BrokenDesign
Shared on Thu, 10/05/2006 - 10:52Last night I was all wiggly excited to download the demo of Need for Speed Carbon off of the Xbox Live Marketplace, as I'm a huge NFS fan. Except for Porsche Unleashed. And Underground was... ok. Underground 2 was lots better. But I digress. The demo stacks up to just over 1GB in size, so expect a lengthy wait if you're downloading during peak hours. I think my download took 3.5 hours total, and it was a long wait.
In this initial experience, and from online previews, Carbon seems to be a fusion of the latest NFS franchises, Underground and Most Wanted, however closer to Underground, mostly bringing the police pursuits from Most Wanted. Something "new" that I'm pretty excited about is borrowing from the older Hot Pursuit series, allowing the player to assume the role of the cop to take down renegade racers. Currently I don't know if this is a feature in the single play, however a developer interview video on Xboxyde.com / GameTrailers.com show that it's a feature in online racing, which is AWESOME. For as great as Most Wanted was for bringing back police pursuits (which I find to make the NFS games much more enjoyable than those without cops), there was no option for the player to take on the mantle of the Fuzz.
Though there's nothing wrong with returning to the fundamentals of Underground, I am sad to see the Most Wanted franchise fall by the wayside. To me, Most Wanted has the best design style, the most edge, the most fun gameplay mechanics and story mechanics (let's just forget about the not so great acting). Granted, it's hard to speak about the design of Carbon since I've only seen a handful of stuff, but again it seems to be a cross between Underground and Most Wanted. There's a trendy tech thing going on with LCD 'X's all over, and has a graffiti-esque blotch here and there, such as the effect behind the logotype on the front cover of the standard edition. It's kinda cool, but the straight up graffiti in Most Wanted was awesome and made for a very nice visual experience in the menus of the game. A lot of people complained about the sepia-toned, gentle blurred appearance of Most Wanted, but I thought it was pretty cool, it really fit the mood of the game and was fresh and different. The glitz and glam and neon of Underground is overrated to me. In fact, I really didn't care much for Underground 1 because I couldn't tell what the hell was going on or where the track was going because of the intensity of the neon everywhere. Thankfully, the neon isn't overbearing in Carbon.
The control is the same as any other NFS game with the same fairly sluggish controls. I wasn't terribly pleased with it, each time a new game is release I have this blind hope that they'll tighten the controls, but it must be considered a staple of the series because it doesn't look like it will change anytime soon, if at all. So far I've only raced an Exotic car, so I can't speak for how the Muscle or Tuner cars handle and perform, but the Exotic drives really well, just like you've come to expect from such cars in the series. EA has brought in some extra effects to help enhance the sense of speed in the game through speed lines toward the screen edges, blurring and slight screen shaking. It does make it appear as though you're going faster than you've seemed to go in past titles, but not by a whole lot. It's a nice addition though.
There are 3 game modes in the demo, meant to showcase the key features of Carbon over other past NFS titles. First up is the standard fare circuit race that was good fun, nice and easy track to help you get accustomed to the controls and handling of your vehicle. There's a new menu to call on members of your crew to help you out in a race, but I didn't use them. Felt I was doing well enough that there wasn't much point, but in hindsight it would've been helpful for review purposes. Maybe I'll make an amendment edit later on or an amending second post to elaborate. Till then you'll just have to wonder. Second game type is the return of Drift events from the Underground series. At first this event really bugged me, the drifting seemed excessive and completely over the top (and I enjoy Ridge Racer), but after clarification from CodeMonkey that drift events in RL are just like this, with the road made to be very slick so that cars slide all over the place it seemed like it fit alright. Mostly I was initially bugged about the fact that I was all over the road in the drift mode but couldn't make my car drift in the slightest in a race event. That still kinda irks me, I wish I could do something of a drift through a corner just because in a racing game that's how I get down, but I'll adjust. Once the full game comes out I'm sure there will be a good deal of tuning available for your cars and I can get my drifting. The last game mode is the new Canyon Races that have been fairly heavily promoted about the game. This is a new and fun game type that puts a sense of danger into the game so it's not just a blitz to the end, you actually have to make sure you drive smart, lest you drive through a guard rail, over the edge, and likely to your death. Till you restart the race. Another very interesting fact about this game type is that it's not your typical race. There are 2 parts to it, first you have a rolling start behind your single rival and the point is to overtake them by the end of the race. Seems easy enough, but it's not at all. In the second round you have a rolling start once again, but you are in the lead and you have to keep the rival from passing you. Also, if you get far enough ahead, the race is over and you win. Of course, inversely, when you're tailing your opponent you don't want to fall too far behind or you're out.
Playing somewhat off of the blacklist concept from Most Wanted comes the crews feature in Carbon. This isn't explored in great detail in the demo, but instead of there being a blacklist that you climb up to gain "control" of the city, the map is broken up into segments, each one controlled by a different crew. Once you form your crew, the idea is to take over other people's plots of the city until you have the whole thing all to your greedy self. Crew members join you in races and can offer you assistance by blocking those behind you, trying to hold onto 1st while you try to hold the rivals back, etc. Seems like an interesting concept, but I'm not sure if I'll use it, much like I didn't in the demo. For one thing, I like to win and I like to win without help of the computer. For another thing, I might just be too jaded by games such as Unreal Tournament 2004 where, in Onslaught, your AI teammates are completely retarded and utterly worthless. Maybe I'll give Carbon's crew members a try. Online crews would be much better, calling on the aid of a human teammate against human opponents will likely have a much more level playing field.
Speaking of online play, I touched on this before but one new online game type is based off of the standard knockout races. If you're in last place when a lap is completed you still get knocked out, but the twist in Carbon is that you become a cop and you get to continue on in the race trying to take down other people. It's a very interesting concept, hopefully it plays very well. Carbon will support 8 people in a single race online, so that will be a nice change over the standard 4. Should make for more frantic races and hopefully some with a lot of place-changing and furious competition.
Definitely the most innovative (at least I think, maybe there's the same feature in another game that I just haven't played or seen anything about) element to Carbon is the new Autosculpt system. This does for cars what games like Oblivion and Saints Row do for human creation by taking stock body kits and vinyl designs and giving the user the ability to completely customize them to make a car their very own in every way. Each body part has a set number of zones that can be altered on a scale of 0-100%. This doesn't give full 360 degree customization, but I think that it's better this way so that people don't create really bizarre cars that look tremendously terrible with body sections sticking out in ways kit creators would never do in a million years as a sick joke. The vinyls are vector-based, so they scale very well and without quality degradation, and can be rotated and repositioned to make a vinyl kit look completely different than it started as. Returning from Underground 2 is the ability to add multiple vinyl kits to your car, something sorely missed from Most Wanted. I can tell that this feature is going to really push the envelope for the future of games that have an emphasis on auto customization and that a 10ish hour game is going to become a much bigger investment when people everywhere put hours upon hours into customizing their car to be just perfect for when they show it off online. This will be especially true if they have the same number of body and vinyl kits as Underground 2 had, if not more. That took a fair amount of time to customize without part customization.
All in all, Carbon looks like it's going to be a good solid game and I'm looking forward to it. Need for Speed Carbon drops November 1st everywhere, I'll be purchasing the special edition off TechDiversions.com and I encourage everyone else who's interested in buying it to do the same. I'll see you online.
In this initial experience, and from online previews, Carbon seems to be a fusion of the latest NFS franchises, Underground and Most Wanted, however closer to Underground, mostly bringing the police pursuits from Most Wanted. Something "new" that I'm pretty excited about is borrowing from the older Hot Pursuit series, allowing the player to assume the role of the cop to take down renegade racers. Currently I don't know if this is a feature in the single play, however a developer interview video on Xboxyde.com / GameTrailers.com show that it's a feature in online racing, which is AWESOME. For as great as Most Wanted was for bringing back police pursuits (which I find to make the NFS games much more enjoyable than those without cops), there was no option for the player to take on the mantle of the Fuzz.
Though there's nothing wrong with returning to the fundamentals of Underground, I am sad to see the Most Wanted franchise fall by the wayside. To me, Most Wanted has the best design style, the most edge, the most fun gameplay mechanics and story mechanics (let's just forget about the not so great acting). Granted, it's hard to speak about the design of Carbon since I've only seen a handful of stuff, but again it seems to be a cross between Underground and Most Wanted. There's a trendy tech thing going on with LCD 'X's all over, and has a graffiti-esque blotch here and there, such as the effect behind the logotype on the front cover of the standard edition. It's kinda cool, but the straight up graffiti in Most Wanted was awesome and made for a very nice visual experience in the menus of the game. A lot of people complained about the sepia-toned, gentle blurred appearance of Most Wanted, but I thought it was pretty cool, it really fit the mood of the game and was fresh and different. The glitz and glam and neon of Underground is overrated to me. In fact, I really didn't care much for Underground 1 because I couldn't tell what the hell was going on or where the track was going because of the intensity of the neon everywhere. Thankfully, the neon isn't overbearing in Carbon.
The control is the same as any other NFS game with the same fairly sluggish controls. I wasn't terribly pleased with it, each time a new game is release I have this blind hope that they'll tighten the controls, but it must be considered a staple of the series because it doesn't look like it will change anytime soon, if at all. So far I've only raced an Exotic car, so I can't speak for how the Muscle or Tuner cars handle and perform, but the Exotic drives really well, just like you've come to expect from such cars in the series. EA has brought in some extra effects to help enhance the sense of speed in the game through speed lines toward the screen edges, blurring and slight screen shaking. It does make it appear as though you're going faster than you've seemed to go in past titles, but not by a whole lot. It's a nice addition though.
There are 3 game modes in the demo, meant to showcase the key features of Carbon over other past NFS titles. First up is the standard fare circuit race that was good fun, nice and easy track to help you get accustomed to the controls and handling of your vehicle. There's a new menu to call on members of your crew to help you out in a race, but I didn't use them. Felt I was doing well enough that there wasn't much point, but in hindsight it would've been helpful for review purposes. Maybe I'll make an amendment edit later on or an amending second post to elaborate. Till then you'll just have to wonder. Second game type is the return of Drift events from the Underground series. At first this event really bugged me, the drifting seemed excessive and completely over the top (and I enjoy Ridge Racer), but after clarification from CodeMonkey that drift events in RL are just like this, with the road made to be very slick so that cars slide all over the place it seemed like it fit alright. Mostly I was initially bugged about the fact that I was all over the road in the drift mode but couldn't make my car drift in the slightest in a race event. That still kinda irks me, I wish I could do something of a drift through a corner just because in a racing game that's how I get down, but I'll adjust. Once the full game comes out I'm sure there will be a good deal of tuning available for your cars and I can get my drifting. The last game mode is the new Canyon Races that have been fairly heavily promoted about the game. This is a new and fun game type that puts a sense of danger into the game so it's not just a blitz to the end, you actually have to make sure you drive smart, lest you drive through a guard rail, over the edge, and likely to your death. Till you restart the race. Another very interesting fact about this game type is that it's not your typical race. There are 2 parts to it, first you have a rolling start behind your single rival and the point is to overtake them by the end of the race. Seems easy enough, but it's not at all. In the second round you have a rolling start once again, but you are in the lead and you have to keep the rival from passing you. Also, if you get far enough ahead, the race is over and you win. Of course, inversely, when you're tailing your opponent you don't want to fall too far behind or you're out.
Playing somewhat off of the blacklist concept from Most Wanted comes the crews feature in Carbon. This isn't explored in great detail in the demo, but instead of there being a blacklist that you climb up to gain "control" of the city, the map is broken up into segments, each one controlled by a different crew. Once you form your crew, the idea is to take over other people's plots of the city until you have the whole thing all to your greedy self. Crew members join you in races and can offer you assistance by blocking those behind you, trying to hold onto 1st while you try to hold the rivals back, etc. Seems like an interesting concept, but I'm not sure if I'll use it, much like I didn't in the demo. For one thing, I like to win and I like to win without help of the computer. For another thing, I might just be too jaded by games such as Unreal Tournament 2004 where, in Onslaught, your AI teammates are completely retarded and utterly worthless. Maybe I'll give Carbon's crew members a try. Online crews would be much better, calling on the aid of a human teammate against human opponents will likely have a much more level playing field.
Speaking of online play, I touched on this before but one new online game type is based off of the standard knockout races. If you're in last place when a lap is completed you still get knocked out, but the twist in Carbon is that you become a cop and you get to continue on in the race trying to take down other people. It's a very interesting concept, hopefully it plays very well. Carbon will support 8 people in a single race online, so that will be a nice change over the standard 4. Should make for more frantic races and hopefully some with a lot of place-changing and furious competition.
Definitely the most innovative (at least I think, maybe there's the same feature in another game that I just haven't played or seen anything about) element to Carbon is the new Autosculpt system. This does for cars what games like Oblivion and Saints Row do for human creation by taking stock body kits and vinyl designs and giving the user the ability to completely customize them to make a car their very own in every way. Each body part has a set number of zones that can be altered on a scale of 0-100%. This doesn't give full 360 degree customization, but I think that it's better this way so that people don't create really bizarre cars that look tremendously terrible with body sections sticking out in ways kit creators would never do in a million years as a sick joke. The vinyls are vector-based, so they scale very well and without quality degradation, and can be rotated and repositioned to make a vinyl kit look completely different than it started as. Returning from Underground 2 is the ability to add multiple vinyl kits to your car, something sorely missed from Most Wanted. I can tell that this feature is going to really push the envelope for the future of games that have an emphasis on auto customization and that a 10ish hour game is going to become a much bigger investment when people everywhere put hours upon hours into customizing their car to be just perfect for when they show it off online. This will be especially true if they have the same number of body and vinyl kits as Underground 2 had, if not more. That took a fair amount of time to customize without part customization.
All in all, Carbon looks like it's going to be a good solid game and I'm looking forward to it. Need for Speed Carbon drops November 1st everywhere, I'll be purchasing the special edition off TechDiversions.com and I encourage everyone else who's interested in buying it to do the same. I'll see you online.
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