14 DAY TRIAL // For quite some time people have mistaken Electronic Arts' Need For Speed franchise with the whole genre of racing games. The historical series has entertained a lot of racers with its adrenaline-filled competitions, highly detailed cars and new gameplay elements, such as tuning, but, sadly, with the last few titles, it has disappointed in terms of sales.
However, all of that is about to change, as EA announced some time ago that we would see four new titles that would bear the Need For Speed brand this year. Three of them will arrive from various studios under the EA corporate umbrella and the fourth and most mysterious one will arrive from the EA Black Box studio, which has been handling the NFS series for quite some time.
We've recently seen some screenshots of the NFS Shift title, which aims to be one of the most realistic racing simulators out there, and now the EA team is treating us to a shot of the upcoming free-to-play online title NFS World Online. The picture shows a portion of the city found in the Most Wanted version, as the future title will have that city and the one from the NFS Carbon title as its home. The producer of the game, Scott Henshaw, says that it will be completely customizable and players will be able to move all of the gadgets around, or even on a different screen entirely.
“Key to the concept of NFS World Online is the user interface which has been built from the ground up to take advantage of the PC architecture. Instead of a traditional console view of a game, we’re using a user-selectable gadget interface designed specifically for the PC. The system allows the gamer to choose which components of the interface they want to add to their game. The gadgets are really flexible and offer a wide range of display options: docked/undocked, floating in the game window or just sitting outside of the game space. A lot of gamers now have more than one monitor so you could keep the game window entirely clean and then have all the gadgets sit in the other monitor. We think it’s about time PC gamers had games that allowed them to arrange their information their way.”
Also, the first trailer of the game has been posted on YouTube, showing that graphics similar to NFS Most Wanted and Carbon will be used, and guaranteeing that players with a less-than-high-end configuration will still be able to jump in and race in the game. All in all, a lot of players will surely be interested in it, and we will keep you posted on new details as soon as they are announced.