Need For Speed To Get Reboot This Fall

It’s official: Need For Speed is being rebuilt from the ground up, and will be rebooted on Playstation 4, XBox One and PC this fall. The game will be created by Swedish developers Ghost Games and published by EA.

General manager Macus Nilson told Gamespot that during the downtime between the last Need For Speed released in 2013 and the new current-gen title announced for now, he had some time to think about the series, what fans wanted from it, and whether he was delivering on those expectations.

“Need for Speed needs to understand what it really is,” he said. “What are the core values of the brand, what are the types of experiences that we want to give to gamers? And sometimes it can be hard to do that when you have different development teams in different parts of the world. So the theory, or the strategy, for us was to become the owners of Need for Speed.”

Nilson said that the studio ultimately decided to rebuild the series from the ground up and start fresh. What that actually means won’t be fully explained until E3, but he did provide a fair amount of information for now. For one thing, there’s going to be a more aggressive attempt at telling a story within the game. This is going to be difficult to pull off because out of all the genres of video games out there, racers register fairly low in the necessity of story. We’ll see if they can do it.

There will also be a revamped online mode of which Nilson wasn’t specific about, but he did mention it would be a further advancement of what players experienced in Need For Speed Rivals. He closed out the discussion by saying he felt the racing genre was becoming crowded and it was harder for any one game to stand out. Nilson feels the changes he’s making to NFS will help the series in that regard.