- Please consider this topic irrelevant and closed as NFSHPR no longer appears to be supported, since it has not received any updates or patches for an extended period of time... -
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2010 was an interesting choice to give the remaster treatment, generating useful debate across the community concerning what a remaster should consist of. Although I was initially skeptical, it would appear I may have been too harsh and have now given HPR the chance it deserved.
Criterion (with the help of Stellar Entertainment whilst the former concentrate on developing NFS 2021) have delivered a revamped HP experience in their signature style. With that out of the way, here's what I think could be made better, whilst still respecting the values of the original:
- The first and foremost improvement is to fix as many general bugs where possible, particularly the pop-in nature of traffic where A.I. vehicles will randomly spawn and despawn; this breaks immersion and damages the enjoyment of online play due to the consequences of colliding with one being so detrimental. Many players have cited this as a significant issue, and I don't recall this happening in the 2010 installment. What good is a remaster if it plays worse than the original?
A second possible area of improvement I've identified from online gameplay recently is the time spent during crash cutscenes, and removing double/triple crashes. Crashing or wrecking out should naturally be avoided at all costs, and whilst biased against Burnout style "crash cams" personally, they're part of this game and serve as a penalty for failure to avoid crashing. My argument is that it renders racers far too vulnerable to being effortlessly busted if forced to crash, as well as causing frustrating (often friendly fire) pile-ups exacerbated by pop-in traffic and/or lag. I would advocate reducing the time spent in this powerless cutscene state, or increasing the time it takes to bust a "crashed" player as a solution.
- Finally, an additional feature a friend of mine had discussed with me: the ability to choose between police liveries! HP has never had customization at its centre, but the custom colour selection works as a suitable compromise. Who's to say Racers should get all the fun though? With a brilliant range of liveries across the SCPD fleet, I'd like to add the ability for players to choose between the Cop colour schemes. This would allow for greater personalisation of your unit, and even provide that little bit more variety in online lobbies. A Sheriff Crown Vic (green/white scheme seen on the Viper SRT-10 etc) or an SCPD Viper (standard black/white scheme seen on GT500) for example.
HPR can be enjoyable, but can also become tedious if a crash cutscene brings the event to a premature end, so there is more work to be done. Adding small new features and ensuring as many bugs as possible are patched is the key to perfecting the formula.
