Re: Need For Speed: World
1. Before Need for Speed: World shut down for good, what were the intentions (if there were any) for expansions to the map as Rockport Turnpike just closes off after a row of toll booths?
The intention was to add a teleport spot at the end of the turnpike to teleport between the World and Undercover maps. This may be the reason for the "TriCities" name used there. The then current map for World had reached the boundary limits for the coordinate system used in World, so in order to add Undercover, it had to be on a separate map, accessed via a teleport like mechanism. In the early discussions about this, Undercover's map could be converted to be compatible with World's map, but Underground 2's polygon density was lower than World's which would mean more that more than just a conversion process would be involved.
The choice of the location of the turnpike was to use the location of what some called the mystery bridge in Most Wanted (2005), which can be seen from Point Camden looking northwest, but not from downtown Rockport.
Canyons
In the Ask Marc videos series, Marc mentioned that the canyons were 90% complete. The canyons were located in the unused part of the map, linking north Fortuna with west Silverton. In one or two releases of World, players that went out of bounds reported being able to see the canyons on the mini-map (the small circular map). The canyons were linked end to end, low end to low end, high end to high end.
What happened?
At the time that EA Canada started work on World, they didn't have much else to work on, as the current batch of NFS games were mostly being worked on by Criterion and Slightly Mad Studios. My impression is World was conceived by the development team rather than management, as a relatively low budget project (compared to Undercover). Sometime in late 2010, much of the EA Canada team was removed to work on "The Run", and never game back. The work on completing the connector roads linking west downtown Rockport with Kempton and Palmont was abandoned, as well as work on the canyons. It's unknown how much work, if any, had been done on converting Undercover's map to World. In the Ask Marc videos, they just stated that these works in progress were no longer a "priority".
Fortunately, night mode and the holiday theme stuff like October Fest, Halloween, Christmas, and New Years were close enough to completion that the work on these features continued and were added to World. For Christmas 2012, traffic cars had holiday theme neons, but I don't recall this every happening again.
