NFS Hot Pursuit bekommt Unterstützung von DICE
NFS Hot PursuitDas schwedische Entwicklerstudio DICE, das u.a. Battlefield und Mirror's Edge entwickelt, wurde maßgeblich an der Entwicklung von Need for Speed Hot Pursuit beteiligt. Das Ziel war es, eine Karte zu erstellen, die viermal so groß sein soll, wie die Stadt aus Burnout Paradise. Criterion Games hat beschlossen, statt den Städten aus den bisherigen NFS Titeln auf blühende Landschaften und weitläufige Wüsten zu setzen. DICE hat darin wohl einen guten Job gemacht:
"It's been a great collaboration actually. Early on we set style guides for what we wanted to create out of this game, to offer players the ability to see a wide variety of types of environments from the deserts to the mountains to the forest to the coastal routes and so forth.
We started talking to them about what we wanted to do and they got excited about the project; they have a very talented team of artists at DICE led by Johannes Söderqvist, their art director. We created all the roads here, we did a lot of work to get the gameplay right before we made it look pretty. They took those roads and those style guides and delivered 110 per cent on what we were looking for with the final result."
Hauptaugenmerk in NFS Hot Pursuit liegt voll und ganz auf den Wagen und wie sie zur Schau gestellt werden. Das geht in Wüstenschauplätzen und Landstraßen besser als in Städten und so soll sich Hot Pursuit auch klar von Burnout Paradise und den letzten NFS Titeln von EA Black Box unterscheiden:
"We do have some towns and stuff in here but this is about driving on the ultimate roads with these really powerful machines - the last place you want to do that is in a city.
In general, in Need for Speed in the past, putting the game in a city has been really challenging because if you want to make it a convincing city with a city grid, that's not going to be much fun to drive so you end up having to bend the roads round and the city looks a bit odd. It doesn't make the game more fun to play having buildings all around. I actually think getting the road splines perfect is the key to making the games fun."
Quelle: NFS-Planet - Need for Speed Shift, Nitro, World Online, Undercover