» Need For Speed: Underground 2 (NFS 8)

Как насчёт трейлеров? Когда они появятся? Хочется хотя бы на что-то взглянуть

Цитата:

а второй андер скорее всего выйдет по расписанию тоесть осенью

НФСы выходят каждый год как часики, а тем более в этом если движок не поменяли, то вобще медлить нечего

ПЕРВЫЙ ТРЕЙЛЕР
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ART
http://www.nd4spd.ru/modules.php?op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&req=viewdownload&cid=52

Весьма неплохо. Жду с нетерпением. Чтобы помыслить о такое еще 15 да даже 10 лет назад... Если бы мне показали тогда, вот мол нормальная средненькая игра 2004 года, я бы наверное сказал "Не гоните ребята". А сейчас вот вижу все своими глазами. Далеко конечно эта область продвинулась, далеко. Жаль только не могу на всю катушку графику врубить --- до того, чтобы менять компутер кажинный год пока не дорос.

Кто-нибудь трейлер уже просмотрел? Как он?

Voodoos
"Первый блин комом" Но посмотреть стоит! Весит немного, так что качайте!

Higher

Цитата:

"Первый блин комом" Но посмотреть стоит! Весит немного, так что качайте!

надеюсь там игру показывают? или как с первым ролик анимированый с заставки

SoftOne
Я так и не понял что там показывают

Higher

Цитата:

Я так и не понял что там показывают

но всежеа то качать что то влом

SoftOne
5 метров влом качать?!

Higher
Пошел качать.

Voodoos
Удачи!

Добавлено
NEW SCREENSHOTS
http://www.nfs-planet.de/nfs8_screens.php?lang=eng&id=1 (2 pages)

Скорее всего это все-таки анимированная заставка, а не игра. Да и больно мрачная она какая-то

piknik
Да, первый трейлер сварганили не очень... Ждём следующих

piknik

Цитата:

Скорее всего это все-таки анимированная заставка, а не игра. Да и больно мрачная она какая-то

такая же ботва была и с первым андером, первый ролик был с заставки

SoftOne

Цитата:

первый ролик был с заставки

На безрыбье и рак рыба

Свежие новости:

Цитата:

NFSU2: City like in GTA Tuesday, 01.06.2004

The magazine 'Computer And Videogames' made an interview with Chuck Osieja, the Executive Producer of Need for Speed Underground 2. He tells us about the open world in the game. It will be a city, where you can drive around, just like in GTA. There will be around 80 different tracks.
The weather will also be new. So it can start to rain, the streets get wet, or afterwards get dry and all this has an effect on the driving experience.

Интервью:
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: NFS UNDERGROUND 2 GOES GTA!

Everything you need to know about the sequel to EA's massively successful racing masterpiece. Part one of our huge in-depth interview inside

17:40 When we first clapped eyes on EA's Need for Speed Underground, it was obvious the publisher's racing title was going to be a tasty little performer. And true enough, its release at the end of 2003 was met with a swathe of critical acclaim and enormous success at the videogame box office, its persitence at the top of the charts underlining the true scale of the phenomenon.
A sequel to Underground was therefore inevitable, but it may suprise you to learn that work on the second game in the series was already underway before the first title left the gate. Underground 2 is no cheap cash-in though, the development studio behind the title, EA's own Black Box studio based in Vancouver, pulling out all the stops to ensure it leaves the original spluttering in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

We recently journeyed to EA Canada's lavish HQ in Vancouver, where we sat down with Need For Speed Underground 2 executive producer Chuck Osieja, to bring you everything you need to know about the stellar next-gen and PC sequel.

Can you tell us about the concept behind Underground 2, give us some background to the sequel?

Osieja: Underground 2 has been in development since last Fall [2003], before Underground actually shipped, and the goal behind it was to create something that was quite different to Underground, so we're very conscious of the fact that we didn't just want to throw out a sequel to the game and have it be more of the same thing.

Work's really focused on the discovery of the tuner culture, and what I mean by that is, anywhere where you happen to live - especially if it's a big city... There's sort of two layers to every city. There's what everybody sees, so if you're a tourist in a city you see all the tourist spots and all the restaurants etc. and then there's a sub-culture whether it be clubs or places that you only get to know if you're local.

And that's the premise of Underground 2 - it's about discovering the tuner culture and finding out where all the races are and finding out where all the cool kids are, finding out the information about how to get the best cars, how to get best races and how to get all the best parts for you car.

What are the major differences between Underground and Underground 2?

Osieja: What's different about this than in the first Underground is that Underground was one big city, but, as you may have noticed, it was a selection of tracks that sort of interconnected and you weren't able to drive anywhere in the world. In Underground 2 you can drive anywhere in the game world. It's roughly about three times the size of the Underground city, with probably two to three times the density in terms of streets.

In Underground we had a lot of dead-end streets and things you couldn't go down, but now you can actually drive down any street, everything's interconnected which creates a far wider variety of race types. For example, just in one section of the city we've come up with - not that all these will ship with the game - about 80 different circuits that we can do just in one area of the entire city.

We're going through and doing that for each section of the city. There are five distinct areas in the city. It is going to be one city this year, it's not going to be a collection of two or three cities.

The reason we do that is because we really want the player to grow and create a reputation and establish themselves as the best street racer in a city. It doesn't make as much such to us to have you drive for a little while in one city and then jump to another city.

This takes place in a brand new city and there is a story that goes around it about why you left Underground's city to go to Underground 2's city. That's where the story picks up and you re-establish yourself in the city and figure out who all the cool kids are and where all the best cars are and where all the hot races are.

The game's going to have a wider selection of vehicles that we had last year, so there'll be more vehicles. Broader is what I'm saying, so if you pay attention to what's going on inside the culture - and I think the culture's really evolved - we're trying to approach a broad base of cars to appeal to a wider audience. It'll be a cooler set of cars than it was last year and a lot different to what it was last year.

What about game modes for the sequel? What can you tell us about those?

Osieja: New game modes... Ah, we'll have more game modes than last year [laughs]. I'm not going to get into specifics but all the game modes we had last year will be coming back and then we found things like drag racing and drift racing were really popular and they brought a different type of game mechanic and experience to the player.

For people that don't just like the pure race experience of running laps or trying to shave seconds, drift and drag created a different challenge for them.

And what we did is concentrated on one, looking at the culture and seeing what people are doing - seeing where the culture's going to be, or where the scene is going to be, we think a year from now or two years from now and trying to apply that type of alternate thinking to additional game modes that we're putting in.

So we're going to have some more stuff that is a lot different to what anybody's seen inside of racing games before but certainly relevant to the tuner culture.

What else can you tell us about the city?

Osieja: The city is going to have five distinct neighbourhoods. Some of the stories on our press release say five inner city neighbourhoods, but it's not. They'll actually be in the inner city, but there'll also be the outlying areas as well. Each one is going to look visually distinctive, so that your eye isn't treated to the same neon vision over and over again. You'll have suburban areas and such.

It's not going to be all neon and wet streets this year. We'll have things like real-time weather in the game, so it'll rain and the streets will actually get wet and then get dry and those things will affect the way the cars handle. The areas of the game world are really distinct, so we'll have stuff that feels different in terms of the drive than we had last year.

We'll still have some of it take place in the city grid but we're going to expand on it and bring in some of the racing style of previous Need For Speed games, so some stuff is more wide-open - it really creates a wider variety of driving experiences and that's one of the focuses of we have in the game.

Can you elaborate on the incorporation of racing styles of previous Need For Speed games?

Osieja: Last year we distinctly wanted to change what Need For Speed had been - wide-open racing on country roads at 150-plus miles per hour - and the tuner cars were much more adept at running through very short city environments - running through turns and things like that.

This year we wanted to do a wider range of that stuff, so we're going to have stuff that's very short and very technical and very fun that's going to lead into some of the Underground-style races, and broadening out into something that feels like Need For Speed-style races where they're hilly and wide-open and a different driving experience.

I think people who like racing games will get a lot of different racing styles to choose from, so it's not always going to be the same type of tracks every time out.

How much more of a challenge was it making a world where you can go everywhere while still maintaining the quality?

Osieja: Huge. The reason why it's a huge challenge for us is because... We're very self-aware. I think maybe half the drives in last year's Underground were good, and maybe half of them weren't, and it's very hard once you start trying to create a city with ineffective roads to make every drive really good.

The way we did that last year was we created a drive and then interconnected it with something else - we made sure we tried to connect sections of road that were good together.

It was exponentially harder this year because there's so much more of that that goes on. The distinct neighbourhoods help us do that, so when you get up into the hilly area, those drives are of a similar style, so it was easier to get those drives together - it's the interconnected aspect of it that's more difficult.

What's ended up being really neat is that we have an entire freeway system that runs around the entire length of the game world. Which is insane when you see it.

Now you're able to do that, will there be a mode where you're able to wander around the game world and choose your own challenges and so forth?

Osieja: Yeah, that's sort of the basis of the entire game. You'll start off in free-roam, and you'll actually have to drive and find different events in the game world. Some things will be available to you on a map, but if you want the cool stuff in the world, you have to go and find it, so you do have to do exploration.

The free-roam aspect of the game probably encompasses 50-plus percent of the experience, and the cool thing about it is the city is large enough and there are enough alleyways and other things inside the game world that... I think players are going to find themselves talking to other players and asking "Have you found this yet?" or "Have you seen this yet?".

Once you find things by exploration they become a part of your map and they're easy to find again, but we really wanted to exploit the idea of having to become familiar with the city - just like when you move to a new city.

Will we be able to drive everywhere right from the start?

Osieja: No.

How will that be boxed off then?

Osieja: Well, we'll do it cleverly with construction and things like that. The problem with opening an entire city to the player at first is it's overwhelming. I remember the first day when they said the entire world was driveable, and you get dropped down into it and it's insane - you go "Okay, this is big". And it made us think of a couple of things.

One is, we had to put in a really clear navigation system for the player to allow them to understand where they're going at any one time, so it's very similar to what you find in a real city where you have signs pointing you to the freeway or giving you access to other parts of the city for example.

But by dropping a person into an entire city all at once, we just thought that'd be overwhelming. You'll be able to accelerate through that very quickly, but at first you'll be confined to a smaller area.

So where's the line drawn between linearity and non-linearity, and how does the sequel compare to the original Underground in this regard?

Osieja: One thing that's really cool about the game this year is it's much less linear than it was last year. Our goal last year was to create a non-linear experience where if you liked drift you could do all the drift stuff and maybe not some of the other stuff. This year, because of the way we're designing the game and the layout structure and the free-roam aspect, you actually won't have to do everything to get through the game.

You can actually pick and choose - if you like drifting you can do that, or if you like this other mode you can do that, if you like the circuit stuff you can go and do that. And you'll only have to do a certain percentage of them to be able to open up another part of the game world and continue the story.

The idea is for the free-roaming environment to basically take the place of a front end, so instead of selecting a race and entering it, winning it and going back out to the front end to select your next race and back and forth - basically it's a series of races connected by an interface.

Instead of doing that, the interface is the city, and you go and if you actually want to start a race you can actually drive to the start of that race and then begin a race at that point.

Stuart Bishop

Следующая часть:
Tuesday 25th May 2004

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: NFS UNDERGROUND 2 GOES GTA!, PART TWO

Our in-depth chat with EA on the PC and next-gen console sequel to its racing phenomenon Need for Speed Underground concludes

17:05 Yesterday we brought you the first part of our interview with EA on hotly anticipated racing title Need For Speed Underground 2 (check here for that part one). Today our chat conducted during our recent jaunt to EA Canada's HQ in Vancouver concludes, NFS U2's executive producer Chuck Osieja once again the man on hand to take us into every nook and cranny of the sequel.
This all part of immersing players in the tuner culture presumably...

Osieja: Yeah, not just driving to other places but you can drive up to other drivers in the world and challenge them. I might be driving along the freeway and a guy comes up next to me and he could challenge me or I could challenge him. Or maybe I can drive down a certain street and see something going on over there and I can drive over to that guy and challenge him to a race. We're trying to make it as organic as possible.

I think that from that standpoint it differs quite a bit from what the original Underground was. If we couldn't have done something like that we wouldn't have done the game. The fear was that we'd just push something out the door that felt like a version 1.5, and I think we've got enough history with products... [where we've seen] that you can do more damage to a franchise than help it by pushing something out.

Anything you left out of Underground that we'll see in the sequel?

Osieja: Quite honesty we had ideas for Underground that we knew we couldn't implement into the game given when we needed to ship that game. A lot of the stuff still went into development because they were great ideas, so Underground 2 really has been in development for quite a bit longer. We've just announced it now, but obviously we had to keep our really good ideas really close to our chest.

That's because of the competition, presumably?

Osieja: The competition that's out there, especially the screenshots I've seen, blow me away how much they look like they're mimicking the tone and style of Underground. Basically they'll be reading every word of what you guys write to see what they can do to actually trump us in terms of features.

Part of what we want to do is unveil these things in a timely fashion but in a way that doesn't leave them [the competition] with any choice but to go out with what they've got planned already - and at the [same] time hopefully release enough content to help you guys keep track of the game.

There's some really cool stuff we've put in the game this year, but it's really easy to do and if we revealed it now I guarantee you'd see it in every other game because it's not that hard.

So, you started working on Underground 2 before Underground shipped. How much was it already set in stone and how much did you respond to feedback you got on the first game?

Osieja: We responded an awful lot to feedback actually. In fact after Underground shipped we did a whole bunch of focus testing and we did a lot of surveys and things like that because the response was so good to the game we really wanted to make sure that we were getting feedback from the consumer and finding out what it is they wanted.

Obviously [we received] things like "There's no performance tuning in the game". Well, guess what, there's going to be performance tuning in the game this year. That's a big thing that we're doing, and that's directly from the response we got from fans that said they wanted to be able to tune cars from a parts aspect as well as from a visual parts aspect. We're doing it in such a way as to be considerate to people such as myself who aren't so performance savvy.

But for a player who understands cars, they can get in there and can fiddle with torque and gear ratios and camber and things like that to eek a little bit more out of the car than your basic player will get. I actually think that's going to be as robust a feature as the visual parts of the cars were last year.

The cool thing was a lot of the feedback we got was actually inline with what we had planned, so it was almost confirmation that these were really in fact good ideas and we should continue with those as well as picking up on some new things. We were pretty happy with the top ten most requested improvements. These were already covered by what we'd already planned for or things we were adding this time.

I'd probably say that 80 percent of what we had planned for Underground 2 came back as confirmation from the consumers, which is good. What that means to me is we're pretty in touch with the consumer and the culture and being able to marry those.

What sort of research have you done into the tuner culture to present it better?

Osieja: [We've] actually [been] to the offices of a major tuner magazine in each of the major territories and... We're trying to build a global product so, although the team is here in North America, we want to make sure that if there is something that's quite unique in Europe [for example] that we're incorporating those ideas.

Our European marketing mirrored our focus testing, so we based their research of off the same focus screener and discussion document that we had here, and that happened simultaneously so we definitely had those. We probably sold nearly half our product in Europe this year, so we're really considerate about what the European market wants and how does it differ from what we do in North America.

We've got four or five guys on the team who are really heavily into the tuner culture, they have their own cars and show them, race them. We go to local and national shows, we're in touch with people who are part of the scene, we spend a lot of time on the different Need For Speed sites. We spend a lot of time on research. It'd be insane for us to think that we know everything that people want and I think it'd be insane for us to think that we understand what the tuner culture is.

Are you going to be doing anything cool online with this open mode, because that would lend itself quite well to it?

Osieja: Yes... (laughs).

Underground was hugely successful so it makes sense for you to do a sequel - what about the rest of the Need for Speed franchise?

Osieja: Still there. We have a few games in development. We're getting ready for the next generation of platforms, we're getting ready for the follow-up to Underground. Our group is a pretty large group, and we have a few irons in the fire. We're not abandoning the traditional Need for Speed. What we're finding is that a lot of things that we've done traditionally, and a lot things that we didn't in Underground... That we're finding we can apply [these] to the Need for Speed franchise.

So I think it'll be interesting to see what the reaction is when we apply some of the things we've learned from Underground to some other driving games we're putting together right now. Without giving too much away, what you're seeing in Underground is really the basis for what our next product will be.

Is the whole of Underground 2 set during night time?

Osieja: It'll be set at different times of the night, so basically post-sunset to pre-sunrise, so it'll be more than just pitch black essentially. Even though it's still at night there'll be a variety of night time settings and the different areas of the game world will also create different visual effects. We're very conscious about having the five areas of the game world very distinctive in terms of visual look.

With the open plan thing, was that directly because of seeing the likes of GTA - like a GTA Underground type thing?

Osieja: Yeah, I think that's definitely an inspiration for it. Those games have sold phenomenally well and they're a lot of fun to play and I think that... When you look at the industry as a whole and when you look at where it's been going and where the biggest evolutions or revolutions have come from, it's from GTA - that open-world environment opens up a lot of possibilities, not just for an action-shooter style game like that but I think for almost any type of game.

For a long time GTA was categorised as a driving game, not an action-adventure game, and for us we saw it as direct competition so we felt like in order to revolutionise driving as a whole we needed to go to a different space and that made a lot of sense to us.

How do you decide which cars make the final cut?

Osieja: We poll a lot, we do an awful lot of research to see what's hot in the community and in the culture. We think about... We pay a lot of attention to trying to figure out where the culture is going to go. Even though 'little Timmy' doesn't realise this car's cool now, there are enough people that are hardcore into the environment that say "This is going to be a good car and these are all the reasons why".

We look at those things and say "Okay, has it got style, do we think it's going to wind up being a big tuner car in the future, do we think it's going to be popular?" And that's sort of how we cull down the list.

We've debated with each other a lot about which cars to include and which not to, and we're trying to get the ones that most people drive. Occasionally there's an obscure one in there... We've got a couple in Underground 2, a couple of the classics that didn't make it into Underground; but the hardcore tuner guys are really clamouring for it so some of those will make it in.

Will the PC version differ much from the console versions of Underground 2?

Osieja: No, probably not. They're all built on a standard platform and we wind up having PC leads [lead designer] and Xbox leads and NGC leads who do some specific rendering tasks to take advantage of what those platforms can do, but as a general rule we try and make sure that we don't put anything in any one game that's not going to appear in the others. It's not really good to short-change the PC guys with something that the Xbox guys get or vice versa.

What do you think is the single coolest part of Underground 2?

Osieja: I think the open world is pretty amazing. People are going to be stunned at how big it is and what the experience is when they're driving through it.

Stuart Bishop

Читайте, переводите, ждите

почитал... товарищи кто крайний в очереди...?

Цитата:

City like in GTA Tuesday

говорят как гта ну посмотрим что у них там выйдет

SoftOne, планируется сделать город, где мы будем ездить и сами искать уличные гонки. Ну прямь как в Форсаже, приезжаешь ты в квартал, показываешь свою "деточку", тебе говорят достоин ты или нет

Higher
SoftOne
Дай бог, чтобы небыло "викидыша", как в первый Underground`е.... тоже много чего обещали... но это уже история... ждем с нетерпением, кстати дата релиза осень 2004 вроде, да?

Higher
ну я понял что планируется я хочу увидеть что у них получится

Отличная новость! Появился скриншот карты города! http://www.nfs-planet.de/pic.php?./images/nfs8/screens/map/0001.jpg

test

Higher
Ааааааааааа......

toshik, круто да? Мне тоже городок понравился

Хачу Эту Игру
Самае Крутое Это Калонки Ф БоГаЖнике

Цитата:

Отличная новость! Появился скриншот карты города! http://www.nfs-planet.de/pic.php?./images/nfs8/screens/map/0001.jpg

я в осадке такого не ждал

Прикольно со втрорым андером получается, прямь как с GTA 3, которая была "подопытным кроликом" Vice City Также и первый андер - тестирование новой серии NFS. Так что Андер 2 будет королём уличных гонок.

Higher

Цитата:

Так что Андер 2 будет королём уличных гонок.

Угу, один в поле - хочешь, не хочешь, королём будешь От конкурентов не отбицца...

0nly

Цитата:

Угу, один в поле - хочешь, не хочешь, королём будешь От конкурентов не отбицца...

а конкурент есть