The Seacrest County and Redview County Police Departments in, respectively, the 2010 Hot Pursuit and Rivals have impossibly large fleets of interceptor vehicles made up almost entirely of high-end exotic sports cars and supercars, including Bugatti Veyrons, Aston Martin One-77s and even one-off concept cars. In fact, the real life Dubai Police Force boasts a similarly lavish police fleet that, yes, really does field Veyrons and One-77s. Of course, because of the high value of these "super patrol cars" and the inherent risks of policing, they are mostly for show and only used for patrolling rich, low-risk tourist areas.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police also rock a couple Nissan 370Z NISMO patrol cars, and it's not unheard of for other Japanese police departments to retain sports cars in the fleet. Similarly, the Italian police have used a Gallardo 560-4 as an actual interceptor unit (which has since been retired and replaced with the Lamborghini Huracan). Unlike the Dubai exotic police fleet however, the Italian Lamborghini interceptors do serve a practical use in the form of emergency organ transport given how crucial it is for vital organs to be delivered to patients in dire need.
Archive Panic: Because there are so many games of the franchise being released, it'll take a Garage full (or the price of a single multi-million-dollar supercar) to complete them, win the races and buy all of the cars.
It's widely agreed that the series fell hard into one, but when it happened depends on who you ask.
Classic fans argue that anything after Hot Pursuit 2 is Canon Discontinuity, with some cautiously believing the series returned to form briefly with Hot Pursuit 2010 through Rivals before plunging back into the dork age with the 2015 reboot.
Tuner fans, on the contrary, argue that the series fell into one either with or right after Carbon, with a brief return to form with Undercover and Nitro (and for some tuner fans, Shift games) before diving hard back into the AAE until the 2015 reboot and Payback.
However, most fans regardless of era preference are now considering the entire Ghost Games era of Need for Speed from Rivals to Heat during the eighth console generation to be the nadir or mixed-bag of the franchise, with awkward Burnout-style "brake-to-drift" driving physics being recycled over and over after the switchover to the Frostbite engine. Compounded to this was the aforementioned inability to pause the game in Rivals, the online-only nature of the 2015 reboot, the loot boxes of Payback, and the cringeworthy plots and characters of the rather brief single-player campaigns in all their games. It's gotten to the point that even many classic fans admit Rivals wasn't that good, and many NFS fans agree that Playground Games' Forza Horizon is now the open world arcade racing game king, and that Criterion—who have changed considerably since their co-founders left—have an uphill battle ahead of them.
The BMW M3 GTR, as featured in Most Wanted (2005) aside from having more fans than detractors. The car has earned some flak from the detractors while being viewed as a "souped-up variant" of the M3 E46 with additional horsepowernote The M3 E46 has 333 horsepower at stock condition even though the M3 GTR has 493 regardless of the latter using a P60B40 V8 instead of the S54B32 Inline-Six engine. in which the latter in Real Life is notorious for its dubious reliability.
The Porsche 911 Carrera RSR 2.8 from the 2015 reboot to Heat. Some of them adore the RSR for being one of the best cars available once it's fully upgraded while others view it as an overpowered abomination that "takes zero-skill to drive and should be nerfed to the ground" even though it's possible to beat it with other cars that are sufficiently competitive like the McLaren F1 in Heat or at least with a good amount of skill to do so. However in Unbound, the RSR's no longer a meta as it's been heavily nerfed, making it less of an example above.
Broken Base: Need for Speed has probably the most fragmented fanbase in all of Racing Games. Basically, there are more than two main types of fandom:
The old school fans, which most of them grew up playing the first NFS titles in the PS1/Saturn/Windows 95/98 era. They praise the first titles for having good gameplay, climate changes (like rain and snow in High Stakes), gorgeous landscapes and super sport cars. In other hand, they despise the tuning era, often saying it was a blatant copy of The Fast and the Furious and the heavy focus in tuning and almost dominant urban areas locations ruined the franchise, with the tuning-free Hot Pursuit 2010 being a return to form.
The Underground/Tuning fans, which most of them grew up playing Underground to Carbon in the sixth-gen console era. They deny the existence of first titles, claiming Underground was the first NFS, ProStreet ruined the franchise, and the 2015 reboot was a step in the right direction. They despise the new entries of the franchise, like Hot Pursuit 2010 and Rivals, and while they have varying opinions on the Shift games, and criticize The Run and Most Wanted 2012, they think both games still hold "the true series' DNA" unlike the others.
Underground/Most Wanted 2005 fans did not like Hot Pursuit 2010 for a lack of aftermarket customization, tuners, and a proper open world.note Although Seacrest County is one continuous environment, it does not have a proper free roam. The free roam is simply just screwing around in a car for as long as you like in single-player with no pursuits or other events on the map. Classic pre-Underground fans, on the other hand, liked the game for those exact reasons. Both sides did have mixed feelings regarding the weapons (especially towards racers) and Autolog though. The flames reignited with Hot Pursuit Remastered in 2020, with Underground/Most Wanted 2005 fans complaining about a "bad" entry getting a remaster (with some review bombing on Metacritic),note the Switch release avoid said review bombing for the most part since Nintendo fans finally got both a proper Need for Speed entry on a Nintendo console for the first time since Most Wanted U in 2013, and a version of Criterion's Hot Pursuit to boot (not a weird soulless version of Nitro like the Wii got) while Hot Pursuit fans were pleased with that, although there were complaints about how just three cars were removed from Remastered (even though they were due to circumstancesbeyond EA's control). Though the addition of livery customization in the update might rectify some of the complaints from the Most Wanted 2005 fans, despite the lack of bodykits there.
Rivals also had issues that did not please various NFS fans. The frame rate was fixed to 30 frames per second all versions, which caused many headaches for PC fans (see Porting Disaster below). Car customization, although improved compared to the Criterion installments and The Run, was still somewhat limited in the eyes of tuner fans. Also, for a multiplayer-oriented game, six players maximum in a session is also rather limited, and despite being a full-priced game, it lacks the ability to pause the game. It did fix several problems that were in Hot Pursuit 2010 though, such as making its county an actual open world and maintaining Most Wanted 2012's improvements to Autolog.
The 2015 reboot. Tuner fans looked forward to the game with cautious optimism, but the classic fans saw it as EA caving in to the tuner fans' apparent whining over the previous installments' lack of "rice burners". It didn't help that EA's marketing basically said that the "real" Need for Speed was what the tuner-era games stood for, and current series creative director Marcus Nilsson stated that the reboot would set the template for future entries in the series. All this meant that classic-style Need for Speed wouldn't come back for a some time.
As both classic and tuner-era sides have bitter rivalry with each other, some NFS fans tend to Take a Third Option and root for both gameplay styles, which is, surprisingly, not maligned among these two camps. Especially evident with the return of exotics since 2005 Most Wanted, and police pursuits in most games since. Then there's even a small fragment of NFS fanbase who actually prefers the sim-style gameplay of ProStreet and the Shift games over the rest of the franchise.
Even among longtime fans, some Vocal Minority still beg for the playable police modes making a return in recent games after Rivals, which the feature has been absent since the 2015 game, even as a side mode ala Chasedown Mode in PS2/WiiUndercover.
Camera Screw: The Underground series and Most Wanted (2005) have a slo-mo jump camera. The jump camera would also trigger whenever you crashed into traffic hard enough to launch into the air. Hot Pursuit 2, Most Wanted (2005), Carbon, and Undercover all had slo-mo cameras for whenever you hit a police roadblock. Fortunately, in every game before Carbon, all of these cameras can be turned off.
Character Tiers: Car-based example: The series as a whole tends to divide cars into "Classes," putting similar cars into different classes (for example, putting high-performance sports cars like the Lamborghini Diablo VT and the Ferrari 512TR in their own Class) based on performance. Each game has its own system of organization. Averted with the Underground series, the original Most Wanted and every game published by Ghost, as the games don't feature any vehicle characterization tier.
The big one is over the Underground era, particularly with its (and by extension, World's) focus on aftermarket customization. Does modding the look of your car make it look like the most badass Pimped-Out Car there ever was, or does it make a finely-crafted machine look like an ugly-as-Hell Rice Burner?
Hot Pursuit 2010. Older fans love it for basically being a throwback, gameplay-wise, to the first four Need for Speed games with a little bit of Burnout formula such as boosts and takedowns. The reception from (sixth-and-early-seventh-gen-era) fans ranges from indifference to dislike due to the lack of vehicle customization beside colors.
Before that, it was Need for Speed: Underground, which threw out the countryside and natural Scenery Porn in favor of inner-city racing and also threw out million dollar exotics in favor of customizable JDM cars (although the exotics came back since Most Wanted 2005). However, the popularity of The Fast and the Furious, the JDM tuning scene, and MTV at the time introduced such a huge Newbie Boom that they ended up taking control of the franchise's identity fandom.
And going even further back, NFS II was this compared to the original, as it removed the cop chases and point-to-point tracks in favor of strict circuit racing. The backlash was strong enough that EA not only brought back cop chases in the first Hot Pursuit, but gave them far more importance than in the original (where they were mostly just a fun bonus).
Undercover was disliked by critics but really liked by tuner fans, who thought it was a more story-driven Carbon.
The most controversial case was for Most Wanted (2012). Critics hailed it as the best racing game of 2012 hands down, but it got a backlash from the tuner fandom (and also from longtime fans who saw it as an affront to the franchise for hijacking the name of the 2005 game). The dissonance was so massive that Criterion Games was downsized to around fifteen employees, resulting in the later departure of its founders and a new developer (Ghost Games) taking the reins of the franchise for The Eighth Generation of Console Video Games, which ultimately didn't work out so well for the NFS franchise.
While Hot Pursuit Remastered received weaker critical reception than the original release of Hot Pursuit (2010) for being a rather bare bones remaster, especially compared to other video game remasters released by then, it was still mostly positive. User reviews on Metacritic, however, have been much harsher on the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One versions' Metacritic entries, with harsher criticism towards the bare bones remastering to the point of calling it yet another EA cash grab, as well as some players shouting their desires for a remaster of a "superior" earlier installment. Oddly though, the Switch version has been more positively received by that platform's players, since this is the first Need for Speed game on a Nintendo console since 2013's Most Wanted U (and a more complete version than that game at that, since Most Wanted U only got one of its four DLC packs as standard and never received the rest), and it's a version of the original Criterion version of Hot Pursuit instead of some bland version of Nitro like what the Wii version got.
The opponents' AI in Shift and Shift 2: Unleashed will slow down just to block you off, making overtaking a bitch.
Previously in World, Rhino SUVs and road blocks, ever since an update to the game made it much harder to escape higher level pursuits. Players had to expect another of couple of each every ten seconds while escaping.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Yes, street racing and running from the police looks fun, but it is extremely dangerous in real life. A lot of the newer games to have warnings before the game starts state that it is merely a video game and should not be mimicked in real life.
High Stakes to III: Hot Pursuit. Despite being a Mission-Pack Sequel to the latter, High Stakes improves a lot in III's mechanics and graphics, adds new gameplay modes and mechanics (like visual customization and tuning, although the former was limited due to hardware restrictions) and polishes those that already existed, and adds new tracks while (in the PC version) retaining its predecessor's tracks.
Shift 2: Unleashed to Shift 1, specially after the 1.02 patch which corrected the jerky handling for controller users.
Also, Underground 2 to the first one, due to introducing an open world. And Most Wanted (2005) to both Underground games, as they brought back the series staples such as supercars and police pursuits.
Event-Obscuring Camera: Hot Pursuit 2 rotates the camera around the car when doing a major jump, making it impossible to see what's ahead until you land.
Shift 2: Unleashed gets the Need for Speed name attached to the beginning by fans anyway since it still uses NFS branding, giving it the lengthy title of Need for Speed: Shift 2 – Unleashed, in reference to the logo, among other things.
The 2015 reboot had a few.
Shortly after its release (though now more rarely) it was called Need for Speed: Underground 3, despite Ghost Games explicitly stating that it's not.
PC gamers and PC Gaming Wiki call it Need for Speed (2016), since it did not come out on Windows until that year.
Fanon Discontinuity: Almost every entry in the franchise falls into the "discontinuity" for some fans. For oldschool ones, it's everything after Hot Pursuit 2 (although they accept the existence of Hot Pursuit 2010, and maybe Most Wanted 2012 and Rivals). For Underground fans, everything after Carbon, but they accept the existence of Undercover and Nitro, and believe that the 2015 reboot is what the franchise needed. They also wanted more recent franchise developers like (of all studios) Criterion Games to stop making Need for Speed games, which in the case of that developer actually did happen.
In 2012, between Criterion's Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Playground Games' first Forza Horizon.
The current era (the 2015 reboot onward) goes up against Gran Turismo Sport and Forza (especially Forza Horizon, but only during that series' off-years) per the norm, plus The Crew 1 and 2 (although the fans of the Underground era — which the reboot took its overall gist from — tends to get along just fine with The Crew series' fandom, although there are the more rabid fanboys which take the trope to its logical conclusion). Driveclub also competed early on, but lost out to everyone else, not helped by its developer Evolution Studios folding and closing roughly a year and a half after the game's release.note Ironically, most of the personnel of Evolution would later go to Codemasters, who in turn were later brought by EA and put in charge of assisting Criterion in developing future Need for Speed games.
The Need for Speed had three game breakers, one for each car class.
Class C had the Toyota Supra Turbo, which was really a Class B car put into Class C due to its low top speed and to avoid overcrowding the B-class. It did 0-60 mph in 5.0 seconds flat, when its competitors - the RX-7 and the NSX - did it in 5.5 seconds and 5.8, respectively, and had responsible handling and traction control. Its stats are so beefy that its C-class peers have a hard time beating it, and the Supra rivals or even surpasses most B-class cars! note The Corvette ZR-1 and the Porsche 911 do 0-60 in 5.2 seconds, and the former has unresponsive handling and the latter is a rear-engined, rear-wheel drive car. Read, it's extremely twitchy in turns. The only time a Supra can be defeated by B- and A-class opponents is in long straightaways, where its weak top speed shows.
Class B had the Dodge Viper RT-10, which is to Class B what the Supra is to Class C. 0-60 in 4.8 seconds versus its peers' 5.2, and handles much better than its rivals. Though it also lacks the top speed advantage, its acceleration and handling give enough of an advantage over opponent cars to make winning B-class races significantly easier.
Class A had the Ferrari 512TR, simply because its rival, the Lamborghini Diablo, suffers from heavy understeer while the 512TR doesn't. The only places a 512TR loses to the Diablo are, just like the Supra, in long straightaways where the Diablo's higher top speed wins. Other than that, the 512TR will almost always be topping the charts in races, especially because the Diablo is often the only car able to compete with it, outside of an extremely skilled Supra or Viper driver.
The bonus car FZR 2000 of Need for Speed II is the fastest car to ever have appeared in the series. Its top speed is rivaled by some of the most powerful cars in Rivals and NFS 2015 (although, with the "pioneer" cheat, it becomes significantly faster), but its acceleration is humongously powerful note It goes from 0 to 200 mph practically in a blink and its handling puts that of the Ford Indigo and the Lotus cars to shame. It says enough that its brakes only really have to be used when jumping would make it leave the track boundaries or crash into a wall due to how impossibly long they are with the FZR 2000.
The McLaren F1 can be considered a Game Breaker for the entire series. Given its then-unrivaled top speed, great acceleration and very good handling, it often took GT1, concept or bonus cars or tracks without long straights to have something realistically stand a chance against it, and even then, its possession of world records were often uncontested. Even in modern games, where significantly more powerful cars exist, it is still a top contender due to its amazing handling or great tuning potential on games that allow so, only struggling in very long straights.
The Nissan 370Z (Z34) was this in Undercover even in the patched version. While being a Jack of All Stats for a Tier 3 car early in the game, it can invoke this when fully tuned (despite it's sluggish handling). As a result, it's fast enough to humiliate the Tier 1 cars including the BUGATTI VEYRON! However, the 370Z recieved a Nerf in newer installments (While it becomes this again as in The Run).
In Most Wanted 2012, the Everyday car class contains the Audi A1 Clubsport quattro, a pocket rocket with 496bhp and a 0-100km/h time of 3.7s.
The Koenigsegg One:1 systematically slaughters all of the other vehicles in Rivals. It has the highest top end speed in the game, it has very strong acceleration and great handling, and it is rather bulky for being a hypercar. The best thing? It's a FREE DLC car. Yes, it might be unlocked at the end of the game, but at that time it's more than certain you can use this vehicle without screwing up.
In the 2015 reboot, everyone and their grandmother uses the Lamborghini Huracán and Aventador, the 2015 Ford Mustang GT, and the 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RSR 2.8 (including Magnus's "277" and Nakai-san's "Stella Artois"), as they have the overall best performance in the game when fully upgraded.
The 911 Carrera RSR 2.8 in particular has been by far the best car in each game from 2015 to Heat. On stock parts its top speed is usually nothing to write home about, but it has always the best handling and best acceleration out of the box thanks to its absurdly lightweight chassis. Once you buy it in 2015, Payback or Heat it will likely be the only car you'll be using from that point onwards, particularly in Heat where it even got BUFFED in its best areas. In Payback it was joined by the Volkswagen Beetle and the Koenigsegg Regera, but both received sizable nerfs in Heat. And finally in Unbound, the RSR has recieved a huge, painful nerf where not only its top-speed is capped in 225 MPH but its acceleration and handling have become much less effective. As result, the car will now choke when attempting to compete with far more powerful cars like the Regera and the (recently added) Bugatti Chiron in S+ Class (as the latter two can reach more than 240 MPH while leaving the former in the dust).
In the Black Box installments (mainly during drag races), the Criterion installments (although for them, it could be considered usual fare), some races in No Limits, and the Ghost Games installments (remember that several Ghost Games employees originally came from Criterion), the oncoming traffic appears to know exactly where to place themselves to be an obstacle.
Cops in the 2015 game especially fall under this for those going for the prestige medals. Not only do they swerve in front of the player, but they prevent the player from immediately restarting in the case of a mistake.
In Rivals, if you trigger Turbo and immediately start an event after that, the boost provided by Turbo will overcome the car's brakes, and you'll begin the event some distance beyond the start line and traveling at a small, but not insignificant, speed. It can help a lot for getting a few extra seconds on your opponents.
A rather infamous one in Undercover: If your tires get punctured during a police chase, you can go to settings, switch damage off, then back on, and the tires (alongside any other damage received by your car) will automatically regenerate. While most people usually shrug off any other damage to the car since they're still driveable, regenerating punctured tires can be quite useful since they almost always ensure getting busted by the police.
High Stakes had a Take That! towards Rice Burners in its opening cinematic, in which a riced-out Honda Civic Expy challenges a Porsche 911 to a race. When the race starts, the Porsche takes off while the Civic expy barely moves an inch before its engine explodes and a Corvette and two Diablos pass it too. Considering that EA would experiment its best NFS sales when they moved the franchise towards tuning culture with Underground, just 4 years after High Stakes...
"Fever for the Flava" contains the line "I got the green glow under my car", and it was featured in Hot Pursuit 2, the last Need for Speed game pre-Underground. EA Black Box, who developed the PS2 version, probably took the note.
Undercover had a mission titled "Payback" where you take down Nickel, a black guy. Payback features a black protagonist Mac.
Since the release of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2010, the game drew some ire from various fans due to its drifting mechanics being similar to Burnout Paradise's and other reasons such as the lack ofaftermarket customization. This carried over to Most Wanted 2012 in particular, as it was much closer to the open-world Burnout game than Hot Pursuit 2010.
Memetic Badass: The pizza traffic car from Most Wanted (2005) became this after being originally slated to reappear inCarbonnote It only appeared in the early PlayStation 2 demo, and the modding community taking advantage of putting it in every Black Box game as a playable vehicle like the aforementioned Carbon, Undercover and ProStreet.
"I SAID RIGHT NOW!"ExplanationA line uttered by Officer Danny Shaw in the reveal trailer for Heat, which made rounds within the community because of the line's overly dramatic delivery. It helps that it appears to be a Shout-Out to the "EVERYONE!" meme from the 2005 Most Wanted.
pfft nerdsExplanationThe NFS Twitter account's reply to a poorly worded tweet by Toyota UK which explained the brand's absence from Heat. Toyota's tweet has since been deleted from the backlash that ensued, particularly because when one looked up the list of current active series that have Toyota/Lexus vehicles in them, two of them (Initial D Arcade Stage and Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune) involve illegal street racing, which ran counter to what was asserted in the tweet, that Toyota "does not want to be associated with street racing". Recently, Toyota only allows Japanese game developers to feature the said manufacturer's cars, much as how Porsche did when Electronic Arts started their exclusive license from 2000 to 2016.
Whoa, Black Betty! (Bam-ba-lam!) Yeah, Black Betty! (Bam-ba-lam!)ExplanationSomehow, "Black Betty" by Spiderbait (which is featured in Underground 2) has recently become a meme among the fanbase after an obnoxiously loud renditionof the song was played in one of KuruHS' streams and inevitably jumpscared the said streamer off guard.
510 ExplanationThe trailer for the 2020 remaster of Criterion's Hot Pursuit features someone challenging his friend to beat his time of 5:10.42 in the event Hotting Up, which said friend does with a time of 5:09.78. This trailer was perceived as a challenge to the fans that still have the original game to beat that time, which one Youtuber not only managed to achieve, with a time of 5:09.59, but they did it with the Mazda RX-8, a car from the slowest performance category on the racer side (The RX-8 is a Street Series car, whereas the event uses the 2nd-fastest Exotic Series).
Most Wonderful Sound: Hot Pursuit 2010 gives us that F1-style roar during the turbo sequence. Just listen! It came back for Rivals, too.
The console and PC releases of Undercover were shipped with severe frame rate issues. Absolute death in a high-speed racing game. The PS3, PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game at least got a patch that (mostly) fixes the frame rate issues, but ramped up the difficulty of the races as well. ProStreet had some framerate issues, too, but it didn't make the game unplayable.
The 2015 reboot was released on consoles without even a manual transmission option, which was a standard feature even in arcade racing games before the Criterion era. Some players even found a non-functioning "Semi-adjustable Gearbox" part, suggesting transmission tuning was cut. The PC version was delayed by 4 months to prevent the porting issues Rivals had. By the time the PC version came out, every version of the game was updated to include a manual transmission option, but other problems came to light: gear ratios for most cars were not only un-adjustable, but wildly inaccurate, and most cars magically grew extra gears when power upgrades not related to the transmission were added. A Civic can have up to 8 speeds in this game.
Older Than They Think: Burnout-like physics (bar Nitro Boost) was not introduced in the series by Criterion Games, but already appeared in Need for Speed II SE's Wild (the way cars crashed, the extreme speeds and the long jumps) and Arcade handling modes (heavy drifting). Keep in mind this was before Burnout even existed...
Downplayed with earlier games in the series, which was less of a poor port and more of the console not being good enough to keep up with a PC. For instance, the PlayStation version of Need for Speed II was very similar in both graphics and gameplay to the PC version, but as more games were released those ports could not catch up, up until Porsche Unleashed, which was basically unrecognizable.
Subverted with Hot Pursuit 2. Though the GameCube, Xbox, and Windows versions all look much worse than the PlayStation 2 version despite all of them being more powerful, as well as having less content and worse gameplay, this is not because of a porting disaster, but rather because the PlayStation 2 version was developed by a completely different company—Black Box's debut NFS title for that matter—whereas the rest were developed by EA Seattle as their last NFS title.
Some PSP versions of NFS games, while drastically different, can be considered a big downgrade compared to console counterparts. ProStreet PSP in particular is the worst offender since it throws out the plot for a generic career system. Shift PSP version also gets a major flak by many fans (especially players who get used to console versions) for recycling ProStreet plots into a PSP title, and can easily get tired quickly save for That One Boss.
While not exactly a port as such, the PlayStation 2 and Wii versions of Undercover are considered by reviewers as nothing more than just cash-ins for fans who don't have a more premium system, and therefore, the superior version. The visuals are worse than Carbon's, despite being two years younger, the frame rate is (amazingly) worse than the 360/PS3 versions, and the game's landscapes aren't actually new; they're actually just various roads and highways from both Most Wanted 2005 and Carbon clobbered together. On top of that, it still suffers various problems that griped the superior versions (i.e. the glaring, shiny street effect). The only saving grace the original lacked was the ability for players to drive cop cars in a minigame trying to bust street racers around, similar to those in Hot Pursuit titles.
The Wii version of Hot Pursuit 2010. Bear in mind how the game was praised for dragging the series out of the stale tuner street racing theme and returning to its roots. The Wii version is effectively Nitro, but without a cartoonish style and several new courses and cars from the more mainstream versions. Everything else however? Nearly identical. You can still modify the look of your car, which, given the car selection, is tragically hilarious.
The PC version of Rivals takes this up to eleven. The cutscenes are unskippable and the frame rate is hardlocked at 30 FPS... on a platform that can easily handle such a game on 60 FPS or higher. What's worse, if someone tried to force the FPS caps off on the PC version, the game loses control of the physics of the car, effectively making the game unplayable.TotalBiscuit shares his thoughts on the PC port here. Fortunately, according to the PCGamingWiki, it is possible to set the game to 60 FPS without this double speed issue with two command lines, with the caveat that the game will run slow for the rest of the session if it dips below the user-defined threshold.
The 2015 game's PC version falls into it in spite of Ghost Games' efforts, though not too much. The biggest issue is that the interface is very uncomfortable when using a keyboard (to the point it's not even the default controller option), with questionable choices like getting to the objectives menu by pressing Tab instead of Escape, or getting into events by pressing PgDn, and you only press the Enter key in the splash screen. It also makes no use whatsoever of the mouse for menu navigation (which while not new for the series, the interface could have taken advantage of it), and you cannot change the game settings once you start playing. And the Xbox One controller shows up during the first loading screen the game shows after loading. It's not to the extent of Rivals, but PC players get the worst experience of the game out of all platforms unless you own hardware that let you play it as if it were a console game (e.g. joysticks).
Need for Speed Payback also suffers from lags and stutters in higher settings and especially if excessive amount of lights (such as police chases or in city areas) are presents. It even lags and stutters in an RTX build!
Downplayed with the PC version of Hot Pursuit Remastered; although it finally got all the original DLC for the first time, the textures are ports of the lower-texture ones from the original PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions. Thankfully, a fan has provided a mod that restores the original PC version's higher-res textures.
There's artificial input lag in The Run, making going too fast actually detrimental if you don't know the track well enough.
Some games discourage players from replaying a race to earn money, resulting with no rewards as in Underground 2 and Undercover, or pathetically low payout like in Carbon.
The incredibly unforgiving crash physics of High Stakes (on the PlayStation version developed by EA Canada) and Underground hardly give you control over your car. You'll just have to hope to get back on your wheels as soon as you can.
Sequel Displacement: To put it bluntly, this is what tore up the fanbase. The Underground games and 2005's Most Wanted became so successful that it changed people's perceptions of what the franchise is and is not. Unfortunately, the problem was that there was already an existing devoted fanbase beforehand. When EA went back to the classic style in Hot Pursuit 2010, the older fans were mostly pleased, but the newer fans (which seems to be the majority of the current fanbase) were not. EA tried to rectify this with the World MMORG released the same year, but since it was a mediocre Allegedly Free Game that (although initially somewhat popular) didn't receive that much attention from the fanbase or video game journalists, it didn't really work and was shut down in July 2015. Ghost Games' 2015 series reboot took cues mainly from the second era's games as a result.
Car customization to the point that it, above all other aspects found in the series, is what groups of fans affiliate the franchise with.
Police pursuits were the original gold saucer for the franchise, as fans would just race with cops simply for the thrill of the chase.
Silent Majority: Possibly for the Criterion installments. Mention Hot Pursuit 2010 or Most Wanted 2012 on a forum or in the comments of a news posting or a YouTube video about NFS and you'll get some heated reactions from the tuner side of the fanbase. However, both those games still sold well (Most Wanted 2012 even outsold 2011's The Run, Black Box's last game in the series), they both made Watch Mojo's list of the Top 10 Need for Speed Games,note Hot Pursuit 2010 at #8 and Most Wanted 2012 at #6, although Hot Pursuit 2 and Most Wanted 2005 ranked higher at #3 and #2, respectively. The top 5 were wrapped up by Black Box-developed installments however. and during the 2014 Steam Holiday Sale, Hot Pursuit 2010note The game was released on Steam before EA switched to using their Origin service for new PC game releases until 2020. was put up against Slender: The Arrival and Halo: Spartan Assault as a Community Choice vote for a bonus discount and won, and in 2020, it was announced that a remaster of the game (the first ever in the NFS series) would be released.
Some say this about Most Wanted 2012. The professional critics, however, hailed it as the best thing since sliced bread.
Rivals got lower review scores than the above-mentioned title, but it is still considered a good arcade racer. The writer of this article shares this sentiment. It wasn't that Most Wanted 2012 and Rivals were bad (they were perfectly competent games themselves), it's just that—despite Most Wanted 2012's surreal cutscenes—they lacked personality, which the Fast & Furious-inspired Underground games had in spades.
Earl in Most Wanted 2005 served as this for a lot of people, usually due to the aforementioned Rubber-Band A.I., because at that stage of the game the cars available are not as maneuverable as they should be for his final course, so although the player will usually outpace Earl for the vast majority of it, when the player gets to the last 15% or so of the course the rubber-banding would kick in and Earl would accelerate enormously, and if the player made even the tiniest mistake in turning the ridiculously sharp corners—which would almost always happen—Earl would be going so fast that the player would find it impossible to catch up in time.
Darius, the Final Boss of Carbon. His car is an Audi Le Mans Quattro (Audi R8 Concept Car) which has all of the advantages that most of the other cars don't and requires the player to use almost perfect skills with a tier 3 car (likely a Porsche Carrera GT, a Dodge Viper SRT-10, a highly-tuned Nissan Skyline or a highly-tuned Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, etc.) that's very competitive.
All the Boss Battle in Canyon are this as they're scripted from ramming them off and easily catch you up in the second run.
The Miami circuits in Shift 2: Unleashed are really awful. The curbs on gentle curves can spin your car out with ease and even with the skill to avoid spinning you'll be fishtailing for quite a while. Even with Traction Control, Best Line and ABS, you'll still get rammed into the wall from other racers bumping into you from the side.
In the first Shift, the tight Tokyo tracks are problematic since the other AI racers will relentlessly push you over and almost ruin your winning chances (think of them as the same tracks from ProStreet, but in reverse direction). Not to mention The Green Hell Nurburgring tracks are bitches to complete with the AI racers driving aggressively. Made worse by the that that ever since Underground 1, the Rubber-Band A.I. got more annoying by each installment.
Mystic Peaks in Need for Speed II is one of the most difficult circuits in the series, with a lot of hard turns (some of them being blind turns), jumps in which you actually have to slow down in order not to leave the track or collide hard with a wall (more obvious in Wild mode) and very tight space that does not leave much opportunities to overtake. Excellent driving skills are needed here, especially in Simulation mode, and even then you may have to resort to excellent-handling cars like the Ford Indigo and the FZR2000 to not do an Epic Fail.
Any late-game Interceptor event in Hot Pursuit 2010 can become this, thanks to the computer's cheating bastardry. The racers have infinite ammo for their weapons and are slowed down much less by your own weapons than they are in Hot Pursuits; for instance, spike strips do damage but barely slow them down, while they can plow through road blocks with minimal loss of speed. The nitrous system for police means it's hard for you to earn nitrous to catch up with them, while one of your primary means of getting nitrous (slipstreaming behind racers) is inexplicably disabled. To make matters worse, you're stuck with what weapons the event gives you, so you might have a loadout that's incredibly poor for chasing a single car; good luck stopping a Bugatti with nothing but road blocks and spikes. They're much better in Rivals due to several small tweaks in gameplay, including the ability to restock weapons at repair shops and a lack of weapon restrictions.
The Nitrocide: Nevada Highway raceday event in ProStreet counts as well, even for the experienced players. The lineup of cars running every race in the said event include the entire Boxcut crew (with one of them running a Pagani Zonda F), two of the hard hitters from Ryo's Apex Glide team, and two random street racers with cars that can go up against them on equal grounds. And that's not even counting the highway track itself which is one of, if not the hardest speed course in the entire game, with narrow, bumpy, and shaky cam-inducing roads and street poles making fun to OHKO any player.
Visual Effects of Awesome: Throughout its history, NFS games have been known for being among the best-looking racing games for their time.
Sometimes, it's the little details that make them stand out. Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit and Need for Speed II: Special Edition with Glide support not only had convincing looking road reflections while it was raining, but the headlights of other cars were even stretched like you've seen many times driving behind someone in the rain.
Hell, even some of the games' menus can look good. Case in point, Need for Speed II◊.
The 2015 reboot in particular looks damn close to a live-action film, with seamless transitions from live-action footage to in-game engine visuals.
that, yes, really does field Veyrons
