If you’ve been keeping up the updates Criterion’s been bringing to Need For Speed: Unbound – the long-running racing series’ most recent entry this year, you’ll know that a lot of them have brought back stuff from previous Need For Speeds.
Steady shots of nostalgia to tempt back in folks whose childhoods are inseperable from the idea of covering a Nissan Skyline in tear vinyls and neon before using it to smoke some poor fool in a souped up Corsa are clearly an element of these plans. However, with NFS itself now right on the cusp on turning 30, Criterion senior creative director John Stanley re-iterates that Unbound’s mission to begin forming an “ultimate NFS experience” isn’t just about trying to stick every previous entry in a big stew pot without thinking.
At a developer roundtable in celebration of the Need For Speed series’ 30th birthday attended by VG247, Stanley spoke about where the vision for Unbound in 2024 unveiled in February currently sits and how it meshes with the fact that, historically, each Need For Speed game to has generally aimed to have its own specific vision or calling card that helps set it apart from other entries.
“You can’t just be everything,” he acknowledged, “but one of the ideologies over this year – for this second year of Need for Speed [Unbound] – has been around Kaizen and actually kind of living this idea of small, iterative improvements.”
“It’s not about gradually getting to be that Need For Speed [Unbound] is then the everything [game] – all Need For Speeds that there have ever been and every feature that there’s ever been – it’s that we are very carefully cherry-picking and selecting stuff at the moment that we know resonates with the fans. You see it with the volumes we’ve done.
“Proper old school drag mode, that really resonates, it’s something different for us, I’d been wanting to get that in for a long time, and I’m so happy that it’s back in the game now properly. Proper drift mode, yep, check, that’s in. Cops vs racers, yep. So all of these really like high level, iconic pieces that Need For Speed’s been – we can’t add in absolutely everything, but the really big things that resonate, for sure, let’s go back, let’s add them in.
“Then, once they’re in, they stay in. If they’re great and players love them, we index on them more, if they’re not, we just focus our attention in the right place. So, we start to build up this real core of Need For Speed, and then try and take that forward.”
The latest update Stanley and co have just revealed for Unbound – Volume 9 – drops on November 26. It’s set to bring with it a new PvPvE multiplayer mode dubbed Lockdown, which is all about stealing rides from lockups and choosing whether to risk losing it all if you don’t catch an extraction truck in time, and the NFS series’ first ever rideable motorbike – a BMW S 1000 RR – so it’ll be interesting to see if either of those catch on enough to become part of that core of Need For Speed for the future.