Just as a sanity check here for all people frustrated about prestige events;
I was a video game developer for around 25 years (do more cloud base architecture now) and found some *fantastic* elements in the game.
Their motion model is the best one on the Xbox platform...some might claim horizon 3 is better but swapping between the two...NFS has the best "video game" motion model.
Their use of green screens and in-game rendering (i.e. a video sequence kicks off and you see your car in the same garage as the real people)...*great idea and they should keep doing this in this years version of NFS*.
Regarding the prestige mode and the "last 'final' race prior to prestige and the last video sequence, this all felt like they were trying to achieve a certain number of "game play hours" in order to achieve their game title status within the Microsoft games market place (which is a technical certificate requirement <TCR> for high end games).
So, I will try to take a snapshot of the Robin drifting prestige challenge, but the long story short:
I have seen my score be ranked #1 at the very end prior to the "scoring" (i.e. highest top 3 scores in the top right corner)...but then I get like an 8th place in the final score...?
After reading all of the posts it seems that there are several issues with the prestige mode... one being the *explanation* of what needs to be accomplished with target *times* or *scores* required to achieve bronze, because they have nothing to do with the scoring in the top right corner...actually the other cars in the races don't even come close to the target times or scores...
So, they (Ghost) obviously had some form of kickback during the TCR (or TRC Sony and Microsoft use the same letters but they swap the last two letters) that forced them to add additional content that would rate the game for (X) number of hours of game play.
The final summary:
Their game was very well done all the way up to the very end...where it became very obvious that my "finished game reward" was the video sequence after the "final last" race...the prestige mode is just to give them a rating of single player game play hours which they obviously were being forced by corporate/$$/time oriented constraints and just didn't have the approval of EA (or other biz related peeps) to spend too much time on the "extended single player game play"...so they punted...
The biggest "no no" that I saw with this had little to do with the actual development team (Ghost) and seemed to be more a business decision.
I have been on games where I had expressed (as the lead and CTO of the game company I worked for at the time) adamantly that a certain "auto-detection" for a players bandwidth capabilities would fail...not because of code...but because of some ISPs in the world blocking specific ports used (at the time) on the live network to determine latency and capabilities. It turned out that when it hit the wild it did fail...and the publisher didn't really care.
The moral of the story... if a game is *really good* up to a very last section or one specific element...then most likely it has nothing to do with the developers and almost everything to do with the publishing company (sorry EA...you should have allocated more $$ and time to fix this last thing...if but to only appease your IP syndicate in order to assure strong sales for this years NFS release).
The final final words?
Yes, prestige is broken and really appears to be nothing but a development company jumping through hoops to meet a specific requirement to give their title a specific "ranking" within the market place to assure "highest return on investment"...and to boot it very well could be that to "fix" prestige mode required changes that would potentially break other elements...or the team and EA are so excited about the 2017 NFS that they figure it will make up for the horrible prestige mode "end of game unlock" (Live TCR/TRC imo).
If you beat the last race...that, in my opinion, was the "End game you win"....everything else is just nasty noise from the money making machines...which...in the end...as a gamer...we want companies to make money so they keep making games...
But yeah... EA.... you *really need* to spend that extra $$ (bling bling) towards the end of the project for your next NFS release to make sure this specific type of scenario doesn't happen again... there are so many elements in NFS that are *AWESOME*....so for sure make the next release...just don't punt on the last section...or follow the "expansion pack" model if you *must* make more $$ to meet your desired ROI.
Prestige is broken...for sure....and obviously will not get fixed as they are going to release the next iteration of NFS...
For those pissed...you won the game...prestige mode is just the blemish of bad corporate decisions...and nothing more than that... give the Ghost teams next iteration of NFS this year a shot...their game was fun enough to finish...if you there wasn't that "end of game unlock (prestige)"...how would you rate the game?
