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Need For Speed:The Run looks cinematic for a reason

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Need for Speed: The Run

Another year, another Need for Speed game, right? Love or hate the franchise, it’s always nice to know that we can expect a new racing game from EA and their development studios at the same time every year.

Last year, we had the return of Hot Pursuit, while earlier this year, we went back to the tracks. Now, NFS: The Run looks set to carve a new direction for the franchise, as a storyline is once again introduced to the genre, while the action heats up in a manner with enough explosives and natural disasters that would make Michael Bay himself proud.

In fact, that’s the exact reason why developer Black Box Studios is using the Battlefield engine.

The engine, which was created by DICE for Battlefield 3, has brought a cinematic quality to the upcoming racer, according to Executive Producer Jason DeLong. “When they decided to split the development across Criterion and Black Box to give each studio the time and development to create a quality experience, one of the things that we obviously had to do was to reinvest in our technology, because we hadn’t been able to because of the yearly cycles in the past”, DeLong said in an interview with Gamasutra.

“So we looked at several options. Do we advance the engine that we currently have? What other third party ones are out there? And when we realised the game that we wanted to make, which we knew was based in a cinematic kind of Hollywood storytelling fashion, we looked at Frostbite and it seemed like, ‘Well, it’s internal; we can work closely with the dev team’: it was the right choice.”

“It allowed us to get a character in the game, have incredible, believable characters in addition to amazing worlds and amazing looking cars.”

“Their visual effects work is second to none; the world destruction, their audio is incredible. And most importantly, one of the nice side benefits was that it’s an incredibly content-driven tool, which allowed us to create more content than we’ve ever done before.”

For the Frostbite 2 engine, this is the very non-DICE studio or game to use the package. Black Box however, did work with the Swedish developer to make certain that the engine was used properly, with Delong commenting that the collaboration allowed for a “very deep racing mechanic of handling physics into the game”.

“We did a cross-studio development on the Frostbite 2 engine that we’re using”, DeLong said. “And yeah, it was a lot of collaboration and work with them to get things like our road tool, which is our internal tool that allows us to build a track very quickly.”

If you’re still wondering if the game is a worthwhile addition to your library, then check out Nicks views on the demo from yesterday.

As for everyone else, Need For Speed: The Run launches next month on every single console or handheld device, with the core game going to the PS3, PC and Xbox 360.

Last Updated: October 20, 2011

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