For one moment, the gap between playing a game on PC and on console seemed razor-thin. I played Need for Speed Rivals on both PC and PS4 and the two versions of EAās upcoming racing game were virtually indistinguishable. What I saw was impressive no matter what machine it was running on.
There are caveats, of course. The footage above was captured from a hands-on demo I played when EA brought Rivals to town last week. Itās from a PC build of the game that was running side-by-side with PS4 builds. (Note that Iām not the one behind the wheel there. The driving in the clip is being done by EAās Marcus Nilsson. I am in the session, though, playing on PC with a PS4 controller under the Rivals_Whisky username.) There was no Xbox One version on hand at the demo session. And you should keep in mind that specs for the PC version weren’t available and I have no way of knowing if Rivals was running on Ultra settings.
For the most part, though, the two looked essentially the same. Take in the videos in this post and youāll see the kinds of reflective surfaces, chaotic particle effects and dynamic lighting that serve as hallmarks of cutting-edge game-making. The team making the game is made up of creators from the DICE and Criterion shops, meaning that theyāve worked on Battlefield and Burnout games in the past.
But itās easy to point to visual sizzle as evidence of improvement. Whatās really next-gen about Rivals? Nilssonāwhoās heading up the Ghost Games dev studio making the gameātold me that it was Rivalsā AllDrive feature, which lets players seamlessly drop in and out of each otherās games. While features like this have been in NFS games before, Nilsson says that AllDrive as part of a rising trend for next-gen games that blur the line between single-player and multiplayer. Rivals, he said, sits alongside games like Titanfall and Destiny in how it presents an open world with dynamic challenges that be handled solo or with co-op partners. āWe thought about how we want to play games in the future and this is where we wound up. Itās delivering all sorts of unexpected experiences, which are a different kind of fun.ā
https://kotaku.com/ea-says-need-for-speed-rivalss-open-world-chases-are-n-509493300
Need for Speed Rivals did feel wild and unpredictable when I played with members of the Ghost Games team. We took on the role of cops and just jumped in open-world play with a single , for example, were yelling at each other to cut off a racer who was pulling away.
Regarding the PS4 version of the game, Nilsson says that the controllerās Share button will pull footage from the session youāre playing in. (This functionality wasnāt live in the version of the game I played.) Rivals wonāt be using the DualShock 4ās touchpad, though, as Nilsson said that the developers wanted to āuse what makes senseā when it came to the consoleās available features.
Watch the short cutscene after one of the pursuits above and youāll see an ominous tone from the police side of the gameās split narrative. When I mentioned that to Nilsson, he said part of the storytelling challenge that the team has been tackling has been to craft motivations and a backdrop where all of the gameās over-the-top racing action fits into a particular logic. āItās a little bit darker and itās a deliberate choice to go and see how far we can take that,ā Nilsson said.
Shiny graphics. Darker tone. A high-speed playground where friends can join you as they please. Will this mix be enough to rev players up for Need for Speed Rivals? Hard to say, but my time with the game has taken it from ānot paying attentionā to ādefinitely waiting for this oneā category.
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