The SimHQ team’s first meeting of the day was with Dana Sissons, a PR rep for EA Sports, who handed us off to one of the NFS: Shift development team members working on the Xbox 360 version of the game. We’d requested to try the game in full realism mode with all the driving aids turned off, in order to satisfy the curiosity of our readers (and us). Unfortunately, EA chose only to demonstrate NFS: Shift with game pad control, and no wheel control stations were present at the show. They did eventually turn off the aids for us (even auto shifting, a request that we had to make multiple times).
Using a gamepad for car control proved problematic in our attempts to evaluate Shift‘s physics model. Joe had a lot of difficulty keeping the car tracking, braking or accelerating properly, and Magnum also found accurate car control to be difficult. Chunx discovered after about 15 seconds with Shift that controlling a racing title with a game pad completely detaches the player from the driving experience. To him, the gamepad made car control seem like nothing more than merely moving pixels around on the screen, vice capturing the feeling that one is controlling an actual car. Without a wheel and pedals for control, there’s not much to immerse him in the racing experience. You can watch SimHQ drivers (mostly Joe) flail about (i.e. drive around) the Autopolis track in Japan in the video below.
We talked for an hour with a lead developer for Need For Speed: Shift’s Xbox 360 team and listened intently as he randomly expressed his concepts and design philosophy for this multi-platform racing title. We’d been looking forward to this interview for days, hoping to learn about this new title‘s features and physics model, the dev team's challenges and accomplishments, and what they hoped to provide the consumer. Aside from learning that EA was showing an alpha build of Shift at E3, what we got was a rather quirky, oddball encounter, to say the least. We’ll spare you all the pain we endured to learn about Shift and just summarize: what we saw, heard, and experienced convinced all three of us that Need For Speed: Shift will stay true to its 14-year tradition as a “fun” racing game aimed at entertaining the mainstream, casual gamer with (very) pretty visuals and exciting, role-playing style of character development, but lacking the depth, fidelity, and features that fans of simulation titles hold in high regard. Once more with EA, the lights seem to be on, but unfortunately nobody‘s home. In a way that’s good news for Microsoft and the Forza Motorsports 3 development team.
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