Need for Speed: Undercover

[tomas]

EA's Chef John Ricitello reveiled some details of the next Need for Speed at the William Blair & Company's annual growth stock conference: The game is called Need for Speed: Undercover and has a very strong mission structure, similar to "The Transporter". Additionally it has a huge embedded storyline, so it gets a narrative touch.

Since Ricitello was pretty disappointed with NFS ProStreet, we can hope that EA will learn from its mistakes. According to Ricitello the Need for Speed Dev-Team in Vancouver had been working for eight consecutive years on a 12 month development cycle. Last summer the team was split and now there are two teams on a 24 month cycle. Unfortunately NFS:Undercover will be only 16 months development time, but the next year's NFS will be a full two-year development cycle.

"We were torturing a very talented group of people up in Vancouver, which makes it harder to be as innovative every year. So, I think we are going to get better from here.

"I'm confident that Undercover is a much better game than Pro Street, and I expect that from this point forward they will do a lot better."

So, we will see what we can expect from NFS: Undercover. Maybe this name is only a working title, but the mission-based gameplay sounds quite promising. Already in Need for Speed Porsche you had to solve missions as the Porsche test driver, which kept you on the road. I think NFS: Undercover could be quite fun, if you have to achieve missions and get a good story behind it.

souce@nfsplanet