Need For Speed: Shift - First Look Preview

If you're not on top of your gaming news as far as racing sims are concerned, then we can assure you that there is a lot of significance behind this Need For Speed: Shift first look. The ongoing legal feud between NFS: Shift's developers, Slightly Mad Studios, and its former development partners on the GTR series of games, SimBin, has put a lot of questions on the lips of the gaming press (click here for a detailed rundown as to why), but needless to say that we're hoping for a lot more from Slightly Mad's NFS: Shift than we experienced in our review of SimBin's Race Pro a couple of weeks back.

Currently slated for release during NFS' traditional autumn window later this year on Xbox 360, PS3, and PC, Shift will be the first NFS title to broach the racing sim bracket since the series' inception in the mid-90s. And, in our our humble opinions, it couldn't have happened a moment too soon. While you've got to give the arcade street racing super-seller that NFS eventually became a lot of credit, the formula had become more than a little stale in the last couple of years. So, what better way to inject life into the game by replacing the usual nitrous boosts and insane drifts with GT cars decked-out in full racing trim, licensed circuits, and an esoteric handling system.

Petrol Running Through Its Veins

Make no mistake, NFS: Shift is a serious racing sim. In fact, it's such a detailed racing simulation that we're struggling to think of a next-gen game that even comes close to the level of polish demonstrated in NFS: Shift's particular blend of style and substance. It may seem a bit silly to talk of polish at this stage in development, what with Shift still being a good seven months away from release at least, but what Slightly Mad demonstrated to us was at a publishable state in terms of gameplay, visuals, and production. However, where the game is clearly lacking at this stage is content.

Our demonstration was limited, showing off only two circuits (Brands Hatch and a London track in the Project Gotham Racing vein) and a trio of cars that included the Audi RS4, Lotus Elise, and Paganni Zonda. Slightly Mad is promising 15 real-world locations in the final game and a much wider range of vehicles to boot. The Chevrolet Corvette, Porsche GT2, and Shelby Mustang were all mentioned during our demo as secured vehicles for the full game release, but Slightly Mad was keeping firmly schtum on any other details. Yes, car customization will be there in one way or another in the final game, but no more info was being released beyond that.

It left us wondering whether features such as customisation might still be in the planning stage at Slightly Mad, which in turn lead us to question whether Shift will have trouble nailing its autumn '09 release window. Whatever the case, we're very eagerly anticipating its arrival because our recent showcase was nothing short of exhilaratingly stunning. Shift not only appears to put a tick in all the boxes that a good racing sim should (e.g. realistic handling, attention to detail on individual car models, aggressive but believable AI etc.), but it also goes beyond the fold to add inspired visual touches that intertwine with gameplay to make the experience memorable, rather than merely competent.

These touches are most noticeable in the game's cockpit view, which is so good that even if you're the sort of gamer who will usually default to a view from behind the car, you certainly won't be doing so in Shift as it would border on an act of criminal negligence. Interiors are nothing short of anally detailed - take the Pagani Zonda's steering wheel as an example: just as with the real thing, the wheel is squared off ever so slightly at the bottom and boasts the same light brown leather trim. Of course, it goes without saying that all the dials and levers are of the right design and in all the right places, and we can rest assured that this will be the case in all of Slightly Mad's car models (seriously, we fear that the studio's obsession with cars might border on the sexually perverse).

Within this cockpit view, the gamer's frame of reference is pivoted around the driver's helmet. This is a key feature as it has allowed Slightly Mad to create the illusion of G-forces. Whenever you take a right-hand corner, for example, the camera angle appears to lean around to the left. Likewise, if you accelerate away from a standstill then the view appears to pull back, while braking sharply will force the viewpoint downwards. Of course, all that Slightly Mad has done is rotate the interior around your driver's frame of reference, but with all the added visual touches such as subtle shading (a hallmark of high standard next-gen graphics) around objects as insignificant as gear levers and dashboards, the illusion is as convincing as a Harry Houdini trick.

But this is merely one of the tricks that Slightly Mad has up its sleeve to generate the sort of adrenaline fueled racing that Shift is threatening to have in abundance. There's also the fact that your driver's depth of field blurs as you increase in speed, or the fact that any jarring contact with the barrier or other cars will lead to a fierce camera shake and a completely blurred out screen for a few seconds (which, in turn, provides a simple penalty system for dangerous driving and encourages clean moves). And that's not all. Exterior car designs have been exhaustively recreated to photo-realistic levels of clarity with the use of premier graphical components. There's high dynamic range lighting that reflects brilliantly across bodywork and tastefully applied heat hazing that eddies above engine panels, which puts Shift firmly in the same visual league as the likes of GT5: Prologue and GRiD.          

Slightly Mad hasn't let up on the physics side of things either, utilising a home-grown 'multi-body system' physics engine to make cars handle realistically depending on their weight and the distribution of that weight. Although the benefits of such an engine may not have been immediately noticeable, they certainly shined through when we saw a car drive over a stack of wayward tires that had been knocked into the track from a previous accident. Rather than simply pinging the tires in the opposite direction as if they were an air hockey puck (this is what would happen in most other racing games), the car struggled over the top of the tires and nearly beached itself in the process - an impressively realistic demonstration indeed.     

This leads to the inevitable question of how realistic the crashes will be in Shift and whether or not there will be damage modelling, the answers to which are very and yes respectively. However, the damage modelling may not be as punishingly detailed as it has been in previous games that Slightly Mad has worked on such as GTR and GTR 2. We saw the cars visibly and convincingly degrade with each collision during our first look, although Slightly Mad are being quick to clarify that while this may have a slight knock-on effect to a car's handling, it won't get so extreme as to stop you from racing. The development team could confirm, however, that extreme crashes involving barrel-roles and whatnot will be a possibility in the final game.

Any concessions that Slightly Mad are making to NFS' arcade street racing fan-base seem to be mild, with the team staying true to its roots of racing simulation for the vast majority of what we've seen of Shift so far. Arguably the most important element of a true racing sim (opponent AI), also appears to be spot-on. The first key element is aggression, which Shift's AI drivers have just about the right amount of (i.e. A hell of a lot more than Gran Turismo's mobile blocks of Styrofoam, but not so aggressive as to boarder on Burnout proportions of aggression). We can also tell you (from a very short period of hands on play), that these AI drivers are a real challenge to race against, displaying breaking points that tended to be neither ridiculously late nor painstakingly early. Slightly Mad mentioned that each AI driver will harbour different racing tendencies, while the developers are also building a grudge system that will be incorporated into starting grids of up to 16 drivers, both on and offline.

Twitchy Like A Mental Patient

From this very short period of hands on play, we also managed to get a brief experience of vehicle handling in Shift (and with the ruthless Pagani Zonda no less). Joyous is the word that best described the sensation - finally a game developer has nailed a realistic handling system that's incredibly tricky to master, but not overly fussy at the same time. The Zonda was like a pit-bull growling at the leash, flicking out its tail with just the right amount of oversteer (i.e. enjoyable, but not patience trying) whenever you graze the throttle in the bends.

While we're on the subject of the Zonda, we also noticed sound FX for the car that went over and above the call of duty as far as audible realism is concerned. The vehicle sounded like the pits of hell were erupting in its underbelly, which is a true representation of just how vicious the machine is in real life. Slightly Mad informed us that in order to get this realistic sound, they recorded a Zonda and then beefed up the audio to add a suitably resonant sound to the beast - one so brutal that it makes your insides rumble nauseatingly. Impressive it is but for Sunday drivers it isn't.

Need For Speed: Shift is the most exciting driving game on our radar for 2009. Truly a force to be reckoned with, it's a game that not only pushes the boundaries of next-gen tech and gameplay dynamics in the genre, but one that might also be the first pure racing sim to sit comfortably on the current generation of consoles.