Need for Speed: The Run is going to take Need for Speed drivers someplace they’ve never been before: out of the car.
If there’s one thing driving games have taught me, it’s that you never – never – get out of the car. So I’m naturally a bit baffled by the upcoming new Need for Speed title, which for the first time ever incorporates extra-vehicular activity into the gameplay. That’s right, you not only can get out of the car, you’re actually going to have to.
Executive Producer Jason Delong described a narrative moment in the game’s story mode, which is based on a coast-to-coast race across the U.S. Apparently your character has some sort of history with the Chicago mob, which is none too pleased about your presence in the city and thus decides to fill you full of lead, with the aid of a helicopter.
“The character gets out of the car, he’s being chased by this helicopter across the rooftops of Chicago, being shot, he has to ‘procure’ another vehicle from the local police force, shall we say, and is essentially just racing for his life to get out of Chicago, avoiding this helicopter firing at him all the way along while he’s trying to race through the city in a cop car,” Delong explained.
In case hoofing it around town in a Need for Speed game doesn’t sound awesome enough on its own, “Quick Time Events” will also be a part of the experience, and we all know that nothing takes a game to the next level like a heapin’ helpin’ of QTEs. The E3 trailer for Need for Speed: The Run showed off a QTE in which a player was trying to escape a crashed car before it was hit by a train.
I don’t want to be too harsh on a game that’s still months away from release but I do wonder what it was that possessed the guy at the design meeting who said, “You know what would be fun to do in our driving game? Not drive!” And of course, what was going on in the heads of everyone else at the table who nodded and went along with it. Maybe it won’t be as silly as it sounds but I gotta say, I buy a Need for Speed game, I’m not buying it so I can run across rooftops dodging gunfire from a mob chopper. I buy it so I can, you know, drive.
Need for Speed: The Run comes out on November 15 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC Wii and Nintendo 3DS.
