sequel to previos post
General Game Adjustments
Balancing REP
I totally agree on your idea of the 5 ways to play, but balancing it a little more would give everyone the choice to really decide for themselves, how they want to be considered. Right now I guess, that more than 40% of the players are considered driving mostly like an Outlaw, because it’s just so hard avoiding the destruction at such high speeds, which is why Outlaw-REP just keeps piling up endlessly, brands us an Outlaw and makes it hard to catch up with one of the other ways to play.
Obviously there are like 3-4 ways to gain REP for each way to play to play, which is alright, but then again, as we have the multiplayer issues, we rarely race in groups, so that we hardly gain CREW-REP. Another point with BUILD-REP is, that the actions, we gain REP for, namely MAX SPEED, PERFECT NITROUS and 0-100km/h are performed quite rarely. Well, I think that the issue with CREW-REP will be solved as soon as the above mentioned multiplayer issues are solved but for BUILD-REP you need to reconsider how we gain it.
For example, right now I am working hard on gaining BUILD-REP by myself, because OUTLAW-REP claims almost 45% of my whole REP-cake. And even though I am catching up slowly by earning SPEED-, STYLE- and BUILD-REP, it is difficult not to produce OUTLAW-REP, because it is just so easy to earn by unintentional DESTRUCTION, SLAMMING, NEAR MISSES and COP CHASES, of which the first and last mentioned ones are almost unavoidable.
Those who like it shall drive as an outlaw but those who would rather prefer driving clean, even not at super high speeds, protecting there beloved build from damage and cruise the roads of Ventura Bay should get awarded as well. Causing chaos and devastation may be thrilling for an outlaw but avoiding it and going rather stylish without hitting anything is just as rewarding for the rest of us.
So my intention would be to give less REP for outlawish actions to give a chance to all the other ways to play. Also, I know you tried already, further decreasing the OUTLAW-Daily Challenges is recommended. They still appear in every single trio even since the last update.
COP CHASE Revamp – BUSTED Revamp
Having talked so much about an OUTLAWs way to play the game, I have seen a totally badass awesome idea by 717sincere on Page 16. It’s concerning the Cop Chases, more exactly the case of getting busted. Well, if we screwed it up, we’ll be teleported back to our garage and pay the fine of like what...50K$ maximum? An amount easily recoverable by running 5 to 7 hard drift trials, which are ridiculously easy to beat. A little more of a threat would be to get our car taken away, if we get busted at a fine anywhere above 10K$ or at a certain heat level. Therefore the following rules for may be applied, which I call the Revamped Busted Flowcharttablegedöns
- in any case the fine has to be paid and will be pulled from a players current savings
+ if busted at the two highest heat levels the car will be taken away; one day for every 5K$ of fine
OR
+ if busted the car will be taken away; one day for each heat level
[I prefer the first one, unless there are more heat levels. See below.]
- if fine exceeds a players savings the car will be hold back 1 additional day for each 5K$ that are missing
- if fine exceeds a players savings + the cars resale value [or optional: 50%], the car will be lost permanently
- if a car is taken away, we don’t have any access to it before it’s released from custody
[optional – if busted more than 5 times with the same car, the car will be lost permanently]
[optional – a busted player may retreat his car early if he pays 10K$ for each remaining day in custody]
Furthermore, since I read it quite a few times as well, some changes to Cop Chases in general may be appreciated, since they are not quite challenging in their current state. For example the amount of time to stay out of police sight for entering cooldown is way to short. Already seconds after losing us, we enter a 10 or 20 second cooldown which is far too easy to get away with. It feels as if Ventura Bay Five-O doesn’t even have any drive to catch us at all.
So here are some general recommendations for Revamps on Police Pursuits
- trigger pursuit by being caught ignoring red traffic lights
- bestow the Ford Crown Victoria police cars with more speed, so that they can keep up with us
- get rid of the blue flash after a finished cop chase, which covers the whole screen and literally blinds us
- pursuits entering cooldown to quick; recommend 5 seconds per heat level staying out of sight to enter cooldown
- lengthen cooldowns to 10 seconds per heat level + 5 seconds per vehicle engaged in pursuit
- if not entering garage passing any random Five-O will trigger pursuit even without speeding/hooning
- save the heat level for a once pursued car until both the licence plate AND the color are changed by a value between 45 and 315 / see note below for reasoning
- reset heat level after one week; original licence plate + wrap can be used again
- introduce a new heat level containing rolling roadblocks and, which would be too awesome, helicopters
- for any heat levels > 2 spawn reinforcements near the pursuit, which will come and join the chase quickly
- make police cars destructible by letting them smash into immobile cars/objects/walls at speeds over 50km/h
The above mentioned changes would make police pursuits in this game much more challenging and therefore require quite some thought if to mess with the cops or not.
Considering how often I read about holding up the heat level until a certain condition is met, this change should receive quite some attention, since it is a pain to always start with some doughnut-eating Paul Blart in his way too slow law-enforcement-wagon being way too easy to escape, when we look for a really thrilling pursuit. However, what I read is, changing the wrap should reset the heat level to 0 but this may not work, as simply deleting decals from one side and copying them back again from the other side or adding a decal to a spot where it can’t be seen will count as a change and therefore make it to easy to reset the heat level. Therefore making it at least a bit difficult the condition to change both the licence plate, as it usually is used by the police to track cars down and the color of the car, should be essential. Concerning the color, the above mentioned value of 45-315 units is to avoid painting a car from red [0] to red [360].
Then about making the police cars destructible as described. People may say, they want to slam and smash the police head-on themselves but how logical would it be if we could keep on riding but they don’t? So it will may be kind of tricky to lead them into some accidents, especially for the Chargers, but that will be even more fun.
As far as to now I have read plenty of suggestions on those police pursuits and due to that I assume very strongly that any of the above mentioned ideas will be highly appreciated by the community.
I’m not saying, the pursuits are senseless and no fun at all. Recently I just had a thrilling police chase with more than a handful of Five-O on my back including 2 chargers and I came into a situation with having 50% of the roads I turned into being fully blocked, another 25% being blocked by the cops who chased me down and then I chose one of the two open streets where that nasty spike strip just waited for me and I hardly managed to dodge it in time but had one of my rear tires burst so all I could do now was escape to the highway, which I did and from there on it was somehow way too easy to lose the police. Soon only one Five-O kept chasing me down and I even played with him a little bit, until I had enough. Brought me a nice 45K$ fine, which I escaped, but it took me a lot of time and effort to get there.
And this is last development of that police chase, having the highest heat level but no challenge at all is why I say, that this part of the game could use some refurbishment.
Again massive props to 717sincere on page 16 who brought up this idea, which gives cop chases a REAL MEANING and those cops a right to actually be in this game.
Map/Minimap Revamp
My next concern is a quite small, but not less important one. It’s small, because it is concerning the minimap in our HUD. When in game’s history was a rotating map showing no directions ever useful? If you want us to use a rotating map, at least put something like a compass around it or, since this would interfere with the current design of the map blurring out to the borders give us the option in the settings to have the map fixed to show north.
The current coordination is a time stealing disaster. I am one of those, who don’t like teleporting via the map because I didn’t by a car-/racing-game to choose not to drive my car and therefore I have to look at the map several times, if I am going somewhere I cannot put a waypoint to and sometimes I don’t even want to set a waypoint because I kind of don’t want to use a NAVI in my “own” hood, if ya know whata mean. Not mentioning the trouble we get, if a chosen waypoint overlaps with a player and instead of pressing [CIRCLE] on our waypoint we press it on the player and wait for his profile to open just to close it again, what steals time again. Considering this issue, it is also highly recommended to make it possible to set waypoints anywhere on the map.
If you could fix this little but important issue, I suppose that mostly everyone will be grateful for it.
Map Extension
When first showed the game to a friend of mine and he took a look at the map he stated, what I will write now, and since then I thought so as well plus I read it a few times in this threat already and so it is quite obvious and at least a statement on this would be appreciated.
Some of the areas on the current map, like the southeast of South Port, or the northwest of both Burnwood and Franklin Terrace look as if they are just waiting to be opened up. Assuming, that if you plan to open up the map, there will be a new industrial area in the south and each a mountain-like and a city-like area in the northwest and seeing this post from “1clkgtramg” on reddit [http://i.imgur.com/dLiqTBI.jpg], which I almost completely like I can’t wait for those but I got my ideas on those map extension as well.
Going along with a lot of other ideas that came to my mind thinking and writing all of this there are some features serving a purpose when opening up new areas on the map.
First to mention would be the numerously demanded additional garage we could transfer our vehicles to and own even more car slots to purchase more vehicles. More on this one later, but for now it shall be enough, that some kind of a racing downtown with long straight streets for drags, big parking lots as the one in Burnwood, and a near residential area just like this image of a residential area how it fits my imaginations, where we, our cars and our icons have our homes being located close to Burnwood could become the perfect centralized spot, where we all can meet and pull off our crew meetings, races and have our very own home.
Already existing and just waiting to become accessible is the Ghost Stadium. Having this opened and decently illuminated we could use it to have our crew gather together, look at other players’ cars, do some races, donuts or whatever pleases us most. Setting up a tricky drift track inside would even grant us the opportunity to watch each others skills close up.
Close to this would be the new industrial area in the southeast hopefully containing the airport everyone is demanding for. Here you could open up long straights for drag races again and a multi-story parking house with its circular driveways we then would drift up and down again and again, just like in good old Tokyo Drift.
Talking about Tokyo Drift and the Japanese drift scene I read so much about here, designing the new city area near Burnwood as J-Town would get major props from every player, since most of our car racing culture image is formed by Japanese underground racing, I guess. Movies like “Fast&Furious Tokyo Drift” just made that image stronger.
Finally in the very west, on the north tip of that island across the big river, we could have long stretched roads seaming its coast as well as long serpentines descending from mountains near the ocean, so that we may witness beautiful sunrises on the riverside in the east and sunsets on the oceanside in the west, while we race at maximum speed or burn or rubber away of course.
I am aware of that asking for map extension while also demanding an increase of human player slots on the servers with this hyper graphic may sound difficult but having at least two, better three crews on one server riding in such a vast city would make this game just incredibly awesome. I am still saying that you should give priority to the major aspects of the game, but you got a highly professionalized team and if you manage to solve those issues you may also be able to tweak the right spots to make these features available as well.
Solving and realizing all the issues named until here, you would have created a game that will probably survive all the way through to the next generation of consoles and at that time you may stick to what you did, learn of your past and create a game which is just as awesome as this one.
From hereon all other issues concern game content which I attach a rather low priority compared to everything before, since they don’t majorly affect or decrease the amount of fun, we can have with the game. I am not saying that they are unnecessary. If so, I wouldn’t write them down here, but compared to everything above they are things, we can wait for until they fixed what is to be fixed. I want them just as bad as you do but there are things we have to be patient about.
Minor, but highly valuable changes, tweaks and small features to add
Seeing how often it has been requested I already think, that you’ll bring with your next update but just to complete my post, I’ll add it to it.
[1;2;3] Manual; Drag; Garage
What numerous players were asking for are a manual transmission, Drag race type and an additional garage.
Well, there is nothing to add for the first two, since they are essential to this game genre and pretty sure you and a lot of other people know more about how manual transmission should work than me. So I can only give you an advice about how to operate it, as I thought about it before as well. Since while driving it is impossible for us to turn off the engine by pressing [CIRCLE], shifting gears could work with the following to commands:
- Shift gear up \ hold [CIRCLE] and press R1
- Shift gear down \ hold [CIRCLE] and press L1
- switch automatic and manual transmission \ hold D-Pad-DOWN and press [CIRCLE]
Holding [CIRCLE] would just be like holding down the clutch then. Undoubtedly the best commands I could possibly think of, since everything else would either conflict with other commands or make it impossible to steer while shifting gears.
And Drag races are just another type of sprint race being short with a lot less checkpoints and the handbrake pulled tightly, until we’re aloud to take off at the start. Nothing else to say.
But there may be a few things to say to convince you, that 5 cars may force everyone to build his very perfect master build but that this is just not enough for some people and that granting additional space for more vehicles in an additional garage is absolutely reasonable.
As we finish the campaign, fill up our garage and tune each of the five cars to its maximum, we will start piling up money more than we can spend because the only thing we could spend it on would be a new car, which we had to sell one of our beloved ones for in advance. A perfect example where having $%&#loads of money isn’t satisfying at all so give us something to purchase with all that money: a brand-new very own garage in a multi-story building in the new district of the town just in the close northeast of Burnwood. Arranging it in a way that we would pay like 100K$ for renting the building itself and 30K$ for the first five slots and 50K$ for every additional slot having up to 9 slots available in total, we would pay an additional fee of 250K$ and a maximum amount of 450K$ to max out our garage. This way those who say they only need like 1 slot more wouldn’t have to pay all the way up to the max and everyone else can just spend as much as they want to. As for the pricing, why should we get more space for cars if we don’t even earned enough cash by racing to actually deserve it?
[4;5] Damage; Crash Cam Revamp
Also a lot of people asked for an option to turn off the damage and I think it makes sense. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely like the damage and it is kind of a challenge to drive clear not to wreck my precious RX-7. But sometimes it is just unavoidable and then driving all the way back home or, what I personally dislike and therefore don’t do, teleporting back and forth is not the fulfillment we are looking for. As for this issue a simple option to turn off the damage may be helpful. An even better solution in my opinion are repair shops at every gas station, which we could enter easily and with minimum loading times and some typical sound effects see our beloved vessel of joy roll down the ramp backwards looking as if nothing had ever happened.
Another very irritating issue is the often mentioned crash camera, which triggers on random occasions like only scratching the wall with the wing mirror and various others I am not eager to count up now. Tweaking this part of the game in the aspects of both when it does trigger and further how long the animation lasts, will let players enjoy more and rage less of their outdoor experience. Again I am not saying that the crash cam is bad. I am absolutely supporting it, because whoever lacks skill at driving must be punished by the hard reality and that would be crashing – telling the crashed person “Work on your driving skills or go get a Trabbi, Buddy.”
Sure, a lot of people asked for “turning off crash cam”, but we got an online-only-game here that makes it impossible and in my opinion unnecessary. Just tweak it, let us recover a little faster and everyone will be happy again.
The last thing to say on the crash event is, that it sometimes spawns me kilometers away from where I crashed, sometimes facing into the opposite direction and sometimes even on different streets. This issue has to be addressed and fixed properly in future updates, because it is a major source of irritation.
[6&6,5;7] Day Cycle & Weather Revamp; Radio Revamp
Read a lot as well and deeply appreciable is the demand for a day cycle. The current system kind of fits locations atmospheres but it would be overwhelming to have one time of day for the whole map including a full day cycle making it possible to see beautiful Ventura Bay in sunlight and the even more astonishing vehicles of our fellow players, what many people are complaining about not being able to do even on their own cars outside. Going a step further and linking traffic and police density, as considered too low before, with the daytime making it dense during morning and evening hours and low during noon and night. Giving 12 minutes to every of this 4 cycles, delay sunrise and quicken sunset would be absolutely sufficient and keep the night dominating. In addition it would create a lot more excitement if you only think of a police chase in the thick morning traffic.
The weather on the other side is just like back in the old days of NFSU2, raining and raining, a few minutes of no rain and then, who would have expected, rain. First of all, before saying anything else, why do our window wipers never make a move when it is raining? Do you expect us driving at 300+km/h without clearing our windshield? Furthermore a little less depressing weather and going along with the day cycle above a little more sunshine and blue skies would be just overwhelmingly awesome. Also having mist and foggy areas in the very early morning hours just before the sun rises to clear them out from time to time would make this city the best to host a racing game ever.
A revamp on the radio makes sense in numerous ways as now it is a pain to change tracks and furthermore most of the 50+ tracks that are in the game are hardly playing or not even playing at all. Therefore I have three simple recommendations on what to do on this just speaking for themselves.
- press D-Pad-LEFT to repeat track/play previous track
- press D-Pad-RIGHT to skip track
- introduce a header to the settings menu listing all tracks in the game
- being adjustable to play anywhere/free roam only/garage only/never
[8] Dashboard View & Interior View
Not much to say about this either except that you cannot or rather you must not make a car racing game in our modern times without it. How didn’t you miss the dashboard view when you tested this game? You want us to create our master build but refrain us from enjoying the feeling of actually sitting inside of them and instead pin our heads to the windshield? What we call for at least, is a real inside perspective with the steering wheel moving, a rear mirror showing us how we’re leaving our competitors in the dust and to top it off in replacement for the holographic speedometer a real one just behind the steering wheel.
Having this would already be pleasing but if you wanted to create a real masterpiece in nearly every aspect and I and for sure everyone else hope that this is what you are going for you may even surpass this rather limited *pit view by a full 270° panorama view including not only what I said before, but also a smooth pan shot letting us look who is behind us left and right, look at our wing mirrors and if someone comes crossing our path from either sides and if 270° were too troublesome even 180° would still be amazing.
[9] Marketplace
Self-explanatory but I will tell you what I mean by this and try to show you, why it will be useful. Concerning the decal-editor at the very top of this post I already said that it should be possible to share our creations and redeem a fitting reward for the work we put into it. As for decals and whole wraps, since creating them doesn’t use up any cash but time I am fine with selling them for like $500 each but 5000 BUILD-REP going along with it. Here a feature similar to the above mentioned “Tracklist” is recommended. Since most wraps are built on a certain vehicle the function to actually group several decals to be able repositioning them would be essential to make this work for everyone. Seeing wraps like these on youTube already makes me want them the instant I see it. Artists should get recognized and awarded for the work they put into the game:
Sonic The Hedgehog Body Wrap on VW GTI by pt12k58fi, writing on page 31
Going one step further and creating an auction hall for selling the vehicles we built and gained popularity would be just as awesome and not quite far from reality since I read about how Jon Olsson who sold his Audi RS6, he participated in the Gumball 3000. The fate the car faced is quite sad but another story. This way, players who gained popularity on social networks or ingame with their builds could use this feature to get rewarded for their hard work with a mountain load of BUILD-REP, the cash the community is ready to pay for their masterpiece and other things you guys may bestow upon successful car auctions.
Contents to add [cars, customizations, music] \ minor changes
As for this I’ll keep it to a simple list of things to add to the game and side notes where I consider them needed.
- resetting the rules for the spontaneous outrun to outrunning the opponent by 200m or 300m to win instead of the fixed finish line to drastically increase the excitement of those races by extending the durance and get back the old thrill of catching up over and over again, which we had in NFSU2...in the good old days
- crew logo creator
- crew leader
- crew waypoints for gatherings
- putting decals on spoilers, painting callipers and exhausts available like in NFSU2, so that we can perfect our wraps
- carbon fiber decals to fill the gap of missing default carbon fiber parts
- more customization, which everyone is asking for; just give us fake and simple parts like in NFSU2, they were just fine
- headlights, rearlights, simple spoilers, bumpers, wing mirrors
- rims [though available as decal, not even one Enkei-rim to be found in the whole game \ loved those the most in NFSU2]
- remove the restriction on body parts conflicting with each other because usually we can’t see why a certain part shouldn’t be applicable to the car
- engine tuning additional to handling tuning along with the manual transmission
[- colored nitrous purge \ different types purchasable in visual customization, being colored individually
- horns \ different types purchasable in visual customization
- high beam light] – I know that these would all be awesome to have but we simply don’t have enough buttons for them not to conflict with other commands, except nitrous purge. Besides the game is already awesome with them.
- give the purchasable sound system a meaning \ after the cops and the lack of customization you advertised the game with so much, it’s the next biggest joke in this game
- highlight the daily challenges on the map, because as it is now we are spending minutes to search for the events
- if raising the REP levels give us goodies attached to each level to motivate us going further and don’t just raise it up leaving it meaningless to earn REP
As for the cars I am quite satisfied with my actual selection but if I had to name two I want to see in the game, it would be definitely the Mazda RX-8 and since you already put so many Ford into the game, I’d appreciate the 1972 Gran Torino Sport a lot as well.
Song Suggestions
Pronobozo - Full Flex
My favourite game - The Cardigans
No W - Ministry
The Only - Static-X
Skindred - Nobody
Other rock and metal like from the good old NFSU & NFSU2, where we had a lot more of it
That soundtrack of Fast&Furious Tokyo Drift
The World Is A Vampire - Smashing Pumpkins
Song 2 - Blur
And what everyone else demands for
Props go to following persons, I totally agree with in nearly all of their statements:
@2fresh2fly on page 29 and @OnahE on page 31 for their detailed overall feedback on the game
@717sincere on page 16 for his idea on cop pursuits
@SupaKur on page 14 for his multiplayer discussion
@TheSoberFox on page 14 for his remarks on the AI behaviour
@LegndaryKitsune on page 17 for his list of general features and add-ons for the game
@Al_Yasid for saying what need to be said AND heard without mince matters
@Straatford87 @Ghost @EA for all your efforts bringing us this game with so much potential waiting to unfold
I want to highlight to posters who obviously have a lot more knowledge than me about cars and games about them but not as much time as me to write down all the stuff I did.
First to cheer to is 2fresh2fly on page 29, who I completely agree on anything he said without a comment.
Next would be OnahE on page 31. Here I want point out the points 4, 9 [which is supporting my very first suggestion to the game], 13, 16 [of all brands they included into the game, Monster is the most haunted one so I don’t get, why they didn’t include various decals of it], 17 [especially making cars not only much lower but also higher] and 22. Thank you guys for your detailed feedback and I hope that we will be heard and our feedback taken into deeper consideration to help this game become not only a milestone of car racing game history but also a defining standard for future games of this genre.
All of this, especially the creative elements, solving multiplayer issues, REP-balancing and handling will not only benefit the players having purchased the game recently but all those who will do so in the future and will make NEED FOR SPEED become THE legend of car racing game history again how future games of this genre should look and feel, thus increase its popularity and therefore play more money into your pockets.
Besides all what I mentioned I really like the game, its world being huge and opened 100% from the start, its look and how it feels until now. But that does not mean that there is nothing more to tweak and enhance, so go on, keep on the good work and create that milestone of car game history, that will define future games and make your customers and fans satisfied, happy and proud of their purchase.
To everyone who read through to hear, I am deeply grateful for having had you take your precious time to take a look at all those thoughts concerning the future of this game which is quite precious to me, as I am looking forward to having it serving me a lot of fun in the future.
Thank you very much Sir or Ma’am, have a nice day and see you on the streets of Ventura Bay.
P.S. to EA and Ghost: If there is a seat vacant in your creative solutions department or whatever you call the wonderful place where all your magic work has its roots, I wouldn’t mind if you ask me for paid visit ^_^
Cheers,
MartialManiaK
