Handling Tips & Tricks

Hello NFS Fans!

I’m Andy Manches, a Designer here at GHOST. Along with a lot of other great features, we are particularly excited to be bringing back the ability to tune your ride in the upcoming Need for Speed, including how your ride handles on the streets of Ventura Bay.

Handling is a very subjective area; it’s all about personal preference. We have been listening to and following the community, hearing many different thoughts on which previous NFS games you liked to drive in and which you didn’t.

Only being able to please some of the people, some of time meant for us the only logical solution was to hand power back to you, allowing you to set up your handling just the way you like it.

We have made this as easy as possible with the Drift versus Grip master slider. Pulling it in either direction will make overarching changes to how your car drives by configuring the individual sliders below accordingly. However, you can delve even deeper than that by fine tuning each slider independently to get the very best out of your car and become a handling tuning master in the process.

My advice here is to delve straight in, try things out and tune via feel. Below are some tips that explain certain features in a more detailed light to help you do just that!

Introduction
A simple approach to thinking about handling can be to dissect it into three stages:

• Driving when not drifting (we’ll call this A)
• Transitioning into a drift (we’ll call this B)
• Behavior while drifting (we’ll call this C)

Each handling-based slider in the handling tuning suite changes the behavior of at least one of these stages in various different ways.

Adjusting any of these sliders will also move the main Handling Style slider toward Drift or Grip. This gives you an aggregate indicator of how your car is shaping up, as well as what effect your tuning is having. While helpful, be aware that this is just the tip of the iceberg. By tweaking various sliders, in various ways there are infinite possibilities to achieve a desired outcome.

Remember each car has different base handling, meaning the tuning sliders will have varying effects across all cars.

Drift Stability Control [Effect: Mostly C]
Drift Stability Control; on or off? This is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. This is turned on by default and allows a stable, ‘pick-up-and-play’ drift style, akin to NFS Rivals. By turning this option off it allows access to deeper drift angles at the cost of an increased risk of the car spinning out completely if you overcook your drift. This is now a risk vs reward dilemma; potentially you can score much higher on drift events when turning this off, but it takes a bit more skill to control the car.

Another important distinction between on and off is the way the car behaves when counter-steering during drifting. When on, this is a condition for exiting a drift and regaining traction.

When off, though, you can maintain or increase your drift angle as you align your wheels to the car’s direction of travel, giving more sideways movement. When this is the case, the safest way to exit your drift is to release the throttle.

Lastly, when switched off you can initiate a drift via a “Scandinavian flick” maneuver. 

Braking Drift Assist [Effect: Mostly B]
This is essentially the decision to enable or disable the ‘tap brake & steer to enter drift’ controls. This defaults to ‘on’ to promote easy and accessible handling, turning this ‘off’ though contributes to an experience more similar to old NFS classics (Underground, MW etc.).

Now the vehicle will have some stability when braking, allowing you to slow down for corners and follow a more accurate driving line than the previous drift model allowed for. Drifting is still possible, but will require a yank on the handbrake amongst other things!

The caveat here is that if you tune your car to be so drifty that it steers into drift, then the car will transition into a drift anyway, even with the Braking Drift Assist set to ‘Off’. At this point the action of tapping the brake becomes irrelevant as the steering alone is enough to get your car drifting.  

Handbrake Strength [Effect: A,B,C]
It may appear counterintuitive that a weak handbrake is mapped to the Drift side, as you might expect a drift car to need as strong a handbrake as possible. However in Need For Speed terms, ‘Strong’ is excessive and provides a torque force capable of turning the car 180 degrees at all speeds with relative ease; an important facility for an open world with Cops.

However, a Weak handbrake is better for drifting as it reacts more sensitively, allowing the car to keep speed but turn just enough that with a bit of steering input it can enter the desired drift.

When this is tuned to just the right level, it can also act as an important tool to chain drifts from one side to another, pulling off some cool gymkhana-esque moves.  

Steer Range [Effect: A,B,C]
Widening your steer range is a popular method for tuning a drift car. It can help you create a higher slip angle when turning to encourage loss of traction, and then allow the extra room to align the wheels with your direction of travel once in a drift.

However I’ve found it useful to fine tune this with my more grip-tuned setups too. 

Grip handling aims to resemble some elements of older NFS titles like NFS Underground. In these games the brake pedal was used to govern your speed at corners, not start you drifting. Steering into drift was near impossible and the handbrake was used as the main drift initiation tool.

Fast forward to the present, and the same will be true if the handling is tuned to full grip. That said, I’ve found cars set up like this can often feel a bit too stiff for my liking, especially when performance is upgraded to super-fast speeds!

If you also find this is the case try setting everything fully toward Grip, and the Steer Range fully toward Wide. This extra angle may be what you need to get you round a few corners if you were previously understeering into the outside. 

Front/Rear Tire Pressure [Effect: A,B,C]
You have two sliders for Tire Pressure; front and rear. It’s best to think of these as grip modifiers; a way to go one step deeper in fine tuning the grip levels on some new tires you may have equipped.

Whether taking grip away from your rear or applying more grip to your front tires, the results are similar. It will make your front end more stable compared to your rear which will affect your turning speed and in extreme cases get you drifting just from steering hard.

The opposite is also true. Having a more planted back end will make transitioning into a drift less likely, and the car generally more stable. This can be helpful to keep your car predictable and on an accurate driving line.   

Remember to buy all the performance customization parts you need to get the full range on all sliders and access the most extreme set ups.

We’ll see you on the streets of Ventura Bay!