Need For Speed Unbound to get new NFS Underground and Hot Pursuit-style races
Wahey, just try not to feel too old now you know NFS turns 30 this year.
Need For Speed: Unbound, the most recent entry in the long-running series about driving around very fast on the streets (yay) or on the track (boo), is getting some new races inspired by bonafide classics NFS Underground and NFS Hot Pursuit.
Yup, the past is back to tempt you into a racing game full of hypebeast culture and colourful swoosh effects. Hey, at least it’s with good reason though, as Unbound’s doing its bit to celebrate the series hitting age 30 in December this year.
As outlined in Unbound’s year two roadmap, these retro-inspired events will be arriving this summer, as part of big themed updates that’re set to run for a few months at a time. The headliners are the second one of these, which will include Underground-style drift and drag races and run from May through to July, and the third, which will bring Hot Pursuit-inspired cops vs racers events to Unbound from August to October.
“No matter your [memories of the series], we all have a shared love of NFS, and we want to build new memories over the next 12 months,” the game's developers wrote in the announcement of the roadmap. “But, we’ll be honest and admit we can’t build everything everyone wants right now, but we can decide together what NFS should be in the future.”
“Our vision is that through our second year of live service, you can, for the first time, begin to play the ultimate NFS experience in one place,” it added. With that in mind, each of this year’s four big “volumes” - the two I’ve already mentioned, plus one based around an Audi head to head, and one for November to December that’s yet to be revealed - will include a couple of fresh cars and content for the game’s speed pass, alongside a major new game mode or feature.
The team also says it’s aiming to keep building on and evolving the game over the course of the year, with new stuff to do and goals to chase outside of the big additions, as well as by implementing fixes and changes based on what the majority of players’ feedback indicates they want.
Here’s hoping we end up getting some stuff that genuinely does remind us why we fell in love with NFS back in the day, and why a lot of us thought Unbound was at least a step in the right direction for a series that has often struggled in that regard since its 2000s heyday.
If you’re interested in a bit more of a realistic racing experience, iRacing’s devs recently revealed it’s finally getting actual rain mechanics, which definitely won’t conclusively prove to you that you’re not Ayrton Senna.