And playing online… it's not a pleasant place. Getting online together is straightforward but a relatively rare occurrence, so we end up playing with strangers. So you're shifting the focus, really, from pure multiplayer, to connected single player. So we thought, how can we engineer this system to remember it and ping it, so everything I do is a potential recommendation for my friends? And if a bunch of friends are playing a particular event, it's going to tell me about that as well. But when they did use it, it really hooked them. And what we saw was that players would hit it quite late, because actually we did a good job of burying it. This has all been born out of Burnout Paradise where we had an asynchronous feature named Road Wars. You know, the game should do this for you! It knows everything, it's attached to a server, it knows who my friends are – with some decent tech and a good creative, we can start pressing some of those buttons for people. But it also comes from those very natural discussions you have when you're playing games: 'what was your score?', ''what was your best time?'. So you've taken your cues very much from social network design and from social discovery systems like Apple's Ping? It's like any social network, there's a relatively small chance of you being connected to Twitter or Facebook at the same time as a friend, but the constructs are there for you to be able to engage with each other as if you were there at the same time. And I think the 'Autolog Recommends' feature is going to change the way people play racing games – it's the ultimate distraction. And when I have played the event, I'll get auto alerts on when my time has been beaten.

What we're most excited about is the solo connectivity, so as I'm browsing through things to play, I've always got information about what my friends have done on that event to encourage me to get involved. We wanted to ramp up the sense of social competition, and have a system that does it for you.Īnd the social system extends into the single-player mode doesn't it? I mean, seasoned gamers may have six to ten friends on their platform friends lists, but in actuality, the mass market gamer doesn't have that many – if they have any at all. Getting a bunch of machines connected is relatively trivial these days, but lots of people don't play that way. And we always knew we wanted to go hard on the connected aspect Autolog came out of watching how people played Burnout Paradise, and looking at where we thought connected gaming was going. And it's about the ease of driving the cars, the sense of speed and those action moments, trying to wrap them around a simple but engaging set of game constructs. When it came to this one, we thought 'what does Need For Speed mean for us oldies?' It's the very first one, it's exotic cars, it's cops… We would have been insane not to use those elements. So this is Criterion's take on Need For Speed, that's what we were always talking about, and we discuss these things in the office quite a lot, 'if we were making this game, we'd do this or that', we're always talking about our take on different kinds of games.

In a driving game that's going to mean speed, action, and the ability to pick the pad up and have fun very quickly.

Irrespective of whatever game we make, it's going to be built on those principles. Fun, accessibility, simplicity – whether that's game modes or mechanics. I think whatever game Criterion makes is going to sit with a number of principles. Was it difficult to merge the sensibilities of Criterion with the Need For Speed franchise? Turns out, you'll never really be playing Need For Speed alone ever again. While we were there, we grabbed a few minutes with senior producer Matt Webster to talk about the game's advanced approach to social connectivity. Last week, we visited the offices of EA Criterion in downtown Guilford for a hands-on session with Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.

Need for speed hot pursuit 2010 beta