On the whole, so far, this year’s Need for Speed title has appeared to be pretty damn good. The game sounds great, evoking the classic fan favorite Need for Speed Underground games, it looks absolutely stunning (and apparently everything we have seen is in game footage representative of how the game will look on all three systems upon release), and developers Ghost Games are just saying all the right things.
That said, they may have made one crucial error of calculation- speaking on their Twitter account, the developers have apparently confirmed that the game will require an always online internet connection. ‘NFS will require an online connection, but the benefits are nice. More variety and a more rewarding experience with friends,’ they said.
Personally, I cannot understand why they would go this route- without exception, games which require an online connection have turned out to be monumental disasters, such as Diablo III, fellow racing game The Crew, or EA’s own SimCity, which is perhaps the most infamous case of the fallouts of necessitating an always online connection from all players.
It is possible that the tweet is just misworded (though it’s been a few hours, and we still have not yet received a follow up), and that there will be more to this that will be clarified come E3, but as it stands right now, the developers have managed to kill all the hype for a game that was actually doing pretty well for itself in one fell swoop.
