Electronic Arts has a service called EA Access available on the Xbox One. For a monthly or annual fee, you’re granted early access to EA games for ten hours the weekend prior to release, a discount on digital EA purchases from full games to DLC to microtransactions, and “free” access to the EA Vault. This means you can download and play a number of EA games with no restriction as long as you maintain your EA Access subscription. For me, this service makes sense because I play a lot of EA games. I had planned for this piece to be a review or some early impressions of today’s release Need for Speed. Instead, I spent a few hours with the game over the weekend and came to the conclusion that we may have reached a point where modern driving games just aren’t for me.
In my two or so hours with Need For Speed, I came to the conclusion that I was going to invoke Wolpaw’s Law to say definitively that Need for Speed isn’t a very good game. Wolpaw’s Law was coined by former game reviewer and current game writer at Valve and has two main components: an amazing ending to a bad game doesn’t redeem everything that came before it, and if a reviewer played a terrible game to completion instead of stopping after realizing it was terrible, the review wouldn’t be different. In my short time with the game, I was disconnected from the game and dumped to the main menu three times and couldn’t adjust the brightness to account for the fact that the game is almost completely at night. The game never pauses while in menus, which makes navigating a pain in the ass and actively encourages you to teleport to places in an open world driving game instead of driving through the open world. The game has a few things going for it, such as terrible but occasionally terribly entertaining FMV sequences, but those tell a milquetoast story focused on characters who remind me of the people I spent 4 years at a public university trying to avoid standing next to at a party.
Modern games in popular genres have a control language that transcends individual titles and makes most games accessible to people who have a passing familiarity with that genre. Ever since Call of Duty 4, modern shooters can be broken down into their most base mechanics as “left trigger to aim, right trigger to shoot.” Driving games have a similar shorthand; left trigger to break, right trigger to go really fast, probably a button press for an emergency brake and maybe another for a some kind of boost mechanic. Need for Speed is no different, but where I expected it to set itself apart was in some streamlined handling customization options. While games like the Forza series or Gran Turismo cater to car fetishists who want micro-levels of control over a car’s setup, I don’t know what a read differential is nor do I care to know. Need for Speed offers a simple Drift/Grip bar that allows you to tune your ride for more drifting or a tighter grip on the road, and some submenus if you want to want to go into a little more detail. I was pretty sure I favored a grippier set-up and completed four or five of the early races. Then came trouble.
MY next event was a drift competition. I failed miserably, probably because my car was set up with the handling slider set almost all the way to “Grip.” I went back to my garage, changed it to total Drift, and replayed the mission. My goal was to finish in first or second place in this timed competition. I finished 5th out of 6 competitors. I was beaten by one AI racer who I had accidentally forced off the course and who I saw spinning her tires while driving into a wall trying to rejoin the course on two subsequent laps. Two. Subsequent. Laps. I tried four or five more times, and eventually improved to where I was consistently finishing third…and well behind 2nd place by scores like 12,000 points to 2500. I came to the conclusion I hadn’t improved, but the rubberbanding AI had simply backed off all the other competitors and told me to just perform at a basic level of competency for someone who had held a controller and played a racing game in the last twenty years. I failed.
I HAVE played racing games before. I loved Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit and Need for Speed: High Stakes for the original Playstation. The Xbox 360 version of Hot Pursuit was a damn fun cops and robbers racing game with a fun open world set-up that I probably love just as much for introducing me to Lupe Fiasco. And I played a TON of Burnout Paradise for the Playstation 3, bought it super cheap on a Steam sale for PC and plan on it being the test case for my Steam controller and living room PC this week AND bought it for the Xbox 360 this year based on just the rumor that it would be playable on the Xbox One when backwards compatibility is rolled out in November.
If I’m being honest with myself, I have a darker history with racing games than I want to admit. While I’ve gotten into F1 racing in recent years, the games from Codemasters remain inscrutable to me. I’m barely able to pass the tutorial phase where you’re assigned to a real-world F1 racing team for career mode, and usually end up with perennial back markers like Marussia or Force India. I’m almost entirely unable to navigate a turn of any serious degree, and this carries over to the aforementioned Forza series, where I play with most assists turned on. Hell, I even have most assists turned on when playing the more forgiving, less simulation focused Forza Horizon series. And I can feel the car slowing down when I need it to go faster, because if it didn’t try to discourage me from cutting a small corner on a roundabout, it would also let me drive headfirst into a turn at speed with such force that it’s wonder my driver avatar isn’t dead from a heart attack before his head would have gone through the windshield and into a wall.
There’s a thrill to the feeling of going faster than you should. I think that’s why I love Burnout Paradise; it gives me that feeling married with the sense that I’m doing so while staying in control. I will never get the chance to pilot a multi-million dollar F1 car, but I wish I could feel like I knew what I was doing when chasing that feeling with a game controller. Something about the language and execution of racing games has escaped me. Thanks to EA Access, I was able to discover this before spending another $60 to be reminded of it again. At least I got to see some first person FMV fist-bumps.
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