Need For Speed Heat - General Discussion

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Finally purchased Heat during Steam's winter sale. I honestly found myself getting tired of playing FH4 over and over for one new free car a week, so I felt like I needed a new arcade racer (with licensed cars) to play with. Honestly not too bad of an experience, but definitely sad to know that support was dropped so soon for it as I feel like there's definitely potential. I feel like the start of Heat's story/game is a bit rough with having low powered cars that struggle to escape from the cops, which I found quite frustrating. (Could just be me being bad at escaping cops) Feels like things get better once you get to events that require 300+ performance rated cars as they feel like they can do better in police chases than the cars around 200 points.

The fact that Heat took back what Payback did wrong, makes me glad I got this instead of Payback on sale. Not entirely sure if this was posted here before, but Raycevick's video convinced me. I do miss having Toyota from NFS 2015.
 
Maybe NFS isn't always the best games in genre, but I am always very curious about setting, cars and general feel of the new entry in franchise. So yes. I am waiting for the announcement. Let's hope they will continue to improve formula set up in HEAT. Some tweaks and changes and it could be iconic NFS.
 
I'm probably one of five people on Earth that think Heat is the best NFS so far. So yes I'm definitely excited for NFS 2021. But I'm also ready for the disappointment since Criterion could change the formula once again.
I know everybody hated Ghost, but for me is still my favourite developer. With Rivals and Heat they just nailed it
IMO.
 
strela
I'm probably one of five people on Earth that think Heat is the best NFS so far. So yes I'm definitely excited for NFS 2021. But I'm also ready for the disappointment since Criterion could change the formula once again.
I know everybody hated Ghost, but for me is still my favourite developer. With Rivals and Heat they just nailed it
IMO.
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I completely agree with you I hope they do well with this next game
 
I do like NFS at its current state with its ridiculously arcadey driving physics, I don't mind they stick with it and just improve on what Heat has. So for NFS 2021, all I need is visual customisation with more parts to build cars, better free roam cops with better progression and further improvement on Heat driving. I'm sure I'll buy it.
 
The reaper
What’s the fastest car in your guys opinion? Mine is the p1 mclaren or the c10
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The overpowered Porsche is the fastest in game but I find the Nissan 240ZG, Nissan C10 and Beetle to be really quick as well.

The reaper
i mean we knew a few things at least I did I knew about the k.s. Edition cars
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I don't think there was any news about K.S. edition cars in mid February of 2019 but I think the community do know that K.S. is involved with NFS since he is the environment artist for Payback.
 
Like @MedigoFlame, I turned to Heat because FH4 has finally become too much of a chore and not enough fun, I got it "free" with EA Play (which was less than £1 for the first month on Steam). I've played about 12 hours so far and I have some thoughts.

The good:

The racing is fine (once you've stopped your car feeling like a somehow drunk boat).

The cosmetic mod system is better than any other racing game I've played (even if a lot of the mods themselves are questionable).

The sense of car ownership is better than in any game since GT4 - my 180SX (my starter car) is currently my best one by some way thanks to a V6 swap, I had made it my drift car in favour of racing an RX7 then an NSX, but I've now swapped the RX7 and 180 back over again. I've bought loads of cars in the meantime but never actually use any of them...

The graphics are amazing, enough to make me want to pay attention to the background when I'm driving around the hills at night and the city is all lit up in the background, but I can't because I'd crash.

The bad:

Drifting. What were they thinking? I get that it's all about the car, but at the level I'm at right now none of my cars can actually drift even with a full drift tune, they just... Wobble. I can do a powerslide, yeah, maybe even string two powerslides together (as long as they're both in the same direction), but trying to actually hold a drift is impossible and each powerslide completely kills your momentum. I'm sure when I've got a 1,000bhp car it'll drift, but why is the game making me do drift events now? Although I should point out I have no problem winning those events because through lots of tedious, slow powersliding and pinballing all over the place I can usually get the target score before the last lap starts. Drift cars are also impossible to drive normally, which has completely put me off doing drift events at night because if I get into a police chase in my RX7 I will get busted immediately because it'll just be flopping about all over the place like an idiot.

Speaking of which, police chases are maybe the least fun you can have in a videogame. If you can't outrun the first car quickly enough you will almost always end up busted or wrecked because they're impossible to shake through a combination of fast driving and evasive manoeuvres, they're far too hard to crash out unless you hit them head on or T-bone (although doing either takes a chunk out of your own health so you're only really going to do that if you're not already being chased by several cars) and they just suck.

The ugly:

Many of the cosmetic mods look like a Salvador Dali fever dream that no real human would ever put on their car. As someone who occasionally browses Speedhunters I sometimes see the authors wondering if the bolt-on overfender trend is dead, and guess what the most ubiquitous mod you can get for basically every car is? Same as underlighting, didn't that die in the '00s? It just strikes me as odd that the Speedhunters name is plastered all over a game featuring cars that would never actually be seen on Speedhunters, yet you can't build the interesting stuff you see there.

Car unlocks seem weirdly paced, like they come in themed batches - level 22 unlocks almost all of the old European cars in one go, then two levels later you get all the '00s JDM nuggets. Why not mix it up so you get something for everyone at every level?

No pausing during online play means I just don't play online, but solo play doesn't have AI cars in free roam so you're left feeling like some sort of psychopathic hoon trashing an otherwise peaceful city which is somehow simultaneously hosting a Horizon-like motorsport festival (with zero evidence of that outside races) while facing a plague of illegal street racing that they can't solve even with unrealistically heavy-handed policing. Like, has no one living there raised their hand in a town hall meeting to say "Guys, I think the people doing the illegal street racing at night might be the ones doing the legal street racing during the day"?

The music, the sound of cars bouncing off the limiter, people making vague threats during night races, the repetitive phone calls every time you leave the garage and objective notifications get on my nerves. Also the post-race scenes where your driver does an awkward little shuffle then stand there even more awkwardly make me cringe so much, I thought FH4 was bad in this respect but Heat, trying and failing to be "edgy" as it is, is so much worse!

Also I'm not sure if it's just me, but some tuning components don't seem to differ - what do purple brakes/suspension/diffs do that blue ones don't? I find myself googling a fair bit about the game which suggests it's not very well explained nor intuitive.

Anyway, I had rock bottom expectations for Heat so despite my complaints I am enjoying it, I'm just glad I didn't pay for it and I won't be subscribing to EA Play to keep playing it after this month is up. It has however distracted me from Jedi: Fallen Order which is pretty much the entire reason I subbed in the first place.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
 
The drift cars are a learning process. If you're doing full throttle all the time then you're doing it wrong.

They still suck, but there is a method to the madness.
 
Sage Ages
The drift cars are a learning process. If you're doing full throttle all the time then you're doing it wrong.

They still suck, but there is a method to the madness.
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The drift cars aren’t that hard I think that forza 4 drift cars are harder to drive nfs heat drift cars are kinda simple don’t think about it too much
 
neema_t
Drifting. What were they thinking? I get that it's all about the car, but at the level I'm at right now none of my cars can actually drift even with a full drift tune, they just... Wobble. I can do a powerslide, yeah, maybe even string two powerslides together (as long as they're both in the same direction), but trying to actually hold a drift is impossible and each powerslide completely kills your momentum. I'm sure when I've got a 1,000bhp car it'll drift, but why is the game making me do drift events now? Although I should point out I have no problem winning those events because through lots of tedious, slow powersliding and pinballing all over the place I can usually get the target score before the last lap starts. Drift cars are also impossible to drive normally, which has completely put me off doing drift events at night because if I get into a police chase in my RX7 I will get busted immediately because it'll just be flopping about all over the place like an idiot.
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Yeah unfortunately, having 1000hp doesn't help with the drifting either. I've seen posts suggesting weird set ups using drag tyres amongst other things but I've personally never bothered to try these. It seems like the drift cars are really only able to achieve the target scores through the huge amount of angle they get on corner entry which scores the most points. I used the RX7 all the way through the game and I never really struggled to complete the drift events. Night time drifting is a pain though. You either have to hide in between events or do one at a time. If you get spotted by the cops mid drift event, well ... good luck

neema_t
Speaking of which, police chases are maybe the least fun you can have in a videogame. If you can't outrun the first car quickly enough you will almost always end up busted or wrecked because they're impossible to shake through a combination of fast driving and evasive manoeuvres, they're far too hard to crash out unless you hit them head on or T-bone (although doing either takes a chunk out of your own health so you're only really going to do that if you're not already being chased by several cars) and they just suck.
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So police chases are a bit different in this game. For some reason the police don't scale to the performance level of your car. Once your car gets to around 250-300 performance level you'll find the police become much easier to escape. By the time you're using a maxed out car, you'll find yourself waiting for the police to catch back up if you want to prolong any pursuits for any reason. There are some simple tricks you can use to escape the police but they only work in certain parts of the map. There are a few jumps which have you flying over some water (aka, its impossible to follow you without taking the jump), for some reason the police are unable to do these jumps and so will lose you once you've gone over the ramp. There are a series of these jumps at the most Eastern part of the Downtown area which take you over these boat docking spaces (I'm not sure what you would call them), any one of them will work, but if you use all of them together it is most effective. There is also one jump in Port Murphy which works very well that takes you over what I would guess is a Cargo Ship dock. So if you're still struggling with the police, or you simply want to end a pursuit, use these jumps and they should keep you out of trouble.
 
There's no special parts or other bs to make the drifting any better. You just have to figure it out the (frankly unintuitive) technique on your own.

People swear by drag tires or speedcross (read: awd conversion) parts but they're completely unnecessary.
 
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The reaper
Why is everybody saying drifting is so hard?
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It's not hard, but it's confusing if you don't know what you're doing because the car doesn't behave as you would expect it to.

Frankly I take issue with the claim that forza drifting is supposedly harder
 

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