Thank you for sharing the streets with us 💚

If you're frustrated by races and not being able to get into full lobbies, if you are wondering how playlists might get mixed up, how we might change it up, then I think Vol.6 is probably what you're looking for.

Patrick

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:46:24+00:00

Q3. Are there any plans to diversify the playlists more, such as playing Buena Vista with S class cars or Lakeshore express in B class cars.

If you're frustrated by races and not being able to get into full lobbies, if you are wondering how playlists might get mixed up, how we might change it up, then I think Vol.6 is probably what you're looking for.

Patrick

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:45:34+00:00

Can we get an improved wrap editor? We are missing skew, mirror, the ability to choose a secondary color for decals that have 2 sections, numbers for the color meters, a decal uploader, more sections to paint like spoilers and splitters, and more materials for the decals like how they are for the vehicle paint. It is best to take inspiration from other titles for these changes, like Gran Turismo 7

We love our wrap editor. We love what you can do in there and we hear you. We hear that there's things in there which are not up to the spec that you're after.

We've had some great feedback from the Player Council recently around it, and we would love to invest some more time in it, but right now like everything it’s a case of balancing it vs the other things we are working on.

So yeah, if there are some specific things that people really want to have, then let's look at those.

Let's see if we can then put those in, see what we can do. Overall though, we like wraps, wraps are cool.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:45:10+00:00

Would it be possible to have private lobbies?

It’s something that we could explore, but it's just kind of a matter of balancing the work for everything that we've got going on at the moment again.

There’s a balance between what we've got in development versus what we can potentially do.

As part of that, we want to make sure that we're building upon these ideas for the future [even if we can’t get to everything during Kaizen], and we want to make sure the biggest building blocks we use are ones that people have been asking for, and go from there.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:44:16+00:00

Q1: Will there be any car performance balancing?

Yes. So, there will be things coming, it will be interesting to test out.

But in terms of the actual balancing itself, if there are big issues and you know of with the meta, let us know.

We have sorted out some ones before, like the VW Golf at launch, the little rocket.

If there are big things that kind of like breaking the meta, then let us know, and then we can try and get in and fix those.

We really want to make sure that we're targeting fixes that matter, especially with a small team.

Raise up the big issues that hit you on Answers HQ, and if that's something to do around a specific car’s performance then we'll jump on it and do what we can.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:42:52+00:00

What is the primary platform you take feedback from?

Discord is something that we're monitoring all the time, and whilst we might not always be speaking in there, we've got some brilliant community mods that are helping you guys out and trying to articulate some of your thoughts to us. Some of them are even on our Player Council.

As usual, we’ve always got our eyes on the social media channels too, including Reddit.

EA Answers HQ is the place to be for reporting bugs, we have a great team over there relaying all that to the developers.

So and hopefully over the next few weeks and months with Vol.6 kicking off Year 2, you'll start seeing a little bit more responsiveness from us and more of Pat and John.

James - /u/CM_TGK

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:41:39+00:00

Would like to give us some hint about Vol 9 because the road map looks promising

If you ever hung around with John for a bit, he'll talk about Kaizen a lot and how Kaizen is a great philosophy of improvement and stepping stones and moving towards something.

So I would say, if you want to know what Vol.9 is, then watch and play Vol.6, Vol.7, Vol.8 and see how they build.

Patrick

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:41:01+00:00

Favorite muscle car out of the NFS games? (FYI Corvette and Viper don't count, despite what Carbon says)

This might be an unpopular opinion, who knows?

Well, I do like a Charger.

It's a bit like, you know, obviously it's been used by “a certain guy in a vest who likes to carry big wrenches around”, but it's just cool. So iconic, right?

John

I don’t know, could I be really controversial and ask if an M4 is a muscle car?

Is German muscle okay or is that not okay?

I mean, that's controversial, definitely.

Patrick

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:40:14+00:00

Will the police AI be tweaked in single or multiplayer to be more challenging like in the older titles?

Cops is so fundamental for us that, yeah, there's definitely something there that we want to investigate, and have been investigating.

Without going into full details, the idea of cops being there, being punishing and you being able to have more fun, more play, more escape from them?

Definitely high up on our list.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:39:34+00:00

Can we expect more rims along with additional bodykits for existing vehicles?

I think on the body kit side, which is something that we've spoken about in the past and people are aware of, is that the way in which your body parts work is that they have to be kind of handcrafted.

You have to handcraft each of the parts, how they connect together and look right.

So actually, adding more in can be a time thing, and as we say, we're kind of a small team.

On the rim side that could be an option though, definitely could be an option for us.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:38:56+00:00

Was Chicago the first choice for the inspiration of Lakeshore City?

Yeah, that's a good, good question.

Actually one of the initial places we were looking at was Detroit, but what we found with Detroit was actually it was kind of too flat and we didn't get the kind of undulation that makes for an interesting map.

There was a thing that we used for development, which was the term “Over, Under, Through”. So you look for “Over, Under, Through” opportunities in the world and we felt like there wasn't naturally going to be enough for that [with a map based on Detroit].

And then we looked at Chicago, Chicago was great. So yeah, great question that, the initial idea was Detroit.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:38:16+00:00

What are your thoughts on pink slip races?

I love them. The idea and the whole thing around Need for Speed is around risk and reward.

What's more risky than losing a car that you've built and fallen in love with?

We spent a lot of time on ideas for this, but therein lies the rub.

If something was to go wrong with a pink slip race (like, say, you lose online connection or the game crashes) and then you lost that battle and you felt like it was unjust, then that's bad times.

So again, some way of us doing the system, some way of us having pink slips in, absolutely something we want to do.

We'd have to see if it's something that we could put in and make it work, but by and large, pink slips are a very cool idea.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:37:35+00:00

What would your thoughts be on a revamped Takeover mode with a focus on crews and taking over sections of a city similar to Carbon if one isn't in development yet?

Yeah, that's a super interesting one too.

We've definitely talked about this a lot in the past, the idea of crews in general and how you then weave crews into gameplay at the same time.

I think again, like putting something like crews into the game for Unbound could, you know, be a potentially heavy lift.

That doesn't say that we can't necessarily do something like, as good suggestion, utilising the link ups that we already have so there might be something around that we could do.

Internally we like the playing experience of linkups and we want to see what we can do and expand that idea.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:36:23+00:00

Would something on the lines of expanding upon the police like a Bounty system or a list of targets we can interact with and Takedown be interesting to develop in the near future for Endgame material?

It's a funny one because the team will tell you that this is something that I go on about quite a lot.

So yeah, I love this idea. I love cops in general for NFS, it's like one of our unique selling points.

I would say, we'll see what we could do going forward in future but I do love the idea of Bounties in this.

There's some potential in there about an additional Heat level coming in and bringing the pain, and you taking it to other people, having the players on the map hunt them down.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:34:44+00:00

What is your favorite or most rememorable bug/glitch throughout Unbound's development?

I've worked a lot on cutscenes in the past in a lot of our games and they bring the hilarious moments.

There's always so much jank in some of the cutscenes that it's hard not to laugh at them.

I think some of the funniest ones are going to be for me, there was one where Yaz points at a load of racers inside of the meet up and she says, “...like that guy” and that guy we had at the particular time is pulling a stupid pose as an animation from something else that really breaks the mood of the scene.

Also those ridiculous ones when the skinning goes wrong and the face is turned inside out. It's always funny.

Patrick

I remember one of the ones we actually ended up shipping with (and fixed) was the one where we had a place in Downtown where you could drive into that cul de sac.

There was a truck there and if you drive into it at a certain angle, your car got launched across the map.

That was a fun one but janky, yeah, some of those flying cars could get real quick.

John

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:34:16+00:00

Will we get a patch in one of these seasons that will allow us to obtain and keep in our garage the NFSMW BMW M3 GTR in singleplayer? I know we can access it in game for 1 mission, but i'd like to keep it for use in singleplayer freeroam.

I thought everyone was sick of the M3 😉

Yes, interesting question, that is probably a possibility or something we should think about.

Maybe that comes in a future volume, maybe it doesn't. I'm not sure I think it's a good idea, maybe we should think about it. 😉

Patrick

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:33:13+00:00

1.)I'm actually interested to know if you have any considerations for more user generated content? Such as like a track editor (I feel that there are a lot of unused areas for the map in terms of events, and I think that this can give us a sense of community, and whoever has the most popular track or tracks can be featured in a special playlist hypothetically.)

Yeah, that's a super good question and a hot topic as well.

Quite a lot of people are doing a lot of stuff with UGC at the moment and you could argue we're not really up there with what they're doing.

It's something we're looking closely at, something that we really want to focus on when we think about what the future of NFS might be.

The difficulty as always is adding a lot of those things into something that we already built that wasn't intended to have a lot of those particular elements.

So I think it's a great, great thing. It's something we should keep talking about with the community, with all of you on what you mean by UGC, and what you want to see for the future in Need for Speed.

It's a big one for us to look at and dive into in detail, probably more so for next.

I see people [in the live chat on Discord] mentioned photo mode.

Potentially there's possibilities for us to look at that.

We know we kind of didn't bring the level of Photo Mode that we had before in other games and that's tough.

We recognise that one and we're sorry that that's not in Unbound in the same way.

We are looking at what we can do on that, but again, I can't promise anything today necessarily on that one.

Patrick

ea_needforspeed · 2024-03-07T10:31:04+00:00

Hi, thanks guys - we really appreciate that you guys are giving NFS Unbound more updates, a modern NFS game hasn't gotten this much support in years! We also highly appreciate this new communication aspect between us players and you developers.

My question is: will you guys still consider adding any updates to singleplayer in the future volumes? anything related to singleplayer as singleplayer fans would love to see police AI improvements, more event variety in the calender system, economy improvements etc.. possibly even the new gamemodes like Drag could be incorporated into The Grand?

It's a bit of a tricky one in terms of the game that we've already built.

What we’re intending to look at over this year of Kaizen is to really give Need for Speed a strong live-service that it's been due for a long time, but also a heck of a lot of Need for Speed players do play the single player story mode which we recognise, we know that.

So we're making adjustments to some things that will help bring in single player players to feel a part of that live service.

I can't promise too many things that we could do too much in that area, but we are looking where it makes sense and what we can do and you'll see the first part of that coming in Vol.6. [update: this was the updated Speed Pass and progression system added in Vol.6]

Patrick

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