Why do you insist on making these ridiculous storylines on NFS?
This post will contain minor spoilers for NFS Payback storyline. However the quality of writing is so thin you can deduce all of this from the launch trailer alone.
I am just about to complete the main story of NFS Payback and I just have to write this up for the off chance this might actually reach someone who can make things happen for the next game in the series.
Why can't we just race awesome cars and compete against leagues like Shift Lock etc. without some completely ridiculous paper thin writing about "underground hackers fighting against the mafia by drifting"? Literally writing that just now made me cringe.
I thought after 2015 cutscenes you could literally just make a monkey throw feces on a computer screen and get more decent writing or believable characters but behold, for this installment you will be fighting against the most ineffective and stupid crime syndicate in the world with the help of the Most Generic White Dude #3567, the Stereotypical British Black Dude With a Fake Accent, the Generic Badass Woman #5764 and the Old Wise Mechanic with a mysterious background in literally everything. Look, I get that you have to keep NFS series accessible for the kids as well but maybe you should then ditch these ridiculous "crime" storylines completely? In a real world if there is a powerful criminal syndicate they don't get rid of their enemies through racing cars, they god damn shoot them in the face. If you want to make a open world game about crime and hacking and espionage there are some other competitors you can look to for inspiration. NFS should be just about quick, fun arcade racing action and really, the Noise Bomb questline is the one you should be looking for when deciding about the script for the next game. It should just be about racing against different leagues to be the best racer in the game world. That is literally enough. The idea about a great race "Outlaw's rush" and preparing for it by racing against the leagues was really good, it's all the juvenile stuff about crime syndicates and mysterious hacked ECU's that ruin everything. In 2015 it was technically about just racing but because each and every one of the characters were so ridiculously over the top and the live action acting was so abysmal people didn't like that either. Maybe you should stop getting older execs to decide what they think young people think is cool nowadays and get some actual people to write the story for once?
And please, for the love of all that is holy maybe dial back the police AI rubberbanding a bit? A bunch of police cruisers keeping up with a tuned supercar at 360km/h? Police corvettes keeping up with a dedicated off road build on dirt? The police/enforcers themselves are not actually very challenging but it's just funny how their cars break the rules of the game. At least change the skins to reflect their performance (Police Aventadors or Raptors etc. instead of just Crown Vic's, Chargers and Corvettes)
