NFS Hot Pursuit 2

[Brent]

The Demo for the PC is out now: http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=38038

And the game is Gold now, it should be on shelves around Oct. 21st...

Playing the Demo the graphics aren't as great as I thought they would be. Trees are still horrible, alpha textures or whatever they are. The water is a little shiny but no bump mapping or anything. I was hoping the graphics would be real good, but they aren't what I thought :( Gameplay seems good though, its fun to play. Though there are some features missing i would like.

But, this IS just a Demo

perhaps the Full Version game will have more features and options and whatnot

I hope they offer more camera views in the Replay, I use to love to do things then watch the replays from different camera angles....

I will reserve final judgement until I play the Full Version game thoroughly.....

I am a huge fan of the Series, I have every single one... so I'll definitely be adding this one to my collection...

[hughJ]

am still waiting for the day that they introduce a sequel that stacks up to the original's spirit... the feeling of ripping around on open freeways, winding country roads, where random traffic and police chases makes sense... i mean, why are cops or regular traffic on circuit courses to begin with?

[demalion]

I find the demo way too easy...well, not way too easy to win but way too easy to avoid capture. It could be that I just have leet skillz from how good I got at the prior Hot Pursuit game, but I haven't played it in over a year, so...I'm guessing that's not it. ;)

Also, I have a nasty little "half the polygons don't render after a few minutes" problem.

Bleh, maybe when they release a demo which more accurately reflects the game play and has this rendering issue resolved (I presume it is a game problem due to my past experience with EA, so I may be wrong) I'll decide whether it is worth buying.

[ram]

The game has an impressive polygon count (~200K polygons / frame) IMO.

[3dcgi]

The cars look great, but the environments are still lacking a little. The game run great on a PIII 1GHz and Radeon 7500 all in wonder with the details all the way up. I'm using 800x600 and 2x aa to output to a TV. I wish the graphics scaled even higher for better hardware though.

Unfortunately the demo can't answer my biggest question which is how good are the tracks. I thought NFS 1 and 2 were great, but the track design went downhill from there. In NFS 3 they took a single track modified a little and tried to pass it off as two or three other tracks. I hope they don't pull the same stunt here.

[breez]

The game has an impressive polygon count (~200K polygons / frame) IMO.

Where did you get that number?

[Unknown Soldier]

The thing about the game. You shouldn't expect it to be F12002 or Nascar or even NFS5:PU. I think EA are going back to arcade style with the game. And it's just fine by me. As for some of those people complaining about the speed of the game and the fact that they have super fast pc's. I got no problems with fps in the game. In fact the fps seems faster than NFS5 and i'm running an Athlon 800 with GF3 card. Maybe they were using beta drivers or something that gave them shit.

Only thing and I think this is what makes people angry, you can't play inside the car(view the dashboard), although there is a view to be on the nose of the car.. which suits me just fine. There are 4 forward views but I liked the nose view the best(I play the same way in PS2's GT3a) although there would be only one other view(the outside view closest to the car) I would choose as the other views seem abit far. Warning!! There is no car physics like in F12002(or GTA3). I think it actually feels like the older NFS's(NFS 1/2).. just alot better graphics. The traffic.. ye maybe it is less too. The car sticks to the tarmac whatever you do to it. The Sounds aren't 100% realistic.. but then again it's supposed to be arcadish.. not realistic and it fits the games style 100%. You also get the usually(for Hot Pursuit anyways) police commentary. First mission you get to drive 1 of 3 cars. I choose the speedster with top speed of 137mph and the other cars top speed is 135 and 125. You have to accumulate enough points to advance to the next stage. These points you can get by either racing away from the police or ending in the top 3 places. Since the top speed of the vehicles is so low.. the cops have no trouble sticking with you and PULLING YOU OVER(i mean crashing into you).. but if you are quick enough you should be able to get urself out of those situations. This mission was about the hardest part in the first four missions and i got pulled over or eventually the other cars were able to pass me with the cops trying to slow me down. The rest of the missions though became easier and i got better cars to drive and the cops were easier to get away from. Oh and the missions are just static like i mentioned above. There are 2 groups which you can choose and then it drops down like a pyramid and you can choose which direction you want to go. I saw a multiplayer option in the game.. although I didn't play it. I read though that the hot pursuit function(Cops chasing you) in it has been removed and there are no vehicles to dodge. Maybe this will be a huge dissapointment to NFS:HP fans.

Sounds: 7/10
Playability/Enjoyment: 8/10
Graphics: 8/10
AI/difficulty: 6/10

Overall 7/10

US

[noko]

Interesting on the polycount number, I know on by GF3 when I try to us AA the frame rate takes over a 50% dive with just using 2x. Which does indicate to me a rather high polycount number where multisampling will start to lose some of its advantages.

[Nappe1]

220 K polys per frame???
yeah sure... :lol:

I have been editing NFS'es since NFS 3 (as said on my site, Quality Addons for NFS'es since January 1999.) And If NFS6 has 220K per frame, I am alien from outer space. :D

Really, where RAM you pull out that number?? NFS4 / MCO (practically same gfx engine.) had under 1000 polys per car and NFS5 had less than 3000 polys. NFS4 / MCO had something like few hundred QUADS (yes, not triangles.) per frame for track and after taking a look of NFS6 files it looks like it has practically same track geometry setup as NFS4 and MCO. So not big differences there.

I would say that NFS6 has something like 20-70 K polys per frame. Definately less than 150 K in any situation. They are using Stencil a lot as well as Anisotropic filtering (is default on highest detail level) with combined with DXT1 texture maps with great shading and multitexturing with alpha tweaks makes cars look so good. Another thing is that it seems they are updating dynamic cubemaps (reflections) as well as Render to Texture mirror on every frame. This definately kills framerate when using AA. (noko's problem.)

so what I think about it??
well, basically said, it sucks big time. NFS6 has worst playability of the series. Graphics are nice but they don't save the game. Lan/net game could have but it does it only partially; on the net NFS6 is the best rocket sled simulator on the northern hemisphere, but it has very little to do with driving cars. No police, No traffic is the last straw. Thanks, but no thanks.

If Community is able to hack more than textures formats (already. at least cars are DXT1 512x512 pixels) it might give some addtional time for this, but I doubt it. even though mesh format could be hacked, I doubt that NFS6 would be more than a game to take a screenshots. But only time shows how easy this game is to modify. it's life is pretty much depending on it.

Nappe1 of RP-Design
http://rp-design.totalnfs.net

[3dcgi]

I've noticed a lot of people are trashing NFS6 at the official message boards and Nappe1 says he doesn't like it, but I'm enjoying the game. It was actually easier for me to get used to the handling in this version than in some of the previous versions. After checking out most of the new tracks I like the designs better than some previous tracks. I do wish they had kept the cockpit views though because it adds a little personality to each car.

[hughJ]

the game seems to be lacking an awful lot of features that have been made pretty standard by now... can't help but feel this game is severely stripped down to the point where it really is not a whole lot more than say Cruisin' USA or something..

what's with the replay system? is it just me, or can I not save replays? or even view them from different cameras? or god forbid, rewind them.. the car models are definitely the highlight of the game so far.. seem to be the only real aspect of the game that isn't a step-back from previous installments..

the car physics are pretty good, imo... if you dislike the inability to flip your car realistically, you can simply modify the cars to your liking.. tweak until you've found a nice balance between realism and arcade.. overall though I can't help but feel this was nothing more than a simple port from a console.. and lacks virtually everything that normally makes the PC versions fun (and offer extended-replay value) for me personally..