We speak to Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit senior producer Matt Webster about social gaming in the asynchronous era.
Last week, we visited the offices of EA Criterion in downtown Guilford for a hands-on session with Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. While we were there, we grabbed a few minutes with senior producer Matt Webster to talk about the game's advanced approach to social connectivity. Turns out, you'll never really be playing Need For Speed alone ever again...
Was it difficult to merge the sensibilities of Criterion with the Need For Speed franchise?
I think whatever game Criterion makes is going to sit with a number of principles. Fun, accessibility, simplicity ? whether that's game modes or mechanics. And it's got to be highly connected. Irrespective of whatever game we make, it's going to be built on those principles. In a driving game that's going to mean speed, action, and the ability to pick the pad up and have fun very quickly. So this is Criterion's take on Need For Speed, that's what we were always talking about, and we discuss these things in the office quite a lot, 'if we were making this game, we'd do this or that', we're always talking about our take on different kinds of games.
When it came to this one, we thought 'what does Need For Speed mean for us oldies?' It's the very first one, it's exotic cars, it's cops? We would have been insane not to use those elements. And it's about the ease of driving the cars, the sense of speed and those action moments, trying to wrap them around a simple but engaging set of game constructs. And we always knew we wanted to go hard on the connected aspect; Autolog came out of watching how people played Burnout Paradise, and looking at where we thought connected gaming was going.
Getting a bunch of machines connected is relatively trivial these days, but lots of people don't play that way. I mean, seasoned gamers may have six to ten friends on their platform friends lists, but in actuality, the mass market gamer doesn't have that many ? if they have any at all. We wanted to ramp up the sense of social competition, and have a system that does it for you.
And the social system extends into the single-player mode doesn't it?
Yes, that's the whole point. The whole point. What we're most excited about is the solo connectivity, so as I'm browsing through things to play, I've always got information about what my friends have done on that event to encourage me to get involved. And when I have played the event, I'll get auto alerts on when my time has been beaten. And I think the 'Autolog Recommends' feature is going to change the way people play racing games ? it's the ultimate distraction. It's like any social network, there's a relatively small chance of you being connected to Twitter or Facebook at the same time as a friend, but the constructs are there for you to be able to engage with each other as if you were there at the same time.
So you've taken your cues very much from social network design and from social discovery systems like Apple's Ping?
Yes. But it also comes from those very natural discussions you have when you're playing games: 'what was your score?', ''what was your best time?'. You know, the game should do this for you! It knows everything, it's attached to a server, it knows who my friends are ? with some decent tech and a good creative, we can start pressing some of those buttons for people.
This has all been born out of Burnout Paradise where we had an asynchronous feature named Road Wars. And what we saw was that players would hit it quite late, because actually we did a good job of burying it. But when they did use it, it really hooked them. So we thought, how can we engineer this system to remember it and ping it, so everything I do is a potential recommendation for my friends? And if a bunch of friends are playing a particular event, it's going to tell me about that as well.
So you're shifting the focus, really, from pure multiplayer, to connected single player...
Getting online together is straightforward but a relatively rare occurrence, so we end up playing with strangers. And playing online? it's not a pleasant place. I mean, I'm a seasoned FPS player and it is not pleasant. If someone is new to video gaming, and they go online for the first time, that's going to be really offputting. Now people can play with friends at their own pace and in comfort ? the spotlight of performance isn't on you, but you get the pay off, which is beating a friend.
And the game lets you extend your network too doesn't it? It lets you see messages your friends have sent to their friends. That's very much a social networking feature?
Yes, definitely. These machines have social networks on them, it's just that no one's quite realised it. We've all got platform friends, we all have machines with network cables, but you can't see it, and there's no persistence, the context is always changing. But what we're doing with Need For Speed is persistent, and we're doing pushes to you that are personalised. If I beat your time and go top of a speedwall, it'll contextualise that information for you; you know, 'Matt goes top, you're now fifth and 32 seconds behind'. That's where the cool shit that goes on inside our comparison engine comes in, it makes it very rich, very personal and dynamic. It's doing many tens of thousands of comparisons and then punting that information out. It's the richness of the information that's important. If you look on a standard leaderboard, you don't know when I went top, you don't know the gap between your performances, you have to work that out for yourself. This system joins the dots. It's more powerful. It's real-time.
It also tracks the number of attempts a friend as made on your record. So if you're top of a speedwall, and someone who's second has made 32 attempts on your time, you know they're going really hard after you. It'll also tell you which cars your friends selected on every event. You're getting an insight into how your friends play. It's fun little bits of data that we can store and track. And it engenders the spirit of replayability.
But another thing you're saying is that, despite this sense of inclusion, and the ease with which we can get to grips with these cars, this is all based on accurate data. Is that right?
I have one example I always use. When we got all the data from McLaren for the SLR 722 we saw that the car's meant to do 209 mph. But in the game it wouldn't, it would only do 204 mph. We checked the numbers, because there's a deep physical simulation going on there; there are 20 values just for the rear wheels another 20 for the front, then there are dimensions and torque curves, all that stuff ? which we do a really good job of covering up, because the game is all about having fun. But the McLaren was still only doing 204, so we started looking for physics bugs? then we realised that the rear tyres were 2mm too small. We increased the size, ran the simulation and off it went: 209 mph?
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is set for release on PC, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 on 19 November.
SONIC AUTOMOTIVE SKYWORKS SOLUTIONS SILICON LABORATORIES SI INTERNATIONAL
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