VOL. 6 END OF VOLUME REPORT

It’s about that time. With Vol. 6 coming to a close, we wanted to take a moment to share back some insights and feedback that we’ve collected over the course of the volume. 

As mentioned in our Y2 Roadmap Blog, your feedback during this year will help shape the future of the franchise, and part of our commitment back to you is being transparent about what we’re hearing along the way to ensure that it’s accurate, and sharing our point of view in response.

But first, let’s take a look at some gameplay data observed during Vol. 6:

S5 more popular than the R8? South Koreans and Australians the biggest night owls of the bunch? Much to think about. Head over to the community-run Subreddit and Discord channel to let the debate rage. We’d also love to hear what else you’d like to see in future End of Volume Report infographics.

Now, onto your feedback. There’s a few important disclaimers we need to share before getting into it:

1. The majority of your feedback won’t be addressed during this year of live service. We’re a small team on a tight schedule and are working hard to bring you everything we’ve promised. We’ll make updates and refine features where possible, but most of the feedback is being collected to inform how we approach things in the future.
2. We will only be including feedback in these reports that relates to what we’re doing in Unbound. There are certain frequent community requests (think we all know what we’re talking about here) that are outside of the scope of this project, and making any short statement about them would be unhelpful. Know that it’s heard and that your enthusiasm is appreciated, but we won’t be addressing those requests in these End of Volume Reports.   
3. We’re focusing on responding to top feedback that has a more or less singular idea to share. Some of the top comments (particularly on Reddit) are long and address several different things or make many different requests. Trying to address them all in this already long blog post could get out of hand and potentially be confusing. But we’ve seen them all, hear you, and are trying to address what we can.

If you’re new to the game and want a recap of the features we’re discussing below, please visit the Vol. 6: Head to Head reveal blog.

Alright, let’s goooooo!

Most liked reply on Twitter: 

• “A much smoother experience when wanting to switch PVP playlists or going from PVP to Free Roam. Both require a full sign out and back in of Online services atm, it’s incredibly slow.
  
  Even if you just want to take a break you have to back out of online play, big vibe killer.” 

Dev Response: We made some changes to this flow already, ensuring that you are now taken back into the Garage so you can see your Speed Pass progression and if you want to make any vehicle changes before going back into PVP or switching to Freedrive. We hear you though and there are more improvements we could make for sure with regards to our flows and menu navigation's. We are looking into what could be possible in a future update

Most liked comment on Instagram:

• “As a person who came back to unbound I can say I want to grind for the rewards and that the game is BACK”

Dev Response: Really glad to hear this! There is much more we would like to do with PVP too and certainly we have learnt a lot already on how we would build something like this into a future installment of NFS from the start.

We saw lots of positive sentiment around the PVP update overall. There are few replies around PVP switching flow, and asking for the checkpoint system to be a bit more forgiving (closer to Heat’s version, whereby your speed is maintained when spawning) or larger in size. 

Dev Response: Checkpoints and reset speed is something we could do, but it could have some serious knock-on effects for how people are used to playing. We will take a closer look for the future but we likely won’t touch it this year because of the risk involved.

In addition, we see that more ‘player engagement opportunities’ would be appreciated, such as emoting (GG, nice race, get gd noob, etc.) with other players in the lobby, seeing opponents cars/player models, or ‘track maps’ prior to the events. 

Finally, other requests included allowing people to toggle whether or not they race with custom builds or stock builds - with level(ish) playing fields. To add to this, offering B-S+ classes all the time would be good (rather than 1 class a week) but of course both of these may result in smaller lobby sizes. 

Dev Response: We’re always looking at the best way we can maximise variety and fairness for players to experience the Volumes’ offerings. Candidly, it’s worth noting that we’re building on top of an existing system which isnt as agile as we would like it to be.

Most liked reply on Twitter:

• “PVP is great and truly fresh breath for NFS, the only downside as I see lack of proper rewards for dedicated people who spends a lot of time in lobbies, both from LVL reward and rewards for Wins etc, I would suggest add decals for each level maybe, or for some milestones.” 

Dev Response: Glad to hear this! We do have a bunch of challenges associated to playing PVP and things like titles you can unlock from completing them which you can then show off during resulting and loading screens. We have lots of data coming in on levels and the amount of grind which we are looking into too. If it makes sense to make changes here, we certainly will.

Most liked comment on Instagram:

• “Before starting the playlist, we need to see the race route when choosing a car.”

Dev Response: This is something we have been looking into but unfortunately is one of those ‘seems easy but isn't’ things. That being said, we are still investigating how we could make some changes here. We understand that you want to know the best car from your arsenal that will dominate for the route ahead

Most upvoted comment on Reddit:

• “I'd definitely like to see some Underground-themed playlists next volume, with a focus on tight inner-city racing in lower-end cars. I'd also like to see the currently playlist-exclusive events (like Solar Cycle and Dark Night) be opened up to more playlists, both within dedicated PvP and within the freeroam playlists”

Dev Response: You will definitely see some Underground-themed playlists for Vol. 7! With regards to the specific tracks there are opportunities to play these in Free Roam as it operates a similar rotation of events through the weeks. We are investigating ways in which we can update the cadence further as we did during the volume, striking the balance between variety and repetition.

Feedback on the Weekly PVP Playlists is similar to what we heard for the Dedicated PVP Mode. Lots of comments about greater variety in PVP (or perhaps faster cycling between playlists) - with variety being a key factor in keeping people motivated. Also some requests for ‘no contact’ races as well, whereby you would ghost through competitors (to avoid griefing). 

Most liked reply on Twitter: 

• “Definitely carry over the Audi handling model to the rest of the car roster. I don't think it's fair for a handful of cars to get the new handling but not the rest of the roster. Some cars built entirely with grip in mind and no drift entry enabled still understeer.”

Dev Response: We are really glad to hear that the handling changes have been received so well. We would love to be able to roll this out across all our vehicles but the truth is that it takes a whole bunch of time to get each car we add to this quality, and we currently only have one handling designer. Whilst he is super human this is too tall of an order even for him. That being said, all of the new cars we add to the game (through Speed Pass) will have the new handling and we will look to add more where we can and when it makes sense.

Most liked comment on Instagram:

• “The Handling especially the R8 is very good. Also the sound improvement is great. Maybe older Audi’s like the RS2 Avant or the old rally Audis would be fantastic. Solid work guys keep this up 👏”

Dev Response: Again, we love to hear it! The handling changes are actually part of future thinking we were already investigating so glad to see we are going in the right direction. As far as adding older Audis, this won’t be happening this year. Because our cars are fully customizable in the way they are, they take us a very long time to make, and the new car plan for the rest of the year is already set.

We also hear your comments about the new handling model potentially being OP, especially compared to muscle cars which are perceived as too slow/heavy in comparison. 

Most liked reply on Twitter: 

• “Personally I think every time you level up maybe the cars should be unlocked instead of having to do really monotonous challenges for them there are enough levels for them all to be unlocked so please change the way the regular cars are unlocked in lakeshore online.”

Dev Response: This is great feedback and we hear this. We are looking into ways that can make unlocking of cars for MP easier or in potentially different ways, more to come on this in the near future.

Most liked comment on Instagram:

• “I think rank system is a nice addition to the game, good indicator for “street credit” in multiplayer. It’s a nice stat to have and i’ve been visiting multiplayer more often in order to rank up. Rewards should be more engaging, let’s say 4 rewards, each one after 50 levels, lvl 1 - banner + title, lvl 50 clothing, lvl 100 emote, lvl 150 driving effect, lvl 200 custom and original car with matching customisation to the clothing and driving effect that we grinded earlier. For the moment rewards have 0 value for me to be brutally honest. Progression time is good.”

Dev Response: Great feedback again. we are looking into the Rank system as a whole and hope to update on it soon. While doing this we will think about ways and what we could add as rewards when you Rank. A more in depth system of Ranking by skill and earning is probably out of scope for Kaizen, it is, however 100% something we would be considering for anything in the future alongside a more dedicated space for pure racing skill.

Most liked reply on Twitter: 

• I’m only asking for one thing. Can you please add the soundtracks of the 90s Need for Speed games to Need for Speed Unbound? And while you’re at it, can we please finally have them on Spotify? Those soundtracks are my childhood and deserve to be preserved.

Dev Response: Ultimately, this comes down to licensing costs, because artists deserve to be compensated for their work. Songs are licensed for individual games, often have an expiration date, and would require new licensing contracts to bring to Unbound. This gets very expensive, very quickly and is out of scope for this year. We understand that music is very important to the Need for Speed experience, and this is something we’ll continue to pay attention to even if we have no plans to share right now. With regards to the publishing request, we still can’t make any promises but this is something we need to investigate going forward because we too have noticed some old NFS exclusives that aren’t available on streaming platforms and personally would like to see them there. Might not be possible, might have to wait for the right moment, but trust that we’re paying attention.

Aside from the music request, overall it seems you’ve really enjoyed the nostalgic content we’ve been bringing to NFS Unbound. This will really kick off in force starting with Vol. 7: Drift & Drag, inspired by NFS Underground 1&2, and continue through the rest of the year. 

The other main request regarding this topic is the Feedback That Must Not Be Named, that we’ve already said we won’t address in this particular blog LOL.

Thank you all so much for being part of this journey, as we continue to build towards the Ultimate NFS Experience in one place for the first time. We hope that we’ve accurately captured your feedback here, but if you disagree then feel free to hit us up on Instagram or Twitter,or head over to the community-run subreddit or Discord channel.

See you on May 21st for the launch of Vol. 7: Drift & Drag.

    -Team Kaizen, Criterion Games

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