An honest review of MP in NFS 2015

As a late-comer to NFS titles, but now having many hours of play, I thought it a good idea to review the game as it stands, mainly pointed at the Multiplayer Speedlists.

Firstly, Nedd for Speed is a great game, in a way I wish I had bought it on initial release because it is so very good.  The graphics are wonderful and the driving is just sublime.

I played the entire campaign/single player missions and apart from the story not really inspiring you with the bad acting and each cut scene not really leading anywhere obvious it was quite enjoyable.

Adding friends is a little awkward when you meet someone in-game and want to add them and voice chat options are not obvious to the user and are again, awkward.  I think that the entire voice chat system should be much easier to apply and use in the NFS world.

Once you have tackled some of the Autolog events, set by your new friends, which is a nice touch, you can take a stab at some of the daily challenges, again, good stuff.

At this point I decided to have a go at the Speedlists, in particular the Style/Drift offerings.  Here I found a group of other players that were interested in drifting and honing their skills in group competiton, great, I was having a real good time, drifting and jostling for position to try to win, getting better each time and trying different cars.  Then, about an hour into it, I realised that it was always the same few that were winning, all with massive scores.  Wow, these guys are good I thought!  Well, after watching them I realised that they weren't good at drifting, in fact they were good at exploiting the way that the game is made, not drifting beautifuly as I would call it, realistic, fun, enjoyable, challenging, honest in the corner drifting.  They were all swaying from side-to-side along the straights and ignoring other players and even the corners.  As far as I'm concerned, exploiting a weakness in a game is the same as cheating and it ruins the game for others, most players want to play on an even field, most have no desire to drive from side-to-side all the way round a track.  It got so annoying that I made a list of their usernames, how sad, but at least it helps me to avoid them for a while.

I did put a post onto one of the forums about the issue but only got the standard reply of how to report cheats (Not Easy) and a statment obout how seriously EA feel about cheating.

There are a few methods the developers could employ to resolve this.  Firstly, you could ban them but then would that be right, as the game allows this?  Second, you could build in a sin bin type punishment system, again, would this be right?  Both options would require major development work to achieve.  My option would be one that should have been added from the beginning, Kick Voting and better than this, local hosting so hosts could self ban these types of player.  This option is not difficult to apply and I believe should be included in the next release, NFS Payback.

So, in closing, I would say that this is a very good game, although, after a while it can get frustrating if you want to play Speedlists.