As an MMO racing game with a free-to-play component, the expectations for Need for Speed World at launch might not be the same as they would be for a typical Need for Speed game. And that's very fortunate for Electronic Arts and developer EA Black Box, because as it stands, NFSW hardly feels like a complete game. With only three basic game modes, there just doesn't feel like there's all that much to do in NFSW. NFSW does away with all of the story elements of recent games in the series -- a move that I'm all for, as story is often the weakest aspect of any racing game. Instead, you grind through either race events (online or against the computer) or try to escape from the cops (Pursuit mode). Either way, you earn money, used to buy new cars or upgrade your existing ones, and Reputation (experience) that allows you to level up and access better cars and more race events. That basic setup works just fine, but there's simply far too little variety both in the types of racing events and the setting for those races.
With races, you have two options: Circuit races and point-to-point
Sprint races. That's it. Two modes that play virtually the same without
any interesting deviations. What happened to the many other modes we
used to see in NFS games like drag races, Knockout, Checkpoint,
Drifting, and Speedtrap? And over the past week, patches have already
been released to tone down the amount of Reputation you earn from both
races and Pursuit to the point where it's going to take an incredibly
long time to ever reach the game's higher levels. That means grinding --
lots and lots of grinding -- on the same selection of races (many of
which take place in the same general areas) over and over with little to
mix up the action.
That problem is compounded by the difficulty in even finding a multiplayer race. Race events are scattered throughout the world, and
by driving to an event (or accessing it via your map), you can opt to
join a single-player race, a private online match, or join an online
multiplayer queue for that race. If you want to play online and don't
have a group together, you can only join the matchmaking queue for a
single event at a time -- there's no way to opt to join any available race. The result: long waits to get into a race. On more than
one occasion, I found myself waiting 3-5 minutes to get into a match
with just one other player, which simply isn't a fun way to play the
game. It is, however, preferable to the times when I waited more than 10
minutes and still couldn't find a match. In order to increase my odds
of finding other players, I found myself sticking with the earlier races
that free-to-play players are limited to.
And forget about balance between players. Trying to ensure that
players are using similar cars or are of similar a skill level would
make things take even longer, so it's probably for the best that the
game doesn't try, though it would be nice if you could change
cars while in the lobby to better match up against the competition.
But the lack of event types is hardly the only area of the game
that feels incomplete. NFSW features a big open-world to explore, but
it's largely just the cities from Most Wanted and Carbon slapped together. Unlike fellow open-world racer Burnout Paradise, NFSW
offers absolutely no reason whatsoever to explore. There are no
billboards to smash, hidden locations to find, or super jumps to
conquer. There's just a largely static world that feels like it's there
only to let you drive by other players and to have somewhere to drive
while in Pursuit mode.
