Need for Speed Shift: Huge Interview

We put our expert racing man Alan Boiston against Need for Speed producer and EA veteran Jesse Abney, for this detailed, revealing look into the game and the series' future.

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Kikizo: With all of this activity on screen what frame rate are you expecting to achieve?

Jesse: Well this is a multi-threaded application and absolutely there are compromises that you have to make to retain a solid state system, there's a whole series of trade offs for performance, and the render thread's running at 30 frames. Whereas the physics and AI threads are running at a full 120hz, so what that you get a very smooth and silky performance attribute in rendering, and a much needed processing route. Again it's a series of compromises, 16 cars on the track fully modelled, fully damaged, fully physically affected which all present a challenge to a render thread, so you really have to compromise, as you see today we don't feel 30fps has an impact on the experience, we're running very fluidly and I think those elements are not mutually exclusive to the 30-frames-to-60-frames argument.

Kikizo: What can we expect in terms of car tuning? Many arcade players can't be bothered with that but some fans are going to thrive on it?

Jesse: It's something that our fan base really looks forward to, and you get performance tuning in a deeper and far more complex way than we've ever done with NFS, thanks to the enthusiasm of SMS. So not only is their engine pushing times of day but its also pushing weather effects which then affect the surface conditions, requiring that you use a bit more strategy in things like tyres, pressure, aero, down force, suspension and all around general tunes on your car. While we understand that this is a simulation fan's big interest, we also understand about accessibility; I'm an example of someone who's an arcade racer, and we are giving somebody who wouldn't normally care about the pressure in their tyres the ability to just say "I need a different set-up and here's the button, click to get it". So there's a spectrum of accessibility options that we're bringing for much deeper and more comprehensive.

Kikizo: You mentioned weather conditions, does weather change in real-time? Also taking into account leader boards, will you have leader boards that show assists, and what weather conditions the lap was raced in?

Jesse: Keep in mind there are weather effects that affect surface conditions, dynamic weather is not one of the things we are shooting for, and again that's a compromise point. It's more important to a racing game that the track condition is the most significant piece, not necessarily the rain or modelling the windshield wipers or how fast you have them on, that's much more of a real life issue in driving that we are not trying to convey in the name of fun. So as far as the physical attributes that affect timing and affect performance of vehicles on one player versus another, it's an interesting thought and it goes towards our tearing and our classification systems for our online multi-player. So I imagine we are always looking at a way to make our multi-player online equal, and make sure people understand who they are racing against and what the characteristics of that racer are. There will be some pretty unique attributes to our career play this year that will expose a lot of those elements like never before, but as to how leader boards account for that stuff remains to be seen. Keep in mind that's a default staple of NFS you know, the leader boards, the competitions the weekly and daily updates is being streamed real-time on nfs.com, as well as in-game, as well as XML threads which are being picked up in numerous sites.

Kikizo: You're going to have a wide range of cars, what cars can we expect to see?

Jesse: This is definitely routed in professional racing and then there's a broad spectrum of cars that NFS has always been famous for, certainly we're not exposing the exact number of names of the cars. You can find a bunch online, today we're racing the Zonda, yesterday were racing the McLaren F1. There's a ton of licensing woes that go on throughout development with these manufactures and sometimes we get the 09 right or 07 rights, its still very odd to me how that stuff is formulated, I still don't know how it all works. It's a tough one and the truth is that we have some really unique offerings, recently we showed the Skyline 2000 HT which is the very first from Datsun. It's a little boxy car that's such a cult classic in Japan, the interior is a big plastic wheel with a metal horn strap across the inside, old rolling handles and an AM radio in the dash. That's kind of a first for NFS, going back we've always had muscle cars, always classified them as American versus European super cars, but this year we have classic era Nissan's and Datsun's and beyond that what we get is many F1 style tracks, so you can expect to see some very exciting announcements. There's functioning pit stops too, and while in today the pits tend to be functional but not really purposeful, you'll certainly see some game modes potentially being announced which take advantage of that element of racing.

Kikizo: Cheating is one thing that's a big concern to us, grass cuts, wall rides, glitch shifting, those sorts of elements?

Jesse: It's a gameplay balancing issue that we're currently doing, you see some cues for cutting tracks and losing time, we certainly have to balance that stuff. Wall riding counter measures for online multi-player is always something we're exploring, we're exposing those exploits and producing counter measures - you've seen disqualification for going the wrong way in the race today.

Kikizo: Well Jesse thanks for sparing the time today, I'm sure the racing fans out there will enjoy having this insight into yourself and NFS Shift.

Alan Boiston is a regular Kikizo contributor and editor of soon-to-be-relaunched VVV Gamer, the competitive racing game and racing enthusiast site. You can read further, detailed hands-on impressions of his time with NFS Shift on VVV, as well as his 'Editor's Blog' follow up to this interview, which discusses his thoughts on the points discussed and what Jesse's answers might mean for the end product. You can check out Edwin's previous impressions of the game here.

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