The announced Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit remaster seems like an...okay...idea

I really liked NFS:HP when it came out in 2010. It was the best Need for Speed game in a long time, and while Most Wanted in 2012 was almost as good the series really hasn't reached the same heights since.

So it makes sense that EA is releasing a remaster of this next month. The NFS series is on hard times and attempts to revive it haven't been successful so why not just put one of the good ones out again and keep interest up while planning to relaunch the series yet again on the next generation of consoles?

But also...it's 10 years later and it's depressing that the arcade racing genre just hasn't evolved in a decade. Forza Horizon has put out some great games in the meantime, but those aren't true arcade racers and everything else seems to be either treading water or even moving backwards.

It will be good to be able to revisit this game and especially its incredible multiplayer (with cross play now) but I'd be happier if EA spent some time looking at what made this game and Most Wanted so good and try to make a new game with those principles that evolves the series, rather than just thrashing around in seemingly random directions with the new titles and reselling us the old ones.

Watching some gameplay I was instantly suprised how playing as a cop that is viciously ramming a car into walls until it's ruined husk does about 10 summersaults in the air has a whole different connotation in 2020. Watching the ruined "racer" car to the side and hearing the deadpan dispatch announce "suspect apprehended" certainly doesn't play too well.

As for the game itself? I dunno why bother remaking this since NFS has been literally building on this exact formula for years and it hasn't been getting any better. I'm not sure what the original Hot Pursuit has to offer that titles like NFS Rivals haven't done better. Even the graphics don't look particularly sharp for a remaster. Seems like an overall miss on all fronts.

They're spinning their wheels (Yeah, that's intended). What they need is a Burnout Paradise 2.

I don't see much enhancement in the remaster, besides the frame rate obviously now the console versions will run at 60fps which is great, but the game is still incredible and i've always wanted to play through it again.
I don't own it on PC, they took the original version off sale on Steam because of this so... i don't really have an option anymore :P.
This and Afterburner Climax might be the only games i've played where i've cared about leaderboards, specifically for beating friends times, i want to see if i can get them involved again and relive old memories :P.

Should have been NFS Underground instead.

@shindig: They need an evolution of the formula. Burnout Paradise was a long time ago. The things it did then are no longer fresh or revolutionary. Forza Horizon is effectively the new Burnout Paradise but it unfortunately is saddled with licensed vehicles and is still leaning too far into simulation rather than arcade racing. Make a Horizon game with all the great social features but let me handbreak drift at 300mph around insane corners and let my Zaibatsu Speed Cruiser smash up into smitherens and now were talking.

@humanity: They're remastering this because A) it's cheap to do, B) there's a lot of positivity and nostalgia around it as a game in a series where people are generally unhappy with the the current state of things, and C) it actually does have something different from subsequent games in its focus on weapons and devices rather than pure racing.

I see what you're saying about the cop stuff, but since it's not violence against people (just cars) and the game isn't really pro cop (it splits evenly between racers and cops) I don't think that's going to play all that differently for most people. It's not like we're going to stop getting cop games.

@shindig: They are never going to make a new Burnout game. Never. It's what everyone wants but I think there's some EA internal politics about it not being "their" IP, and NFS being their true racer franchise.

They need to just make a game that plays like Burnout and call it Need for Speed. Nobody has any reverence for the Need for Speed brand at this point and they've made so many different types of games with that name that they should just make the game that's actually fun.

But you wouldn't be able to include real cars or probably microtransactions...

I'll double-dip. Though, I have to admit, it doesn't seem like ten years since this game dropped. This is the last Need for Speed that mattered. Shocking that the brand has stayed alive despite whiff after whiff.

At the time, this game's approach to asynchronous racing was really novel. And I recall the handling model feeling good for the time. It's from an era before the rise of Forza Horizon (that is, before the overt hybridization of simulation-level driving physics and arcade-style objective structure), and I'm curious to see how Hot Pursuit holds up.

I was cautiously excited for this, but after looking at some of these gameplay videos I'm honestly straining to see much difference between the 10 year old original and this remaster.

Is this one of these things where the general audience is like 'aww yea i liked that game so i gladly buy it again' and spending resources to polish the game up to modern standards doesn't increase the amount of sales to warrant the costs of doing so? Bummer.

@onemanarmyy: It's EA. They ain't going to bother polishing the game up.

Activision is the company that does full on remakes (such as with Crash, Tony Hawk, and the Modern Warfare campaigns.) EA just releases ports and calls them "remasters."

@bigsocrates: I'm not sure how you'd properly remaster this, it's still a beautiful game it's just receiving some small updates and upgrades, though cross play is a pretty big addition.
Maybe i don't want to pay £25 for that maybe i'll wait, but i'm not against it at all, making a great game available again for old and new audiences.

That multiplayer was top notch. It's right up there with Driver: San Francisco from that generation.

@isomeri: Yeah, wow. This is shocking.

Now, if you're comparing between the 360-era console version and the modern remaster, there's clearly an update to the framerate, the anti-aliasing, and the level of detail—particularly on long-distance environmental objects.

But the remaster and the original PC release look almost identical.

@cikame: Update some of the textures and assets, change the lighting engine, add more particle effects, maybe replace the car models with improved versions, I don't know, I'm not a developer or an artist.

I'm not even saying it looks "bad" per se or that this is a terrible product, I'm just saying it's really more of a port than a remaster. It's okay to port your old games to a new set of consoles, and to sell a new version on PC, I'm just a little tired of pointless marketing terms.

You could, of course, fully remake the game with new graphics and driving etc... Tony Hawk style but for a 10 year old game it doesn't necessarily make sense because graphics haven't changed THAT much in the last 10 years.

Just call it Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 10th Anniversary Edition! I guess that's what I want.

I was on board until I saw the actual "remaster."

That looks almost exactly the same. And the changes I do see don't feel "better," just "different." 60 FPS on console is nice, but I bought it on PC back in the day... so...?

This game ruled back on the 360, but I can't say I'm willing to pay $40 for it. I'll wait for the discount just like I did with Burnout Paradise remastered. These Criterion games just hit different. EA clearly knows their old games were the best, so why can't they figure out what to do with NFS now? It's baffling, but then again EA has been baffling for quite some time now.

@isomeri: I didn't see the logos at the bottom of the screen at first, and thought the old version was the remaster. Definitely not a hugely noticeable difference between the two. It's crazy how much graphics haven't advanced in great leaps and bounds in ten years. Felt very similarly about Burnout Paradise Remaster. However, both Burnout Paradise and Hot Pursuit were great games, so I'm glad people who may have missed out of them in the 360 generation have an easy way to grab them on newer hardware.

I was happy at first. Thinking this was the real Hot Pursuit and not the 2010 one. What point is there to remaster the 2010 one? There's barely any difference in the footage shown so far. This is a top tier cashgrab move.

@hero_swe: 2010's Hot Pursuit is the last game in the franchise that is kinda beloved and holds some good will, and they also have the source code in a usable way. If they wanted to remake 98's Hot Pursuit, they would have to spelunk among the piles of 8 inch disks, dusting off the one available reader and look for a haskell compiler to run in the only functioning PC with Win95 and 3dfx video card in the state.

At that point is probably easier to build a new game from the ground up.

@norm9: *underground 2

Wait, are you talking about Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit?

Loved that game back in the day. Many late summer nights spent in the fictional El Niño outrunning police.

I see what they're trying to do and Hot Pursuit (2010) was nice but it wasn't remaster nice. If you want a crowd pleaser with regards to driving and EA it's Burnout or NFS Underground (... maybe road rash but even that feels late now).

I'd prefer if EA went full Activision THPS on NFS Underground. Full remake of the first couple of games, fully bring back the old sound tracks, licence some new music that would fit, embrace car culture for what it was then but also show love to what it is now and the future...

If I could upgrade to the new version for $5 like I did with Burnout Paradise, sure. But, the old game basically runs on anything, supports 21:9, and I don't need 100 frames in every game, so... eh.

But as far as racing games as a whole goes, who do I have to talk to at Rockstar or Take-Two in order to get a remaster and PC version of Midnight Club: Los Angeles?

@facelessvixen: This, this, this. I've been wanting an okay version of later Midnight Club games on PC forever. Lots of fond memories of 3, never played Los Angeles though.

That's what I was hoping at least. Maybe make a remastered collection of 1 and 2, but ofc that would take work as you say and we all know EA hates doing work.

Hell yeah man. Loved these damn games. I spent so much time on Hot Pursuit 2 on PC with a wheel.

Not sure why they didn't show the Xbox 360 version as the main point of comparison in that video because the remaster looks extremely similar to the current PC version they're primarily showing.

They've got some better anti-aliasing, but it may be possible to do supersampling or something in the current version to get similar results. Occasionally there is a texture that's been replaced with a higher resolution version, but 99% of the textures appear to be the same. Some of the lens flare effects look to be toned down - certainly is a change but you can't really call it an upgrade.

Looks like they just used the auto-color filter in Photoshop lol. Not touching this one.

I LOVED all 3 Hot Pursuit games. Although, I still have my PS3 hooked up in the basement with access to the this game.

However, if it sells well and leads to them making another Hot Pursuit style game, then I say go for it!

Hot Pursuit is my favorite of the modern era NFS games because:

• The handling model is ridiculously unrealistic and therefore fun. It's basically Ridge Racer game where drifting every corner is faster and they made it super easy to initiate and hold drifts.
• It's not an "open world" game, at least not in single player. The map is call connected, but you pick races from a menu. There aren't a hundred little challenges on the maps or things to collect. I like the simplicity.
• I prefer countryside scenery to cities and the map in Hot Pursuit has this wonderful "Cruisin'" game style feel where every type of climate is represented in a tiny space. You can go from desert, to snow covered mountains, to redwood forest, to tropical beach, in the span of like 10 minutes of driving.

In regards to bigsocrates' original post - arcade racers did evolve, but they evolved by become open world and putting light RPG elements in it, just like action games. Unfortunately, I'm not sure those things actually made the games more fun. I think the truth is that, apart from improving graphics or adding combat, there simply isn't much you can do to an arcade racer by it's very nature. At the end of the day, it's still going to be about driving a car from point A to point B.

Hot Pursuit was decent, but the rubber-banding was so... bad. Like later into the game you have to really take all the shortcuts and drive perfectly. Most of the time the last few seconds of a race determine everything. You can easily see the other races go WHOOSH on your radar which just infuriates me.

In online matches the traffic also is random and sometimes when you were gonna drift a corner 180 degrees there's just a car that'll put an end to you on some of the slimmer roads. Should have had an option to disable traffic as a host. REALLY pretty game for the time though. Just at that point I was hoping for more than what felt like Burnout physics without the spectacular crashes.

I think people give NFS 2015 a hard-time. It's great. I played it in the EA Vault and liked it so much I'd have bought it if it wasn't for the online requirement. If you haven't given it a try please do, it's much better than most of the other modern NFS games. I sunk more hours into it than Hot Pursuit on PS3/PC combined.

Should there be a new Wiki page for the Remaster, similar to other remasters? I attempted to create one but it was rejected without explanation.