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| EA admits mistakes in NFS development |
Wednesday, 22.09.2010 |
 According to  CVG John Ricitello talked about the development of Need for Speed and admitted mistakes, which caused the decline in both sales and quality:
"I'll tell you a story. If you went back to when I first got into the games industry, 1997, Need For Speed was a really strong title.
"I'd come into EA just after we'd shipped a couple of relatively miserable ones. Our Need For Speed business was off... dramatically. We came up with this idea of putting a cop in the game. Suddenly this whole cat and mouse, cops and chasing thing blew the roof off."
"We had several consecutive years of growth. We reached a bit of a lull period and came up with Underground which has sort of that night-time vibe and lightning which brought it to new heights - north of 10 million units for the franchise."
"In the '04 to '07 period, we had a single studio, Black Box, up in Vancouver, building our [NFS games]. And we literally had them on a death march building for five years in a row. [They were] annual iterations, they had to put it out; no rest for the weary.
"It'd happened before - games publishers do this from time to time. We should have put them on two-year alternating cycles but we didn't. And the title declined dramatically. We started to lose people. they didn't want to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
"It was definitely our fault. Those days are gone. We're back in two studios and we've got them on bi-annual cycles. We made really great progress... with a strong entry last year, which was more of a simulation game.
"This year [with Hot Pursuit, NFS] is right back in the core action driving... it's had a two-year dev cycle... I feel great about it."
And indeed the Slightly Mad Studios made a successful relaunch of the series with Need for Speed Shift last year and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit from Criterion Games, which is being released in November 2010, appears to be a good title as well.
EA Black Box on the other hand concentrates on the long-term project Need for Speed World and develops extensions and new features for the free-to-play onlineracer.
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Comments (2) |
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| #2: von Shocker
(22.09.2010 23:41) |
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No, as written in the news, NFS Shift was developed by Slightly Mad Studios and NFS Hot Pursuit by Criterion Games. There is a rumor of NFS Shift 2, which is likely to come from Slightly Mad Studios again. 
Black Box is developing NFS World and will continue to do so... 
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mfg
Shocker
www.nfsplanet.com |
| #1: von goku1910
(22.09.2010 23:01) |
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Black Box?
Does this mean Black Box will have a 2 year dev cycle for NFS Shift 2, etc?
NFS Shift was a good idea, but the quality on the performance was lacking.
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