he Need for Speed series is one of the most successful in Electronic Arts' stable, behind unstoppable forces like Madden and The Sims. With four games released in four years, no one is more aware of the potential for franchise fatigue than the team at Electronic Arts Black Box in Vancouver. Rather than unleash yet another neon-lit street racing variant, senior producer Mike Mann and his team have set about redefining the game, and pointing it in a completely new direction. The result? "It's all about authentic street racing," Mann declares. "The Fast and the Furious vibe is dated, and the culture has matured. ProStreet is a reflection of that."
In order to really change its approach, the studio essentially split in two after the release of Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Half of the team went onto address Electronic Arts' insatiable need for annual sequels, iterating on technology where it could. The result, Need for Speed: Carbon, was successful but criticized for being "Most Wanted at night, with sexier cars and stylized visuals." While these guys bore the brunt of the gaming community's "Hey, why do you have to squeeze one of these things out every year?" questions, the other half of the Need for Speed crew had the luxury of extra time to reimagine the franchise and take it in a new direction.
"We had a lot of success with the street racing thing," says Mann, "and we wanted to keep the new game tied to that philosophy, but we wanted to show how it's evolving, and how we see things moving over the next few years." The core of this has been to pull away from the illicit side of the culture, and explore the "evolution of professionalism within street racing," as Mann puts it. "It's less about the 'bling' and 'zing' and more about performance now," explains producer Mark Little. "We wanted to show that the way these guys are racing has changed," he enthuses. "It's still raw and emotional like the stuff you'd see on the streets, but now that there's more power and crazier speeds, there's a need for more discipline and more control."
"The maturation of the culture mirrors what we've seen in both the skateboarding and snowboarding scenes," Mann explains. "The popularity has meant that it can't stay underground forever, and we're seeing this stuff completely change the way motor sports are organized and presented. It's all tied in with the way youth culture keeps reinventing things and putting a new spin on conventions," he enthuses. "Traditional racing is dry and too clinical. Formula One and NASCAR aren't aspirational because they're so exclusive by their very nature. The cost of entry is prohibitive, and even if you have the skill there's no way for an average person to prove that."
So how does ProStreet reflect this? "The game is all set in the real world, for a start," Little tells us. "It's all set in real, iconic locations from around the globe that are associated with the scene we're exploring. So on one hand you have Daikoku Futo near the Bay Bridge in Yokohama, which is one of the most popular meeting areas in the world for street racers, and on the other we have tracks like the Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California."
To explain his point, Little loads up an early build of the game to show us how Infineon will look. "The whole game is wrapped around multidisciplinary race weekends, which have more of a festival vibe. It's like a big show," he explains. "These weekends are focused on four types of racing: drag, drift, speed, and grip. Drag racing was switched out for drifting in Need for Speed: Carbon because we felt we'd done everything we could do with that particular gameplay mechanic at the time, and drifting was becoming increasingly fashionable. Now that we've had some time to work on it, we feel we've really found a way to handle drag in a different way. In ProStreet you're really going to be able to feel what it's like to put down all that power and blast away from the line."
"Drifting has been completely reworked too," Little says, smiling, as he takes a stock Mazda RX-7 around the first bend at Infineon. As he hurtles into the first left-hand bend, he flings the car sideways and slides it gracefully through the curve. "In the past we kept the drift challenges to more confined areas, but now it's much open and we let you really get a feel for the flow of this kind of racing."
"Speed racing is exactly what you'd think it is from the name," he grins. "It's about taking stupidly, crazily powerful vehicles out in the desert and just tearing it up. These things are 800 hp or more, and they're just insane." The gearheads among you might be familiar with "Big Red," the legendary 1969 Camaro built by R.J. and Dan Gottlieb in 1987 that destroyed the pack at the second running of the Silver State Classic in 1989 by devouring the 94 mile course in 27 minutes and 54 seconds, at an average speed of 197.99 mph and a radar-recorded top speed of 222 mph. Though Big Red itself doesn't make an appearance in ProStreet, you are encouraged to develop something in its spirit.
Although the Black Box guys are reluctant to confirm a specific car list beyond the inclusion of Porsche vehicles and the RX-7 that appears in many of the early press materials, it seems likely we'll be able to play with some old-fashioned American muscle so we can develop something equally manly. One thing Mann will tell us is that ProStreet has "the largest car list we've ever had, with over 25 manufacturers represented," and when pressed on the balance of exotics versus more attainable cars, he reveals that "there are only eight supercars this year."
So what's grip racing? "It's what the culture is calling its version of circuit racing, basically," Little tells us. "Much like the other disciplines, it breaks from the conventions and is much more aggressive than traditional racing. You see a lot of rubbing the walls and rubbing other cars."
Which brings us nicely to what will no doubt be one of ProStreet's most celebrated features: damage. We're starting to see damage handled in more and more realistic ways in new-gen racing games (both Forza 2 and DiRT feature it prominently and proudly), but ProStreet is the most convincing we've seen yet. Rather than simply make it so graphics change when you crunch into something, the EA Black Box team has built a physics-based procedural damage system, which means that cars scrape and crumple based on what they were hit by and with what force. Clip another car on a corner and see a body panel dent or become detached. Whack something really hard and the body will deform just like the real thing.
"We knew we wanted to do something special with damage," says Little. "It's absolutely the single most requested thing we hear from gamers, and we wanted this to be a real 'next-gen' approach. In the vast majority of games out there, developers show damage by switching out parts of the model or tweaking the art. You can do that if you know exactly what the car looks like to start with, but because we have the Autosculpt feature that we pulled in from Carbon, we don't have that luxury. Conceivably, every car can be completely unique, so we needed to come up with a way of deforming the car procedurally." The result is incredibly convincing, as it's far subtler than attempts we've seen elsewhere. Paint scrapes off, metal buckles, glass cracks before it shatters, and panels can dangle precariously if the impact isn't hard enough to pop them off completely.
But it isn't just crumpled metal and broken glass that makes things look convincing; Mann is keen to stress that the dirt and grime of racing is an important part of the vibe that hasn't been adequately conveyed in any games before. "Something you don't realize from just playing games is how much smoke there is," he tells us. ProStreet will go a long way to rectify this by rendering realistic clouds of noxious tire and exhaust fumes using a clever combination of volumetric particle effects and fancy lighting. The result is something that looks remarkably realistic and not like the painted-on effects we've seen in games like Project Gotham Racing or Gran Turismo. This stuff dissipates just like the real thing.
To demo the effect, Little swings the camera around to the side of the RX-7 and lights up the tires. As he nails down the power, wisps of smoke start to swirl near the contact patch of the tire and slowly get sucked into the wheel well. As the volume of smoke increases, the rotation of the wheel sucks the smoke around, and you can see it vortex before it billows out and starts to obscure the rear of the car. Seen through the smoke, the car within appears out of focus and blurry, and eventually the tire is burning up so much that the whole screen is full of smoke. As Little lets off the gas, the smoke starts to clear and you see it quickly dissipate in a very realistic way. If there's a feature we're going to see copied by every racing game in 2008 and beyond, this is it. Though seemingly little more than a cute cosmetic addition, it adds tremendously to the vibe of ProStreet and actually evolves into an important gameplay mechanic. One-on-one drift races take on a whole new dynamic when your opponent hits a corner first and lights up his tires so much that you can't see the road ahead.
The team is understandably enthusiastic about what it has achieved so far, but there is still much about ProStreet yet to be revealed. Specific information about car lists, additional track locations, and, most significantly, the online gameplay modes is being withheld until later in the year, with a steady flow of information planned between now and the game's expected release date in November.