I don't want NFS to turn into a half-assed sim, a la GRiD, DiRT, and other weirdly acronym'd games. I want to get into a Lambo sitting 12mm off the ground and fly around city streets with 18 foot trails of nitro flames coming from the 6 exhausts protruding from my rear windscreen. I want to connect to the internet and instantly be landed in a line with 3 other cars that look like they drove through a lego factory, covered in double-sided sticky tape. It's completely unrealistic, and that's its market.
There's proper sims for when I want to actually feel like I'm driving a car, like LFS and rFactor. This new concept is going to be terrible. True simmers will despise it because it brands itself as a sim, yet still has arcade physics*. The old NFS followers will despise it because they can't drive over speed ramps at 450km/h in their slammed FWD ricebox. They're going to put into a niche of a niche market. It's just going to fail from all sides, which is a shame...If EA had their heads screwed on, they'd make a shiny new HD "underground" type game, to rival midnight club or burnout paradise. It might still be flogging the cash cow, but at least the "old" NFS followers would be happy they have a new game to play, and the simmers would be happy because they can stay well awya from it.
I'll certainly give it a chance if/when a demo is released, but I'm not holding out any hope for it...
My 1.21p
* - For example, look at the Laguna Seca vid Furiously-Fast posted above. Look at 0.38-ish, when the Porsche slams into the Beemer. I've seen enough Le Mans to know that if one car hits another car at 90°, they don't rub along each other and continue as if they avoided each other. We're led to believe that one touring car has smacked into another one at speeds well in excess of 60mph, yet they both come out completely unscathed, and the one that was T-boned even continues in a straight line? Sorry, that's not very accurate, and that's just the first thing I noticed watching the first vid I've seen of "Shift" (which holds a different meaning altogether in Ireland
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