Under the Hood: Our Best World
We’re just weeks away from the launch of NFS Heat but before you get in your car and find yourself cruising the streets we thought we’d give you a bit of insight into why we think Palm City is our best NFS world yet.
Inspired by Miami
After the arid deserts of Need for Speed Payback’s Nevada-inspired world, we wanted a big city location that could deliver dense urban action and open world cop chases while capturing the feel of fan favourites Need for Speed - Most Wanted ‘05 and Underground.
We started looking for a setting that would feel both familiar to players and unique to Need for Speed. Miami gave us all the right ingredients - a vibrant city with a multicultural blend of music, cool street art and stunning night neons. It felt pretty fresh for a Need for Speed game, and we also knew immediately that it could deliver that classic NFS look.
While we were location-scouting Miami, we saw crazy weather - blazing sunshine then torrential rain then bright sunshine - all in the space of a few minutes. We loved the idea of bringing this to the game, so we built a full dynamic weather system. You get a range of changing conditions as you play, and it was a great excuse to wash the streets down and go big on night neons, wet cars and reflective roads.
We stretched reality a bit, fusing Miami and Florida with Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to provide us with some much-needed elevation and big vistas, and to inject a little variety. There’s a massive city to explore, and the surrounding countryside gives you these cool panoramic city views while you drive.
Built for Racing: - Fast, Fluid and Uninterrupted Action
Before driving games became open-world, designers could craft race routes to perfection, packaging high speed straights, technically challenging sequences and epic scenery to dramatic effect.
With NFS Heat, our approach was to start by building a solid set of race routes, then tune and craft them to the landscape around them. We incorporated epic scale landmarks, spectacular vista reveals, sequences of perfectly-driftable turns and dramatic changes of scenery to try and focus the experience on amazing racing.
We then set about adding more challenging, technical routes because they were more fun, and focused our efforts on reducing the frustration when you got it wrong.
We removed blind turns, so you’d always have time to react to the challenges in the route, and we removed hard-stops in the scenery. We wanted to make something fast, fluid and uninterrupted - a rewind-free experience that demanded more forgiving route design.
We loaded run-off areas with destructible scenery, so even if you make a mistake and slide off a particularly challenging corner, you don’t need to respawn - you just barrel through a load of props and keep going. It’s fast, fun and easily the most visceral driving experience we’ve ever built.
The Perfect Escape
We found early in development that getting chased by the cops is way more fun if you’ve got decent tactical options. We tried to fill the landscape with lots of different ways to shake your pursuers.
Look out for ramps and billboards, head for the interstate and drive in oncoming traffic, weave through dense back-alleys in the city, refill health at gas stations, tune your car for all-out speed and find somewhere to hit top speed or tune for offroad and use the backcountry.
We also built a much denser road network. You’ll hit an intersection roughly every 20 seconds compared with every 60 seconds in Payback. There’s around 100 KM more road in a smaller, more compact footprint.
There’s just way more choice when you’re under pressure and trying to lose the cops. A side effect was the world is just much easier to navigate - pick a landmark, follow your nose, and you’ll pretty much get to where you want.
NFS Heat is about the contrast between day and night gameplay. Day is about earning, night is about risk and danger. One key aspect of this gameplay is the use of Safe Houses. It’s tense trying to make it to a safe house with low health and high heat level with the cops on alert.
For the first time in Need for Speed, you can pretty much drive anywhere off or on the road. You get these tense cat-and-mouse moments with the cops patrolling the roads while you try and make it cross country to the nearest Safe House to bank your REP.
Reasons to explore
We’ve overhauled our exploration and discovery gameplay in a number of fundamental ways.
First up, Billboards. Hitting ramps and smashing through billboards is simple, distracting and fun, but they need to be fast, spectacular and easy to retry, so we found places in the world where you could generally hit them full tilt, take in amazing reveals of the landscape, land in specially cleared areas and circle round to try again, if you miss. You’ll need to upgrade your car or choose between tarmac or dirt performance to collect them all. We also placed a few in devious locations - easy to see but hard to access to get you thinking.
For die-hard collectors, we placed smashable neons all over the world and to celebrate Need for Speed’s urban roots, we placed a load of collectible graffiti tags and street art in hard-to-find places. The street art’s well worth looking out for - find it to send it to the wrap editor, and you can use it to customise your car.
Finding collectibles in games can be a bit daunting. When a message reads “CONGRATULATIONS YOU FOUND 1 OUT OF 150”, it’s easy to switch off, so we carved the world up into 18 districts and created great rewards for each district.
Now you’ll see something like “CONGRATULATIONS YOU FOUND 1 OUT OF 6”. You know you only need to find 5 more, AND you know they’re pretty close by. The map displays the district totals as you go, so you can easily check back while you play.
We also wanted the rewards to be great. Find everything in a district to unlock a package of customisation options - decals and vanity items. Find everything globally, like the street art, and you’ll get a special edition car.
Massive play spaces
We noticed how much our fans liked to play in the airfield at the centre of the Need for Speed Payback map, and we wanted to bring that idea to life on a larger scale and reward people for exploring the whole location, so we added multiple play areas to NFS Heat.
Head for the disused Raceway on the edge of the city to rip it around a high speed circuit. It’s right next to the player garage, so it’s a pretty good place to test out your performance customisation.
In the South West of the map, there’s a big industrial zone. The centrepiece is a massive container loading area, where we used the versatility of containers for some ultra-challenging time trials and some of our more deviously concealed collectible items. It was like building gameplay out of building blocks.
Tune your car for offroad, and head for the quarry - a massive rock playground in the North West of the map carved into the landscape with terraced sections designed for exploration and airtime. It’s a fun place to play.
Head South from the city and you’ll find a vast complex of warehouse buildings and test facilities surrounding a rocket launch site.
And that’s not all. There are tons of secrets, signs and hidden areas to discover and explore.
NFS Heat arrives on November 8th, we can’t wait to see you in-game, try to keep up.