Underground 2 and Most Wanted 2005 will probably never happen plus remember this if they were to remaster some cars and possibly soundtracks would be removed due to license
I have yet to get this game, i can't get over the visual effects
The problem is... People want classics like 2005 Most Wanted and Underground remastered (or games a lot like them). The thing is with that, people have nostalgia with the Blackbox era games which cannot be captured again since we are no longer that young anymore.
The thing is, those old games are pretty amazing.
People nowadays would be shocked how much better Underground and so on is and how much more content there is compared to newer games.
@@TheProfessionalDrift That is also true. They have huge replayability. Most Wanted in particular pushed the boundaries of the consoles of it's time. It was the golden age of gaming (in general) imo
@@riojones9959 Yeah. And also how there were different shops for different types of customization in Underground 2. Details like this just make the game more „alive“, you know and give it an incredible atmosphere, which is lacking in newer games. The only new NFS with a good atmosphere was NFS 2015. I’d say that was the best NFS game in the last decade (!). The only problems that game had was the fact that drifting was OP and that the cars were unbalanced. It was a very solid foundation they could have built upon but the games got worse lol
@@TheProfessionalDrift Very true. However, me myself disliked that NFS and after the reboot of MW (made by Citroen Games), for me, the franchise just fell off. The series has always had great potential with knowing how cars are customised, knowing what the clients/gamers want from the franchise should have made it easy for them to build upon. I still play Underground 2 and 2005 MW to this day and much more than NFS Heat. It is a great shame
@@riojones9959 I agree. I also think that racing games (especially arcade racers) went downhill in the last decade as well. Back in the day there were so many good ones like Juiced, Midnight Club etc. Maybe EA thinks that an NFS game won’t sell that good anyway so they cut budgets for it year after and we’re left with this :/
I actually think the best arcade racer right now (except the older games of course) is gta online LOL. If it had more players it would be so much better…
But it’s awesome that you still play these older games.
I agree on what you said, I notice this as well with GT7, FH5, etc. My take is the majority of the racing game community is expecting the game to have live service style content like say Fortnite, COD to have something do or else they get mad and bored. I don't see this type of expectations from players when compared to other single player game genres I play.
As for me, as long as the game delivers on its beginning to end, and had a great time, I'm satisfied and got mo money's worth. This is my mindset since I grew up on the PS2 era.
Same mindset being 43. I’m no online player so it’s solo content only for me as well. Once I’m done with the campaign/career, I’m on to the next.
Needs more content. Its great for a base game but we expect it to be more of a live service like The Crew 2 or FH5 for that price point. If it was sold for $30-40, then I'd say it's okay.
I hadn't played NFS in years but really enjoyed the campaign and was happy to stop there.. not sure why there's a huge demand for end game or NG
Because longevity is something very important for a game. People have waited long time for this, and to spent $70 on a game that only offers at most 30-50 hours on playtime (Talking about story) is ridiculous. That is not at all worth the price. Imagine buying a part for a car or your PC and it only lasts 50 hours. Do you think that's worth it?
@@carlovergts02 I think if the experience of those 30-50 hours is profound then yes, it is absolutely worth it. Everyone has different expectations for a product tho so that is entirely subjective. I for one absolutely do not want a continued service game that I have to keep up with. I want an experience with a beginning, middle and end. Then I want to look back on that journey, take it in and move onto another NEW journey. Not agreeing or disagreeing with your stance one way or the other, just providing a viewpoint that I personally have with my gaming. (Haven't played this game, just a Devil's advocate sort of comment to shed light on a different opinion on what someone can desire from a game)
it says alot about you if you are confused why people want end game content. We dont spend lots of money on a game just to be able to play and have fun for less then a week. We want more for our money then just a campain. I know it has multiplayer too, but lets be honest. The Multiplayer is trash.
@@trautsjYou bring out a valid stance, I can't really argue against this. As someone who likes competitive games, I normally look at longevity as something very important. But I also understand the views of someone like you. So, I'll say this, if you are perfectly fine with spending that much for a fullfilling yet short experience, that's fine. But, judging from the reviews and all the complaints, it seems like a majority of people don't think that way.
The single player campaign is very very repetitive and dull. I dont understand how some even enjoy it. Even just for the single player its not really worth it
Maybe because there's like 5 different events and really little to do after getting the platinum trophy for driver
I really didn't like the main campaign, it was a chore and a slog to get through and my god it's repetitive once Jaz rejoins the crew. As bad as payback was with microtransactions and such I still go back to play that campaign. Ghost gave us better campaigns bar none. I want something new, no remakes, no remasters. Let the Black Box Era stand on it's own as the greats they are we need to stop chasing nostalgia and let them go wild with the franchise.
Honestly? It's the way the story for Campaign was structured and how Online was made. The character of Yaz and Tyrell was fine, but there was so much that could've been developed more especially since it was essentially slammed that "Alec", which by the way we don't even see in the game at all, was behind the theft of the cars. It could have been a mashup between NFS Carbon and Most Wanted in story-wise, but it was just bare. There's a reason why people loved Caleb Reece, Eddie, Razor, and Darius from the older games they gave you a purpose on what you need to work towards. This could've been resolved if they actually made Alec a threat in the game like Razor, Caleb, Eddie, and Darius, and where someone like Asap Rocky could be a big role in the game since he was always in the marketing. After the story, you basically have nothing to do.
I think something else to add is that you can't easily just start a new campaign. That's what I did when I was done with an older title like MW and U2 game. With resource scarcity necessitating decision making, maybe the game could have made it more replayable that way. Multiplayer should be different though to allow for more experimentation.
Ah, does Unbound inherit the very intuitive "go to your documents and rename a couple of files" new game start method? 😆
Seems to me a big expectation issue, once upon a time we bought a game and played it till we got bored or got a new one. Now people expect a game to be eternally supported with new content all the time, without any DLC of course, no fees or car packs. Keep adding to my game forever!
I agree with you but I think people have these expectations as games are costing a lot more compared to back then. But yeah, I do agree that there’s this unreasonable expectation for years and years of support
Comparing Unbound to Most Wanted (2005) is like comparing Saints Row (2022) to Saints Row 1 or 2.
Reviews being low are probably because of people like me who listened to surpisingly good reviews and bought that piece of mediocre game.
Game has essentialy just 2 race mods and one of them (drift) doesn't even plays enjoyable, so you get pretty bored after 1 ingame week.
Gameplay against cops is just ResidentSleeper, you don't want in any way, shape or form to trigger cop chases because there is not much to do with those guys - you just drive behind the corner and suddenly you're Houdini. Cop chases in Most Wanted were cool because there was like 10+ cars chasing you down, trying to get you in the "box", you could use pursuit breakers or send them flying with a proper hit, also you could boost the ammount of force with speedbreaker.
TL;DR: It looks like shit, it plays like shit and it sounds like shit - it's shit.
Honestly this video made me consider this game even more than before. 25 hours is great, i don't really have that much time to play anymore, definitely picking this up when it reaches like $30
@HokiHoshi
At 6:09, NFS Shift is not part of the Black Box Era since it was made by Slightly Mad Studios.
That's true, but Black Box assisted in the development, so they still had influence in the game and I personally consider it part of the "black box era"
@@HokiHoshi
That makes sense.
In my case, i consider NFS games made entirely by Black Box being part of the Black Box era.
Meanwhile, NFS Shift was overseen by Black Box producer Michael Mann and senior vice-president of EA Games Europe Patrick Soderlund.
So by saying "part of the Black Box era" and even if it's an indirect link, you're also right.
I don't care about extra challenges outside of the story... Games like Test Drive Unlimited knew how to keep racing fans interested well after the story had ended. And even for a non open world game games like Street Racing Syndicate had features like Pink Slips in the game so you could have endless fun winning other cars from people online.
I said at the time that I thought you were overrating it Hoki, for the simple reason that its handling is _still_ appalling. The lack of updates, the short single player...none of that would've mattered to me if the game's cars were actually...y' know...enjoyable to drive. Seems like a fairly important part of a driving game, no?
But lots of people didn't seem to care that it handles like a war crime. They liked the customisation and they like NFS, blindly. So they got caught up in the hype. And now that's done with, they've 'finished' the game, they're left with nothing but that terrible handling model. At the end of the day nothing else really matters in a racing/driving game.
Let me put it like this: two months into release...this is the point at which, in a game like Forza Horizon, the new player would just be starting to dig into the depths that it has to offer. You might have a quarter of the cars. You probably haven't even tried drifting, maybe haven't gone online, or touched the livery system, and probably haven't tried tuning yet. I am not exaggerating here when I say I played Horizon every day for five years and was still learning new things about the handling until fairly recently. And because the handling was so well balanced and deep, all the other stuff like the customisation, the tuning, the livery editor, the photo mode, all of that becomes pleasurable, because it revolves around a driving model that you love.
If NFS is to remain something that anyone cares about they just have to fix that handling system. They need to make it enjoyable to drive and satisfying to drive. Until they do that it will be nothing more than Unbound over and over again.
amen brother, the handling is just not good enough and havent been in nfs in ages, probably decades. Im not talking about full simulation or even simcade, nfs rivals was probably the last nfs game which had relatively decent arcade physics.
ever since 2015 I for some reason can just feel it when they're gonna have a fucking shit handling model.
see trailers and watch the camera make these overexaggerated catch up movements added with the car's "happy" tail end. that instantly reeks of ghost/criterion's brand of shitty handling and i've been right everytime, they never tried to fix anything.
my own mental note is when a racing game has a steady, non/less exaggerated catch up camera a la horizon, gran turismo, heck even old black box games, they usually fare better. the only ones with ghost/criterion's brand of over-exaggerated camera is well... basically asphalt (yes, the mobile game)-like.
I personally really enjoyed the main campaign, but it`s honestly far from perfect, and in hindsight I probably enjoyed more than I realisticly should`ve. My main problem with it (now that I`ve beat the game and haven`t played it since around Christmas), is that as you progress through the calander, you`ll find yourself constantly repeating the same small set of tracks, and even more so if you get confident enough in your ability to run fron the cops, that you`ll always aim for the high risk/reward events, or just streight up clear out every event available each time you head out. This makes the game feel vary repetitive, and the lack of variation in race types doesn`t help. The not at all generous race payouts and the lack of full offroad races also makes the large car list feel redundant, since most people will probably just stick to a small handfull of cars that they`ll buy and upgrade...
The multiplayer in it`s current form is also loughable tbh... From what I`ve experienced of the multiplayer (in b class anyway), all the playlists/championsips i would get always has the same tracks, just in a different order, and with 1 track being different each time. This for me is the single biggest turn off from a racing game... The payouts are pathetic too...
Compare Unbound to the blackbox era games all you want, but their campaigns were much more varied and replayable, and their multiplayer, while bare bones by today`s standards, were great for the time, and offered a level of local multiplayer fun that unbound can only hope to achieve (since there`s that stupid 4 person party limit, and I don`t even think that you can set up custom races in unbound, though I might be wrong, and I apologize in advance if I am)
Also, Unbound`s handling still has those moments of odd...
The game is bad: the physics are horrible and it is the main source of how bad this game is. It's horrible to drive on it, the physics doesn't make any sense, the world seems too tight for the cars, no sense of speed. And of course there are the cartoonish visuals that you can't turn off, are pretty but gets in the way of the gameplay too much. The story is not good either. The grind for online is way too much. This reimagination of the Underground/Most Wanted series have been pretty bad executed with Unbounb. I could pass all over this if the game physics were actually good. But the cars feels horrible. It's mashup of GRID and NFS Payback that is horrible to see.
what made the 25hr career mode from nfsu2 and mw enjoyable was the ability to start again and make different choices in cars to make it a bit more challenging like tuner only runs, muscle only runs, specific brand cars only it a lot like how people made nuzlockes for Pokémon games after beating it to add a bit more difficulty to it. Nowadays once you've started these games that's it that's your one and only career and you cant make a new one unless you make new accounts for the actual service your using or buy it on a new system. Personally I beat the career mode in less then a day (on the hardest difficulty not that it matters) then went to play the multiplayer for about a fortnight before I had unlocked the crazy BMW m1 body kit that required you to find all the collectables and beat the challenges and honestly I didn't find it fun to do so it was boring. I've had more fun going and playing an emulator version of underground with crappy graphics and small car lists simply because there was less busy work and a more rewarding feeling from winning events.
This is a personal opinion.
It is incredibly far from the era that NFS Saga was excellent.
The characters have the mental age of an 8 year old.
A very marked descent of the WOKE line.
The soundtrack is a disaster, other franchises have radios or even NFS had different genres (rock, metal, hip-hop, electronic, pop, indie), here they only play Trap.
The cars they chose are closer to Tik Tok than to a car fanatic, something that other franchises understood and NFS did not. Putting the same car but convertible and counting it as another car, is a total lack of respect to the people who love the car culture.
I consider it a car game for people who don't know anything about cars.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they put a Tesla in it.
Boom! Brutal but true.
I'll tell you the real issue
-The balance is Garbage
-Physics are garbage
-Story was ok but campaign felt weird!
-Heavy cars have no chance at being good
-Cops are absent
-Multiplayer is dry and broken
--Nerfing the gti and the Regera was dumb when the 488 was the most broken car in the game
-Handling physics Need to be separated between Racing and Drift! Combining the 2 is literally making the game feel like it's having an identity crises!
The criterion developers are so useless modders have to takeover to make it what it should be
the same can be said for many games but modders can only do so much
Why in the world did they close down Ghost Studio, they kept inching closer and closer when fans wanted and finally Heat delivered. I heard a rumor it was that they refused to put microtransactions in Heat but I don't know if it's true.
U expect EA of all company's to do post launch content for a game that makes em no money, I saw a comment down below saying "they wont put financial backing for a game that isnt title madden or fifa" n it's true EA only cares bout games that'll get em more money through transactions rather than actual game sales. Best case scenario for nfs imo is to get away from EA n make a new game under a new publisher if not then every nfs game will be like heat in post game content until EA puts this series in the dirt
I was that comment 😅
It's kinda sad... I've had a lot of fun on Unbound and now I'm just grinding the last day over and over to buy more cars. But I don't feel the need to launch the game again.
The game's biggest downside is the music, because you turn down the volume the moment you turn on the game
OMG I just counted. I'm a 25-year NFS veteran too! NFS high stakes baby
Yeah, No Man’s Sky level of support from an EA game? I wish.
True! xD
After the campaign, played like 3-4 hours in the “end game” and just stopped playing and haven’t touched it since
This is absolutely true. I think Unbound is a great game and I've always loved NFS, but honestly the multiplayer absolutely needs some work. I don't think it's anything unfixable, and Criterion seems to be interested in fixing it, but as it stands right now, it's just not up to par with other franchises. Hopefully they build upon it tho!
if we're talking post game content i think a good idea would be a end of week championship made up of random races with a randomised vehicle requirement a vehicle class and a specific car. it'd incentivise car building with the championship giving a massive payout that'd also feed into the following week to repeat the process over again
Honestly I have really enjoyed Unbound yes it does have its flaws but I felt that it did a lot more than what 2015, Payback, and Heat all did and you have to admit it’s a solid game and more enjoyable than even FH5
It’s the closest thing to all of the classic arcade games we all have loved in our childhood and I’m glad that this is the direction Criterion took
I’m just hoping that this is a small blunder and that Criterion has more to make up for down the line yes this was a letdown and a disappointment but I have faith in Criterion for their post release content as they have for many years almost a decade now so let’s give them some time
Hopefully it all gets better from here
The main issue I have with modern NFS games is not the game itself, it's the experience. Old games had a dark tone with rock/rap music. Modern games are basically fortnite clones with bright colors and happy themes, and emotionless music. It kills the deal for me. Often times, I shut down the soundtrack on NFS Heat and it gets like 20% better. I understand I'm old and they are trying to reach a new generation now. It is what it is, but doesn't change the fact that I don't enjoy these games as I used to due to these issues.
I use a flash drive and get songs from my phone and play them. Makes the games much better
$70 and still no day/night cycle in multiplayer
Absolutely disastrous
I fear for the future of the racing games genre
why fear it when it's been highly irrelevant for years and lost many games over the years lol
sorry but unless iRacing and Forza fall off drastically (which they won't) there is 0 competition in the racing genre so of course nobody is going to try
As long as I can race my homies in fully maxed out cars like heat I’m fine