NFS WORLD: ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE: EPISODE 5

Submitted by Eduardo Agostini on Thu, 2010-04-15 20:55

Ready for some eye-candy? Have you been chomping at the bit for some new info regarding NFS World? Are you experiencing withdrawl symptoms since Closed Beta 3 ended? If you answered yes to all three of those questions, then this episode will surely help to quench your thirst.

First things first, wanted to kick things off with a mini movie review of a flick I watched a couple of weeks back. I had it on my PVR for months and finally got around to watching it. Fast Track: No Limits. Made in 2008 and set in Berlin, it's a fairly low budget Fast and the Furious wannabe. The highlight of the movie was me doing a double take when I saw NFS Carbon on screen! There's a fairly good clip of some kids playing NFS Carbon in the background in what is meant to echo the illlegal street racing themes of the movie. It was interesting to see their take on the culture and I'd like to think some of it was inspired by NFS. Other than some decent racing sequences, the acting was fairly average and the plot was pretty weak. If anyone out there's seen this movie, let me know what you thought!

Here's the trailer for the movie if anyone is interested.

By now some of you may be saying, "Quit stalling...let's hear about NFS World!", so let's do just that. In the spirit of past episodes, I'm going to continue with some before/after shots highlighting the upgrades and renovations we've been doing in the environments. This time, however, I've enlisted the help of the World Garage community. I recently asked them to take screens from Carbon and Most Wanted of areas they were interested in seeing. While the before/after shots won't be direct comparisons, they should jog your memory to what it used to look like so you can appreciate what we've done with it for NFS World. And since there's an abundance of shots out there of Silverton, Rosewood and Downtown Palmont, I'll focus on areas you've seen very little of. Some of these are still work in progress, so just bear in mind that it can only get better.

New, larger Ferris Wheel, animating neon, improved textures, and updated panorama. A static shot doesn't do it justice!

Still work in progress. A peek at Downtown Rockport and some of its new architecture. Still needs a solid lighting pass.

Rockport Stadium interior looking sharper than ever. Imagine the car shows being held in here! New skyline in the background!

Our beach drive is now lovingly called Zombie Road by the locals. A surfer's paradise. Sharper textures and a much nicer panorama!

Side dressing was overhauled. Some weak looking buildings replaced by cooler industrial moments. Roads and walls looking much crisper.

So what have the artists been up to lately? After having spent a few weeks killing many, many bugs, we are back to revamping the final few areas of the world. Downtown Rockport is about 65% complete and the new scenic moments we've added are some of my favorite in the entire game. We're also been tackling the Palmont Highway which has some great vistas that are undergoing complete remodeling. As we approach the final stretches of our global renovation, we sometimes tend to be our own worst critics (or maybe it's just me never being completely satisfied). In the past month, we've also squeezed a bit more polish in Chinatown and Silverton and when I look back at the shots from CB3 that many of you have taken, I can't help but feel satisfied that it's looking even better now. In fact the art and rendering team has kicked so much @ss lately, that we're looking forward to a little trip to the theaters to watch Kick-Ass next week!

What else has been happening? Well, I have it on good authority that the next Closed Beta will be using our new build. Not sure when that will be rolled out, but I'm looking forward to seeing how you all feel it stacks up compared to the previous Closed Betas. I've seen a lot of the suggestions and critiques of our game from the Closed Beta testers and I think you'll start to see that many of the things you've been asking for are things we've been working on for the past three months in preparation for this build. Anything you see that's still missing is merely yet to come. Remember, the game you played was where we were at back in December. A lot of progress has been made since then.

Some quick comments based on things I've read here and there on various forum threads.

- There will most definitely be more variety in both vehicle type and colors with our traffic.

- Tire smoke is broken! We're investigating and working on finding a good balance of quality and performance. Pro Street style smoke will never work on our low end machines, but Carbon quality tire smoke just won't cut it anymore.

- The number of cool cars we've seen from CB3 is overwhelming! We've highlighted some of the cooler cars in past blogs, but this time around I think we're going to up the stakes. NFSKirk mentioned a contest a few days ago and I know plenty of you have been sending him images already. Follow the link and submit your car. We'll have a panel of judges (myself included) critique and pick an overall winner, but we're going to ask all of you to help narrow down the finalists.

- Saw some unofficial polls that asked what you all thought of the graphics for NFS World and was happy to see that they were all generally favorable. It's always a challenge to balance expectations when it comes to a game like NFS World that's free to download and needs to run on a very wide range of PCs. We'll never be the next Crysis, but we'll do everything we can to push our visuals as far as they can go for an online game. Hope you agree when you see our next build!

On that note, I'll leave you with a couple last pieces of eye candy to tide you over until next time. Since all the before/after shots were from Rockport, these will be from Palmont.