NFS Shift 2 Unleashed - Details

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kikie
Jordan do you notify game developers, like EA in this case, that you created a subfourm for one of their games, Shift in this case?

I wonder if EA employees come to this subforum to read about the comments customers have about Shift. To see if EA can lear about the wishes gamers have about Shift.
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No, they are not notified.
 
HeadsoupBob
I don't think the bashers will have fun ending your day if they can't make it to the line themselves...
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Sorry, Bob, but have you EVER played Shift online?:crazy:

MOST bashers don't care one way or the other whether they make it to the finish line. Some of them just camp out on corners and deliberately wreck whoever they can hit. There's a whole sub-genre of players whose ONLY goal in any game is to frustrate and annoy those playing the game the way it is SUPPOSED to be played.

To be honest, most bashers CAN'T make it to the finish line before a GOOD driver has finished and DNF'd them. They don't even TRY. They are too busy going round the track with their friends, banging into each other for the sheer hell of it, rather than actually trying to race. Few of them finish.

You SURE you have raced online..?:dunce:
 
Private lobbies are a somewhat crude solution to the problem... You get restricted to the small number of 'clean' driving Friends you can find.

For me, I simply think a change to the RULES to penalize anti-social driving to the point where it becomes rare (who out of the current crop of rabid bashers is even going to PLAY the game if every crash destroys their expensive Works Murcielago and they have to PAY for the repairs - and yours?) does the trick, and turns EVERYONE into a 'clean driver' out of necessity.

Then you don't NEED private lobbies, which are limited in number, apparently, anyway... Imagine the hit to EA's servers if nearly ALL games were private... there's few enough active lobbies even now!

Now that EA have an unashamed basher-fest in HP, let's make Shift2 a REAL racing game, not a demolition derby dressed up as a racing game...💡
 
Destinkeys
For me, I simply think a change to the RULES to penalize anti-social driving to the point where it becomes rare...
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Picture this: the same precision/aggression point system from Shift 1, but this time, move drafting over to "precision" and make all the remaining "aggression" items award negative points.

Driving line, clean pass, corner mastering award XP.
Trading paint, dirty passes, corner slides lower XP.
 
kikie
I wonder if EA employees come to this subforum to read about the comments customers have about Shift. To see if EA can learn about the wishes gamers have about Shift.
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EA employees have in fact visited GTPlanet and communicated with the people in here, especially when the game was just out. :)
 
I think vancouverblade (ea canada employee) was seconded to NFS World Online shortly after it came out and left us. But I am pretty sure a lot of the other guys (at least at sms) read the forums occasionally.
 
Shadow Wulf 2k
Picture this: the same precision/aggression point system from Shift 1, but this time, move drafting over to "precision" and make all the remaining "aggression" items award negative points.

Driving line, clean pass, corner mastering award XP.
Trading paint, dirty passes, corner slides lower XP.
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If you look through the game files you find they originally had a lot more things counting as aggressive driving (getting airborne, driving off road, hitting guardrails, saving yourself from spinning at the last possible moment). I think it was originally conceived as kind of like "light force" and "dark force" points like in those new Star Wars games - they would both be valid ways for reaching new levels, only one would make everyone think you were a dick and would let everyone online know this in advance too.

I think it ultimately proved too hard to distinguish that you were getting "dick points" rather than just "point points" - they still ran into a million people complaining that you got points for bashing cars without understanding how this changed your interaction with drivers you bashed, for instance. And in any case they didn't really communicate that this was happening very well either. And then, having removed some of the ways you could become known as aggressive, it ultimately sabotaged the online-aggro-driver-early-warning-system since all the cutters and rail riders ended up with precision icons instead.

They have said they are removing some of the "useless economies" of the game in Shift 2 - there will probably not be the same stars, cash, profile points mix you see now, just one or two, and handed out differently.
 
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Would be great if the new Thrustmaster T500RS is fully supported on PS3 as well on PC.
 
Thing is, points is points... The only thing that is going to discourage bashers is to make it too EXPENSIVE to write your car off every race.

This is the whole point of REAL racing. No-one is ALLOWED onto a track with other drivers if they demonstrate that every time they get behind the wheel, the 'red mist' comes down, and they write the race car off EVERY TIME, and write off a lot of other peoples' race cars, too. Same idea on the roads... Your license gets revoked if you wreck all the time. But the bottom line is, the sheer COST of doing that is what drives the whole thing (that and the risk of death or mutilation!:ouch: ).

But what the game has done is make the cost of wrecking ZERO... and no-one dies!

Increase the cost of wrecking, and fewer will do it.

I have always felt that damage 'points' should be weighted towards the front of the car, even if the engine is in the back. If the 'basher' hits you, he gets the majority of the damage points, you get few. Rubbing paint (side to side contact) well, that's just a part of racing! But bashing from the rear, that's NOT racing...
 
I don't know what thread you're trying to have this conversation in anymore, but for me, seeing:

damage 'points' should be weighted towards the front of the car, even if the engine is in the back. If the 'basher' hits you, he gets the majority of the damage points, you get few
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combined with

Poor game. Cars that stay static for more than say 30 secs (or half a lap, whatever is shortest) should be automatically booted. This isn't rocket science! Anyone with half a brain and a love of racing ought to have thought of this. I often get the feeling that SMS had neither
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should really give you a big long pause about how easy you think it might actually be to design an online system for a game that doesn't actually exist while you're making it. Because it's not exactly rocket surgery to think of a slight problem you might run into if you did that :)
 
SuperShouden
So...apparently EA thinks Shift 2 is on par with GT5 and "Far Ahead" of Forza 3:

And they said that GT5 has "Too many cars" despite Sift 2 having 130...which, by the way, is the most ever in a NFS game.

http://www.videogamer.com/news/gt5_has_too_many_cars_says_shift_2_dev.html
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I think it's a valid thing to go after them for. In a broad sense, the more cars you have, the less dev and QA time you're spending on any one individual car. It becomes extremely tempting to not actually model the car as it is, but model it as a bodyshell with very slightly different behavior, using a set of generic templates. I suspect if you got access to the car data for GT5 you would see a whole bunch of those using effectively exactly the same data, just attached to a different car model and using a different sound bank.
 
Boxox... If this were the FIRST racing game ever made, then yes, I would agree with you. But these 'problems' MUST have surfaced on many other racing games before. I cannot believe that things like this are totally new to Shift. So yes, I'm sorry, but they SHOULD have been thought about right from the very start.

Let's take track cutting... it is prevalent in a LOT of games. Annoys the HELL out of most serious racers, and allows cheaters to make a mockery of a good race. Problem is, when shooting for a photo realistic recreation of a real track, you can't go sticking walls where there aren't any.

BUT.... it's a GAME.

There's no reason why an 'invisible' barrier can't be placed to prevent track cutting. Only people that would complain are those deliberately track cutting, no-one else would even KNOW about it. Win/win.

Now, I'm no professional game designer, but even I can anticipate that problem and think of a game related solution. Surely a pro should think of these things right from the START of a game design. Once again, I reiterate that FAR too much emphasis is placed on visuals, and little to the core game rules.
 
Destinkeys, remember that Shift 1 was incredibly rushed to release, there were many things they clearly left out. I'd almost put money on EA having just said "just get it to a working state" and released it. Shift was was really a very unfinished game, but with a couple of mods on PC I still enjoy it more (offline of course) than GT5 (Actually I enjoy the PS3 version since patch 1.03 too).

Everything revealed so far suggests to me that Shift 2 will be something to be reckoned with and has the potential to be the first racer to actually satisfy both sim and casual racers alike :)

You should stop playing it online Destinkeys, surely there's something else available you could play if Shift frustrates you so much and it's such a simple thing to fix...
 
HeadsoupBob
...remember that Shift 1 was incredibly rushed to release, there were many things they clearly left out. I'd almost put money on EA having just said "just get it to a working state" and released it.
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I definately got the feeling that SMS didn't have enough time to test out the game and do a thorough quality check. I'm hoping that the second time around they'll be accustomed to, what I presume, are tight production deadlines imposed by EA.
 
Yeah, that's pretty much the classic simracer attitude. "Replicate the bugs that made GTR2 ridiculously harder to drive than the real car and the basic physics errors in the tyre model and tyre data" = "realism" :)
 
HeadsoupBob
Here's a preview from VVVGamer,(now VVVAutomotive), it's a good one because these guys generally have a more serious understanding of sim racers. Good talk about physics, plus video showing the guy playing it (no screen footage unfortunately). Read the comments section too:

http://vvvautomotive.com/2010/11/30/nfs-shift-2-unleashed-first-hands-on/
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Thanks for the link, it's good to read a preview that goes into more depth.

Nice to see Hockenheim is included in the track list, maybe we should start up a master track/car list.
 
I'm curious... Are all the people giving SMS an easy pass on the whole 'don't bother making people race fairly' rules actually playing online?

Are you trying to tell me that you AREN'T incredibly frustrated if some 6 year old with a Works Lambo plows into the back of you because he just couldn't be bothered to brake? Or a cheating illegitimate SOB takes a podium place away from you because he couldn't be bothered to drive around the chicanes? Or some lurker parks his car across the track round a blind corner just for the sheer spite of it?

And, for Pete's sake! You can't be serious saying 'if you don't like it, JUST race the AI offline':crazy: The AI is no challenge whatsoever once you reach a decent level of skill and have carefully tuned cars. The only real challenge in this game is racing REAL PEOPLE online. Because of my crashing PS3 and protected Game Save in Shift, I've gone through the entire game three times against the AI. I don't play offline at all any more, except to tune cars and practice lap times.

I've had some incredibly good fun and serious challenge racing online. But altogether too much of it has been spoiled by idiots. Now, please remember, you can't stop an idiot from being an idiot (you can't fix stupid!), and I don't expect EA to cut their own throats by making the game so hard that noobs give up or don't buy it. But the rules for clean racing should be available to Lobby Creators AS AN OPTION so that the skilled can prevent idiots from ruining THEIR fun (after all, the game has to appeal to BOTH types, not just ten year olds!).

If anyone cares to remember, a LOT of track cutting exploits got fixed in an online patch. When you first got the game (if bought early) track cutting and driving on the grass had next to no penalty at all. Later, they changed it. BUT... they did an incomplete job. But it obviously shows that SMS were thinking along the 'clean driving' lines, just too lazy to finish the job. All any developer had to do was play the game online for a few hours, he would have quickly found all the unpatched exploits.

But NOOOOOooooo........:yuck:

One patch was all we got (online). They NEVER did attempt any fix for ramming (it's GOT to be easy for the game to calculate when someone hits your rear at say a certain percentage over the speed that a corner can be taken at, and just make him go porous... they go porous when reset on the track, so the code for THAT is already in), they never did a fix for 'camping', they never fixed the rail-riding exploits, or gymnastics that the kids love so much.

All I have been suggesting is that SMS not only try to make the game LOOK like track racing, but that they allow those that WANT to play at track racing enforce Lobby rules that mandate behavior that real track racing does. GT5, kitty litter and grass slow you down MUCH, much more than Shift's does. There's THAT exploit fixed. How hard was THAT?:rolleyes: GT5, you rub the Aramco or walls, same thing. Damn near come to a complete halt. Problem..? Solved..!

But the suggestion that, rather than patch the exploits, we should all just roll over, and not play online because a few kids want to ruin it for the rest of us, well, it's beneath my dignity to tell you how ***** up that is.

Shift2 needs to emphasize sim rather than arcade, because all the arcade fans have gone to HP. And a sim that lets you cut track and chicanes, lets campers and lurkers mess things up, and bashers bash is NOT a sim. Might as well give us power-ups, invisibility, and rear facing Browning machine guns! It's already got bugger all to do with track racing.

It only LOOKS like track racing.:banghead:
 
Destinkeys, you were given links here more than once for complaining about wreckers online over on the EA forum, and you never did join their league. You have enough rants on the subject now, inserted into any thread you fancy, regardless of it's subject, to fill a small book now.

I don't know if you play many other games, but if you involve anonymous strangers + any function that even remotely allows them to make life difficult for other people, you will end up with people sabotaging pick up pub games. It annoys everyone else too! However, it just means they get a group of people together for a match instead.

Also, there's this game you totally need to get called Left 4 Dead, and play it with people who have mics and a youtube account. That could get pretty funny, I think.
 
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I don't get it, boxox... Why should I have to join a poorly organized, limited membership Racing League, just so I can race clean? I want to be able to be matched randomly against drivers from anywhere, not just the few that can make an organized race, on THEIR schedule, driving THEIR choice of cars and tracks, with THEIR own interpretation of the rules.

I HAVE raced many of these so-called 'clean' drivers, and trust me, they exploit many of the game's loopholes. If a corner can be made quicker by leaving the track entirely, they will do that, then bash into you as they re-enter the track as you stay on the road. They will then apologize after the race, reluctantly if pressed... "everyone does it, why not me?' seems to be the mantra. Real racing, you leave the track entirely (all four wheels), it is YOUR responsibility to avoid other cars as you re-enter.

Shift's poor physics allows driving on kitty litter and grass to barely slow you at all. So most of the so-called 'clean' clubs allow it (how would you stop people, anyway?). So many corners can be taken in a manner that would destroy a real car, thus ruining the realism of the game.

My take would be, enable rules for the physics and game that mimic the real world AS AN OPTION, so that clean racing happens whether the opposing driver wants to or not.

And, bottom line, boxox, if you yourself aren't outraged that such obvious non-racing behavior is not only tolerated, but actually MANDATED (points for spinning out an opponent? REALLY?), perhaps you are more part of the problem than part of the solution. Just how clean do YOU drive? Methinks I smell a fish...:ill: Smokers can ALWAYS come up with an argument why they should be allowed to smoke in public. Non-smokers can see the transparency of their arguments.:crazy:

Shifting (pun intended!) the responsibility for clean driving rules away from the game developers, at least as an option, to self-imposed, unenforceable CDC's is a total cop-out. I've already shown how several of the most egregious exploits COULD be fixed with a bone-stupidly simple patch. But when the developers put 100% of their efforts towards visuals that make a game LOOK like a sport, but refuse to incorporate the RULES that that sport uses, who honestly thinks they CARE one tiny bit about that sport...?

Like I said, a 3D photo-realistic chess game that allows an exploit to turn all your pieces except the king into queens is INSANE. And suggesting to the players that, if they want a game of REAL chess, they should go join a 'clean chess club' rather than have the game developers patch the exploit is, sorry to say, idiotic.:dunce:
 
From one of the video interviews with Nilsson he mentioned that designing an online game that punishes wreckers has a lot of unintended consequences in the long run, and that Autolog is designed to go the other way and make it so your own league is auto-populated from your friend list with your own custom leaderboard and points/times challenges between all of you.

I don't know. It strikes me that you spend a lot more effort writing these long complaint posts than you spend on doing anything to improve the situation. I am sure the GTP league doesn't enjoy being told they are all cutters and wreckers either.
 
Far ahead of Forza 3? Didn't forza have like, 550 cars? I don't care to expierience every car in the game, i just hope that they include a big enough number to suite my niche preference xD
 
I'm thrilled by the upcoming second installment.

They did a pretty good job with the first Shift, so I'm curious what they have up their sleves now: GT license sounds very promising, and I'm really looking forward to racing Bathurst.

I, for one, am glad that Shift isn't another GT/Forza clone and they seem to continue adding lots of drama and visual goodies to the package.

The Ferrari DLC was fantastic, hope all the new cars are up to this standard.

Besides, I quit online racing because I just don't see the point of it. And that's not a fault of any game in particular - sim-ish console games are hardly anybody's cup of tea and most would like to turn them in a Burnout persiflage. Ah well.

Could very well be I buy a PS3 for this title, as MS continues to not support G25 wheel.
 
SuperShouden
So...apparently EA thinks Shift 2 is on par with GT5 and "Far Ahead" of Forza 3:

And they said that GT5 has "Too many cars" despite Sift 2 having 130...which, by the way, is the most ever in a NFS game.

http://www.videogamer.com/news/gt5_has_too_many_cars_says_shift_2_dev.html
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Lol and still less than Gran Turismo 1. Three consoles ago!!! XD

To DestinyKeys

To date i have seen ONE game on ANYTHING that really hurts your car if anything less than the whole thing leaves the road/lands a jump wrong. That Game was evolution GT. It was pretty pants, but had loads of inpired/inspiring/brilliant ideas. A longish straight road, you drive on the grass in a corvette, and before you get halfway down it, the car is totalled, as it surely would be driving over grass or dirt at 100MPH. The game featured the FM3 "exclusive" feature, the rewind. It was limited severly, but you could make it ridiculously powerful. at the expense of being able to be fast! It worked soo well, giving three or four attempts max at the simplist of corners, and it somehow never became truly addictive... In 2002 i think
 
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I dont think that the online play was as bad as Destinkeys is making out, he has not even mentioned Time Attack racing online .
This was the best way to race on Shift for me , the best players on the game could usually be found in these rooms and there was allways a lot of mutual respect between them.
And also Manufacturer races where everyone had to race the same car, usually attracted a good field for racing as well.

For Me The guys at SMS are very talented and real car enthusiasts and this came through on SHIFT, but obviously they where restricted by EA .

So Its going to be interesting to see what they can do now they are going to be unleashed,and get the full on physics engine this time for PS3.
 
First of all, many online Time attacks got populated by the same idiots that thought that winning involve punting you off the course. Secondly, they were especially popular with the type of idiot that thinks that camping in the road round a blind corner and messing up as many lap times was such HUGE fun...:yuck: And finally, that's not RACING... that's qualifying (the game should have had a short one of these to determine grid positions before every race).

And, I'm sorry, boxox, but where do you come off saying that I should be doing something about it? I'm not a game designer. I just play the damn things... I just don't know how many times I got to say it, or how big a font I got to use, or whether bold is necessary before you acknowledge this (your post certainly ignored it completely), but the rules for clean racing need to be included by the game developers...

AS AN OPTION

Now, how is that going to have a detrimental aspect on the game?:rolleyes:

Idiots can be idiots where and when they want, and random clean drivers can get together without the hassle of joining a 'clean racing' club, that has NO stewards, no third party watching for infringements (even if inadvertent), and no review so disagreements can be arbitrated. ONLY the game developers can make the rules. It sure as HELL ain't my job...:crazy:

Look, you want a free ride driving game where anything is allowed, go find one. But a RACING game that ignores the RULES of racing is like a chess game that ignores the rules of chess (still not sure why that analogy hasn't sunk in). And, don't get me wrong, it appears that GT5 has the same problems, AI that barge their way around and PIT you because they are too dumb, but if Shift2 wants to emerge from the pack, making it a RACING game rather than demolition derby AS AN OPTION would go a long way towards getting people who actually LIKE racing to play it.
 
Destinkeys your sounding a little obsessed about this... You seem to think having these rules AS AN OPTION will stop the idiots joining the races in the first place, you realise they'll still be there being annoying but it just means you'll be able to kick them AFTER they've ruined your race. You can still sit on a corner and block traffic without cutting the track and avoid the 30 second stationary kick by moving at 1mph, and I'd think the kids that enjoy being wankers will enjoy even more ruining someone's race who thinks it shouldn't be possible...
Otherwise you might as well do what everyone's been suggesting and stick to FRIENDS only and find a good bunch of people to race with :)
How about we give it a rest till Shift 2 is released where everything should (hence waiting and not pre-judging) be fixed, as Shift will not receive any further updates and us PC players have the mods to keep us happy :)
 

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