EA Announces Need For Speed Rivals, To Be Released Later This Year
EA has announced their latest game in the Need for Speed series, titled Need For Speed Rivals. You can expect to see it come out on both the current and next gen consoles, which include the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, the PS3 and PS4, and even the PC. The Wii U doesn’t look like it’ll be getting the game, however, mostly due to the fact that the Frostbite 3 engine being used for the game won’t work on the system.
From the start it sounds pretty similar to EA’s NFS game 3 years ago, Hot Pursuit. It’s set in a giant fictitious county and the environment is completely open, and players can take on the role of either a street racer or a police officer. However, what makes Rivals different is that EA is introducing AllDrive, where essentially gamers will be able to enter and exit their friend’s “county” seamlessly and “on-the-fly”. An example that EA’s spokesperson gave is that if you and a buddy are chasing different suspect on a different part of the map, and you two end up meeting up, at that point the game will transition into a co-op state where scoring and objectives get changed as well. It’s a pretty cool idea, but with EA’s track record I’m a little nervous.
After all, you might expect EA to go and force the game to be always online, even after the SimCity fiasco. Luckily for NFS fans, that’s not the case: according to Marcus Nilsson “You can play this alone with a disconnected box as much as you want. It will work with AI in the open world, and it will take you through the single-player progression of the game. That’s something that is very dear to us, and foremost Need for Speed is a game that you play through yourself.” Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re not going to push AllDrive, but at least it’s good to know that you’ll still be able to play the game even if the servers all crash. You can expect to see Rivals come out for the Xbox 360 and PS3 on November 19th, and the PS4, Xbox One, and PC versions coming out “later this year”.
