June 17, 2004 - At Electronic Arts' Redwood City, Ca. headquarters today, the world's biggest publisher gave a select group of journalists the first worldwide look at the sequel to the world's best selling game in 2003. Need for Speed: Underground 2 is, as Executive Producer Chuck Osieja says, "a true sequel, not just a 1.5 upgrade," giving gamers a wide-open world that's five times the size of the previous game, with a huge new assortment of races styles, challenges, licensed cars, the ability to modify your car's engine, and finally, for Xbox, PS2 and PC owners, the chance to race online. Need for Speed: Underground 2, which EA's Black Box studio started developing in July 2003, is slated for release in North America in November for Xbox, PS2, PC and GameCube.
In the demo, the team's developers went straight to the point. Using streaming technology to create a massive living, breathing city (like Rockstar's Midnight Club series), NFSU2 is a massive, five-neighborhood metropolis, offering a huge amount of exploration to the tune of 200 km of cityscape to drive through (as opposed to the 40 km for NFSU).
The pre-alpha PS2 build we saw, but did not play, follows up last year's stunning 3 million unit-selling NFSU by giving hardcore and casual gamers a lot to dig into. In the demo Osieja showed us how you can drive into any area of the game, starting from the southern-most tip of the city and flooring your ride across the environment in realtime to the distant mountain on the far end, without load times or cutscenes. Using a map system in the bottom left-hand side, players can determine which drivable sections are available as the street sections appear in gray. A huge network of freeways connects the city, enabling players to drive along streets or navigate via the "spaghetti"-like network.
Like NFSU, Black Box's sequel plays at nighttime, and the streets are indeed wet. Despite several criticisms about all the courses being dark wet streets in the previous game, Osieja defended the decision, explaining that the race culture only takes place at night, and they want to be as authentic as possible. The team also has listened very carefully to focus tests and fans of the series. In response, the courses are now designed with drunk bumps, or as Osieja called them, cat eyes (the little reflective bumps in the center lane of a freeway designed to help direct cars drive in their lane) that shine as your headlights hit them. Cat Eyes also appear on the guard rails, and both create a much better navigational sensibility.
The open street racing world will also take place over the course of the night, so players can see the sky starting out rather light at dusk, remaining dark most of the night, and growing lighter at dawn. Black Box is implementing a weather system that delivers light, medium, and hard rains, and various speeds of wind. Like real life, the city might be raining in one section, while remaining dry in another, so that as drivers cruise from one section to another, they'll experience an organic, dynamic change in the weather.
But the game's main goal is to uncover its "Underground Tuner Culture." Players commence with enough cash to buy a rather low budged ride, and as they cruise the huge cityscape, they find races in which to enter. From the video you can see there are distinct sections ranging from the downtown, the industrial, the suburbs, the entertainment/commercial sections, and the upland section, or the rather inviting snaking mountainous hills, clearly preparing you for heavy drift races. All of the modes from the previous game have returned, so players can enter into career mode, quick race, drag racing, drift races and the like, but they're structured in a different, non-linear way.
Again, players find races to enter by exploring the city, and by using a PDA message system. The PDA will tell you of an upcoming race using the on-screen system, or you can just cruise. You might find an opponent to race by simply driving the streets. The streets are filled with regular traffic cars and tuner vehicles. If you can stick with a tuner car for long enough, he'll challenge you to race, whereby the winner must get ahead of the other by more than 300 meters. EA explained this is quite a challenge, citing that some of the testers have raced in these so-called "OutRun Challenges" for more than 20 minutes per race. The OutRun Challenges, however, aren't mandatory, echoing the game's open-structure theme. Or you might find a glowing purple ring, indicating a place to start a different kid of race.
With the open city structure, EA is naturally implementing adventure-style elements. Just like with the massive opportunities found in the Grand Theft Auto series, the huge cityscape of NFSU2 offers players the chance to seek out hidden shops. Twenty purchase shops litter the currently unnamed city (they're still working on the name), enabling players to buy new parts that range from visual add-ons such as fenders, hoods, windows, rims, wheels and the like, as well as the new ability to tune their engines. For the simpler casual players, they can simply buy an entire kit, automatically changing their car, or they go in and place each part, specializing their vehicle to their liking. There are 20-plus parts to enhance, tweak, upgrade, and modify.
The performance parts will indeed enhance the driving experience of your car. By finding all of the 10-plus shops, players will then be able to unlock all of the cars within the game. EA wouldn't speak about the kinds of licensed cars it's got in this year's model, but you can probably expect to see all of the tuner-style cars from last year's edition, plus EA confirmed it would add a broader range of cars to fill out your garage.
The racing bits are interesting. The same sense of speed and the great looks from the previous game have been retained, even though the pre-alpha game showed some hiccups and streaming snags (which we expect EA to iron out over the next four months). The cars deliver an excellent sense of viscerally powerful speed, while also filling your ears with real car engine sounds. This year players can actually earn style points and attribute them in realtime to their car as they race. EA showed us how finding shortcuts, and pulling off powerslides, drifts and the like earned the racer points which could then be instantly transformed into NOS, for speed boosting.
The races themselves might take place in a distinct neighborhood, but they also might cross over into another section of a neighborhood as well. In a move that ought to really blow away dedicated racers, there are more than 150 races in the game this year. Also, if you tend to be more of a straight circuit racing fan, you don't have to enter all the races to beat the game. Or, if you happen to dislike drifting, you aren't required to enter those races to progress.
Lastly, all versions but the GameCube version will feature online play (yes, that means it's on Xbox Live). EA is withholding the details for now, but it's surely planning to deliver these toward the middle of summer (at Camp EA). But you can expect to be able to bring your customized, stylized vehicle online and race against others drivers for sure. Though EA wouldn't confirm it, I suspect drag races will play a big part in the online functionality, while EA is probably going to highlight specific races from its new city for online racing. EA also would not confirm whether cross-platform racing was possible, as it was in last year's cross PC-PS2 versions.
In short, EA's Need for Speed Underground 2 proves to be one of the most ambitious games of the 2004, taking the organic, living, breathing open-city approach that made Grand Theft Auto the biggest game of 2001 and 2002, and giving it a Need For Speed look, feel, and style. The game is genuinely impressive, and now what we really want to do is stop talking about it, and play it all night. Everything -- the sense of speed, the car modification, the huge, open environments, and the luscious Brooke Burke, who plays a part as a navigating sort of mentor -- is in place, and it all looks extremely good. You might have heard us saying this about other good games, but it's hard to say it any other way. We simply cannot wait to play Need for Speed Underground 2.
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