You’re probably a fan of Need for Speed; the franchise – which has been knocking around for some 28 years at this point – has racked up some 150 million sales in its lifetime. It’s been under the care of some of the most notable names in racing, including EA Canada, EA Black Box, Slightly Mad Studios, Criterion, and Ghost Games.
Though the series has struggled lately (turns out people don’t want weird live-action cutscenes in their racing games), veteran gamers still remember the halcyon days of NFS fondly – and why not? Titles like Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit are classics for a reason. Whether it’s the incredible-looking tracks, the challenging police pursuits, or the 3D-accelerated graphics, the game made a massive splash when it released – and that notoriety has never really gone away.
How nice is it to see, then, that the game – rocking its original models – still looks absolutely amazing in 2022? The video embedded above shows footage of Hot Pursuit ported into Unreal Engine 5. The modder, David Kerekes, said that he’s “barely started working” on the game and that what we see here is a very early look at the game after Hometown and Atlantica have been migrated into Epic’s latest engine. Kerekes apparently used “various NFS modding tools and some Houdini and Python” to get it all operational – but this is the project in a very early stage that he’s “barely started working” on it.
Impressive, no?
If you’re hungry for more Need for Speed action, you’ll be pleased to hear that Electronic Arts is unifying Codemasters Cheshire and Criterion Games to work on the Need for Speed franchise
.
This follows an announcement from EA back in 2020 that the Need for Speed franchise was handed back to Criterion, when caretaker developer Ghost Games shifted instead into an “engineering hub” – whatever that means.
We know precious little about the next Need for Speed game at this point; all we know is that it is, indeed, in development, and has been under construction since at least June 2020. Maybe we’ll hear more about it this year? Let’s wait and see what happens over the definitely-not-E3 period next month.
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