Criterion working with DICE on new Need for Speed

Burnout developer Criterion’s upcoming Need for Speed reboot – an attempt to bring the series back to its halcyon Hot Pursuit days – will release in November this year. It looks pretty damned good so far – and if any developer can revive the flagging racer it’s probably them.

They’ve been getting a bit of help though, courtesy of EA stablemates DICE.

“It’s been a great collaboration actually,” Criterion art director Henry LaBounta said of the partnership with the Battlefield developer.

“Early on we set style guides for what we wanted to create out of this game, to offer players the ability to see a wide variety of types of environments from the deserts to the mountains to the forest to the coastal routes and so forth.”

Criterion’s senior engineer Alex Fry told Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry that roughly 15-25 DICE artists have been helping create the NFS world.

“We designed the world here, handling guys and the world artists worked together to make sure the game world drives well and feels right,” said Fry.

“Once we finessed that and locked all the roads down, Henry set out the art style and how this game was going to look. Then we built in core locations… this is going to be seaside, this is going to be the mountain range, we wanted a bridge here… we mapped out the rough lay of the land and then DICE with our art director went in and turned it into something beautiful.”

"We’ve had our guys living in Sweden and Swedish guys coming here. We’ve had people from Black Box come… we definitely worked hard on getting this game useable from a variety of locations. Our lead technical artist moved to Sweden and worked with their senior technical artist, so those two guys together worked with myself and the graphics coders and the world artists that were here."

Will this be a case of many hands making light work, or too many cooks spoiling the broth? EA is expected to showcase the game quite heavily at Gamescom this week, so I guess we’ll find out then.

Source : Eurogamer

Last Updated: August 16, 2010