My Feedback and Suggestions about Need for Speed 2015

After playing this game for over 50 hours and completing the story mode, I find myself in dire need to provide some suggestions and feedback. I put the feedback about the issues in the order of necessity of fixing, and I apologize if I emphasize some issues that are long known already. So here are my 2 cents:

First of all, let me start with the good things in this game:

1. The GRAPHICS look great most of the time. The scenery, roads and the cars look great.
2. The SOUNDS on most cars are great too. My favourite is the RX-7 🙂
3. The AMOUNT OF CUSTOMIZATION possibilities are awesome (although some things don't have many options, like certain cars only have 1 or 2 bodykits or bumpers and no head-/taillights).
4. The fact that you can SAVE THE DESIGNS of your cars. You can sell the car, but you can still keep the design saved, so you can reapply it on the car when you buy it again.
5. The HANDLING TUNING is very detailed and works good for the most part. I still feel like I have to provide some feedback on this though.
6. The PERFORMANCE TUNING is also very detailed. The amount of possibilities and information about the car's statistics are so cool and engaging. I do have a suggestion about this though.
7. The option in your garage to VIEW YOUR CAR. It's a great feature, but I also have a suggestion for this.
8. SNAPSHOTS are a great idea to share your car designs or statistics, although it should be a little easier to view your buddy's snaps. It's great that you can take them without the HUD though.
9. NO PAID DLC'S OR MICROTRANSACTIONS! Thank you!
10. DEDICATED SERVERS! I can not express my gratitude for this. The frustration and bad experience I've had with p2p networking destroyed all the fun I had in a "certain racing game".

Second, I can't help but suspect that some people that had to make decisions in the development of this game are a lot, if not totally disconnected from the racing (game) community. One of the issues I mention below is the information
shown in the HUD as well as in the 'end race screen' and the 'speedwall'. If the right people were more connected to the racing community, the information shown there would've been much more useful.

Feedback about issues I experienced:

1. The issues with HANDLING MECHANICS vary per car. Some are worse, like the 180SX and the Toyota Sprinter.
a. Sometimes the steering locks up. At first I thought it was my bad driving skill, but I heard most of my friends had the same problem. Sometimes when you use the handbrake and your car turns sideways, you drift a bit and you still have some speed. That's when the steering locks up often. If I had a camera I would film my hands on the controller and the screen to prove that I'm almost bending that thumbstick to the left or right in order to make the car turn, but it just doesn't for about a second or so. It's not limited to a certain car or handling setting. All my friends have experienced it. I recorded a video of the steering locking up. When I take the highway exit and use the handbrake to turn, it locks up and doesn't want to turn much further for about a second. I almost broke off the thumbstick pushing it to the right. Video of steering locking up.
b. Sometimes a car can randomly pull very hard to the right or left, without me touching the thumbstick. I have experienced it a few times, but my friends have more.

2. INPUT LAG. I experienced some input lag on PS4, and so did my friends. Even though it's not much, it's still making my reaction time worse and this can ruin a race easily.

3. The HANDLING TUNING is very detailed and cool as I said before, but I still need to get something off my chest. You can tune your car to grip very good, or make it drift very easily. When I first heard about this, I was so happy I could drive with grippy cars again, instead of drifting around every turn. It turns out drifting around turns is still the fastest way to race. This means that I'm practically forced to go back to drifting around turns (which I was so hoping to not have to do) in order to be just as fast as other players. I have the choice to either fall behind and get through turns way slower, or resort to the way of handling that I hated in the previous three or four NFS titles. That is a really not what people wanted when they asked for a different kind of handling than the "Rivals' way of driving".

4. Random other players/AI DRIVING THROUGH YOUR RACE while they're not in your race as opponents is extremely annoying and just plainly needless. Hardly anything is more annoying than getting wrecked by someone coming towards you at 200mph so you have no time to react. Please, for the love of god, have mercy and take that feature out, because that just makes people angry and causes unnecessary frustration. There's already enough chance to get wrecked by traffic when trying to set a good time on a track. Random players or even AI that needlessly screw up your race is without a doubt one of the most frustrating things I've ever experienced in a racing game.

5. AI BEHAVIOR is extremely random in the missions. Please, DO NOT just nerf the AI, as that will just be boring. The behavior has to be tweaked.
a. Sometimes you can lead the entire race and get overtaken by Amy in her 180SX while you didn't even make bad driving mistakes. That really doesn't make any sense, while other times you can win without much trouble.
b. In drift trains, the AI just rams you and drives on, without any notion of your position. When you are at the front of the pack, they just ram into you, making it very hard to drift normally. When you're in last place, they're too slow most of the time.

6. The RACING/NAVIGATION LINE on the road is very misleading at times. Sometimes it randomly changes lane or leads you into thinking you need to take a highway exit. Very annoying and has caused wreckage many times. When starting an outrun race against your friend or random player, half the time you have to make a u-turn to go into the right direction. Really strange. Video: Video of the navigation/racing line.

7. At the moment it's way too confusing how the 'CREWPLAY' works. There is the session that you get in when you press play, which can hold 8 players. (Side note: only 8 players? With dedicated servers I'd expect at least 12 or more.) Then there is the crew you can join with your friends so you can invite them to events. This is not explained in the game, which is actually really needed.

8. The 'INVITE ONLY' option in the crewplay is misleading, as you go into matchmaking when you press play. That way your game session is full right away and there is no way to invite a friend into your session who came online unexpectedly 2 minutes after your pressed play. At that point the only way to get into the same session with that friend, is to let him invite you and all your friends that were in your session. That's really not efficient and takes a lot of time as you have to load into the servers with that long loading screen again. The 'invite only' option is only for a crew within your game session. According to one of my friends there was a private game session option during the beta. Where did that go? Can't there be an option like game session for friends only, invite only and public? Just like in Rivals.

9. The buttons X, square, circle and triangle in the wrap editor don't work very well. Sometimes it takes 3 times pressing the button for it to register.

10. CUTSCENES.
a. Apart from the fact that it's very annoying that we can't skip them, it takes about a second after getting out of the cutscene, before you get back the control over your car. Needless to say, it's weird and doesn't make you feel like the game is working properly.
b. Can we please take crashcams out of this game, or at least let us disable them? Sometimes they take way longer than others and even need a loading screen before you can start driving again, or pressing options to restart the race. They're a feature in other racing games as well, and they've always been a nuisance to me. I've never understood why they were invented in the first place. Hitting stuff is annoying already and slows you down a lot anyway - why make it worse and add a time consuming unnecessary cutscene?

11. I don't know what 'SNAPSHOTS issues' signifies as one of the issues that are being investigated, but they are being taken after every race you do. Why? There is no significant information in these snapshots whatsoever. Apart from the shots taking up completely unnecessary space on my PS4 harddrive, they're also being uploaded to the NFS Network.

12. It's still RAINING IN TUNNELS. Facepalm lol :P

13. I believe the SHADOWS can be improved in certain occasions. For example the moment when you pick your starter car. That looked really bad. Also at the start of a race when it shows your exhaust - that doesn't look too good either.

Suggestions:

1. MULTIPLAYER/PUBLIC PVP/END GAME CONTENT. Please consider adding an option to race random people on the game. An option to select a race and go into matchmaking on that race. It would be amazing as end game content and above all, it would expand the longevity of this game with another 4 years. An option to go into matchmaking without selecting a particular race would also be nice. Just like there was on NFSW. Press a button and it randomly finds a race that has people waiting for opponents. Of course matchmaking would probably require a lobby with a countdown. Minimum required amount of players to do a public race is 2 of course. In my experience this is the most desired/expected end game content by the community. This would also be a the feature that would convince most of my friends to get this game on any platform. That kind of end game content would keep so many people playing and would increase the potential of this game dramatically. It would also convince me to keep playing this game for longer than 2 weeks.

2. MORE CAR SLOTS/NEW GARAGES. I was really disappointed when I heard about the 5 car limit, but if there's a way to expand your garage, than I can live with it. A suggestion is buying a warehouse/garage in a different part of Ventura Bay, with new car slots, so you can own more than 5 cars, because I'm done with the 5 cars I bought. I want to try out others too, without having to sell my favorite cars. Please let me be a real owner of my garage. Now it really feels like I'm renting the cars. Now that I've been playing a little more too, I've come to realise that I hardly value the cars at all. I just sell them to try others. Only the ones that perform best I keep.

3. TELEPORTING. At the moment, you can only teleport to events. There are a minimum of 72 OTHER icons on the map (not even talking about the icons of the AI and fellow players), but we can only teleport to the events. Please consider making teleporting possible to anything and anyone. It doesn't have to be that you can teleport to any point on the map without selecting an event or player, but at least let us teleport to other things too, besides events. Although teleporting to any part of the map without having to selecting an AI, fellow player or event would be way cooler and gives us lots of freedom.

4. The LOADING SCREENS are necessary, but it seems to me sometimes we get unnecessary double loading screens. For example, when you want to start a race, you first have to teleport there (loading screen #1), and then you can press start race or invite your friends (loading screen #2). Why not be able to start a race by selecting an event on the map and press play or invite? That would save us one loading screen. You can already do this with the garage, by pressing the touch pad or options (on PS4) and pressing 'jump to garage'. Restarting a race also doesn't actually restart your race. It teleports you back to the start of the race and you'll have to press start again. Doesn't seem very logical.

5. The HUD.
a. As a long time competitive racing game player, I want to see basic valuable information on the HUD when I'm in a race. Not too much, because that would obviously just bother me. I'd like to see my current position in the race compared to all other racers, AI or real player. In drift events you can actually see a playerlist of that race and their respective scores. Why isn't that shown in time trials, sprints and circuits? Common sense should apply.
b. The rep at the top of the screen is completely useless. It's capped at 5,925,241 and that will be changed soon, but we'll get to the next cap again very soon. That's renders all the rep that you get by drifting and speeding etc, completely useless as well. I'd understand it if it was in a cop chase as that would be a good way to accumulate bounty or something. But it's done everywhere and with everything you do, even when you reached the reputation cap ages ago. It takes up space and has no use.
c. On top of that, and this is also one of the things that made me think some of the devs were completely disconnected from the racing (game) community, most of the speedwall is based on this useless feature, REP. What in the world do racers care about Rep, when its maximum is reached so easily anyway? Even if it wasn't capped at all, RACERS CARE ABOUT TIMES ON LEADERBOARDS and not about a reputation score. How is it possible that only an approximate of your time on a certain track is shown on the leaderboards, aka speedwall? How is it not more logical to use the time for every sprint, circuit and time trial (or the drift score in a drift race) as a measurement for the speedwall? I can tell you, nobody really cares about the rep scores in a race. People want to be fast, and the leaderboards are about times. Not about how many points you got for speeding and drifting, when it's not a drift event. If the SPEEDWALL is going to be improved, please, show at least two decimals for every time. Three would be even greater. I did a few runs last week and got 1:17 on a track. My buddy got 1:17 too the next day, but we couldn't see how far apart we were on the speedwall. Why not show the decimals? It doesn't make sense to hide the decimals on a leaderboard. I'd also like to ask to take out the Rep scores from the speedwall entirely. I've never seen anyone care about it.
d. The MINIMAP doesn't have an 'North-indicator'. Why not? In all racing games that I've played where the map rotates around your icon, it has an 'N' on it, pointing to the North. It's pretty hard to determine what direction you're going without that indicator. Especially if you're not very known in the area. Another suggestion I'd like to make for the minimap is the possibility to expand the minimap. It's actually a feature on The Crew and to be honest, it's one of the best ideas I've ever seen. On The Crew, when the minimap is not expanded, it displays an area around you with a diameter of 500 meters. When you expand it, it shows an area around you with a diameter of 2km. For that to work, the minimap zooms out a bit, but also gets about twice as big. That way you can easily see turns coming up way further and that is a great help when you're racing on highways at 230mph. Now when I'm racing on highways at that speed, I
practically have to check the minimap every second to see what is coming up. Unless I know all the races by heart of course, but that's gonna take a lot more time.
e. LOCATION NAMES when you're driving through an area would be nice. This is also a feature that I like in The Crew. It may be because The Crew has such an extremely big map, but I think the name of the area in a small font in the corner of the screen would be useful.

6. COP CHASES.
a. Wouldn't saving the heat level per car be useful? At the moment, losing a cop is way too easy. I've had it happen that I was talking to a friend while in a cop chase, and I had lost the cop before I noticed the cooldown had started. Now it's fair to say that that was my own fault, as I should've paid more attention, but the fact that the cops are way too easy to lose AND I have to rebuild all the heat all over again is still pretty frustrating.
b. I'd like to be able to destroy a cop when I ram him repeatedly. That way they can also be a little faster, because now you can outrun them way too easily.

7. WRAP EDITOR.
a. Mirroring decals is already being mentioned in 'Under the Hood #1', so I'm not going to mention that here. However, I'm still missing skewing of decals as an option.
b. When changing the paint of a car, you can't pan around the car.
c. Zooming in would also be a great help when doing precise vinyl work on cars. This is actually something that can be useful in a lot of other customization options, such as changing the rims. Zooming out and looking at how the rims match the car's design would be a great feature. When changing a spoiler, bumper, mirrors, anything at all, it will be useful.

8. The issue with the loading screen for getting into a game session are known, but does it really take that long to connect to the servers?

9. The SOUND SYSTEMS in cars are a cool idea, but it's nowhere near what was possible in Underground. It might be that possibilities with this feature are gonna be expanded, but it's still a shame it's not part of the full release. I'd love to be able to customize my cars like that.

10. The way PERFORMANCE TUNING is set up is very detailed. On some parts though, a little explaination would be very useful, like the turbo's. There are lots of them and hardly anyone knows what the difference between them is, apart from the effect it has on the performance. It'd be cool if that was added. Besides that, the tuning looks a little boring. My suggestion might not be realistically possible to implement, because it's really just a copy of The Crew. Being able to see the car you're tuning and see what part of the car is being changed, would be awesome. Now it's just a standard generic picture of the part you're changing and the new part you're putting on has the same picture.

11. Make a DAY/NIGHT CYCLE. This would require some extensive developing time, but it would definitely improve gameplay and the field of view. This would be a big plus for competitive players who want to set the fastest time on leaderboards as they'd be able to have a clearer view on the road ahead.

12. LEADERBOARDS are only available as a list of your friends and players that you've seen before in a session, called the Speedwall. A global accurate leaderboard, on a website and/or ingame would be so awesome. If there would be a public service, like the SpeedAPI used to be for NFSW, that would also be a great substitute.

13. The ENGINE/EXHAUST SOUNDS IN TUNNELS need to give me chills. Now they're not much different than when you're not in a tunnel revving your engine.

14. I guess thousands of people have already said this before, but a racing game, inspired by car enthusiasts like Speedhunters, CANNOT lack manual transmission, *pit view AND wheel support. Missing one of these would be something possible to overcome, but all three is really a big shame and worthy of a massive facepalm. Shame on you (or whoever decided not to include them).

I hope this is useful feedback.

Peter