Unless there’s a clear and obvious reason for it, requirements to be online at all times when playing a game rarely go down well. The upcoming Need for Speed reboot will need you to be always online.
While the reasons for this aren’t entirely clear, the NfS twitter account did at the very least say that “the benefits are nice.” This at the very least suggests that online play is integral to direction in which Ghost Games want to take the game, and they cite “more variety and a more rewarding experience with friends,” though we’ll have to wait until E3 at least to see what it is exactly that they have planned.
@DeanRheims NFS will require an online connection, but the benefits are nice. More variety and a more rewarding experience with friends.
— Need for Speed (@NeedforSpeed) May 28, 2015
Elsewhere, an Xbox Game Store listing pegged the game down for a release on 3rd November, which was spotted by endlessly observant Reddit users before hastily being pulled. Even if that particular date is incorrect, the game is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC later this year.
Source: Twitter, Reddit, via Videogamer
Light Liguria
Its probably going to piss off alot of a lot of people that pre-ordered… they never learn from always online as with the disaster of Diablo 3 and Simcity.
freezebug2
Yeah, they’ve certainly lost a sale here with this announcement after many years of loyalty to the brand good and bad. The last NFS was semi-always online and that grated but to go the whole hog and require a permanent online hook has killed it for me.
Hope that this isn’t going to be the trend, the thought of going back to playing board games with the family…….:P
Forrest_01
So I know that this is from Friday & I am a bit late to the punch, but hey. I was off work on Friday – Not gonna apologise for that! :)
Anyway, bad, bad idea to have an always online game. It was bad enough in Rivals where the world carried on around you even if you did ‘pause’ (pausing did nothing but bring up a menu) & where you would go for a quick pee & come back to find yourself being rammed off of a cliff by another user or arrested by the aggressive AI, but this sounds even worse.
Aside from the pausing issue, there is also the fact that an always online game cannot be played during periods of downtime, either due to the PSN or your ISP. Any game that cannot be played at all at certain times should be approached with a lot of caution. Destiny is a pain in the rectum for this, but there is at least some purpose to why it is built that way. One game in my collection being unplayable I can forgive (I would prefer not, but still) – When it starts becoming that my entire collection cannot be played due to PSN issues or ISP issues (i.e. those things that are completely out of my control), that is not good form.
Also, I can actually see no reason for this to be the case with this game – Why do you need to constantly be around other player controlled drivers? Why can’t it be a choice to either be surrounded by AI & be offline, or choose to dive into a multiplayer driven world? As others have mentioned, Burnout got this right. Why can’t others ape that (i.e. a single player that can be played entirely offline, but the option to jump seamlessly into multplayer pretty much whenever you feel like & it just works)?
I have bought a lot of NFS games in the past. This might just be one I choose to miss.