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EA Confirms Fate of Criterion, Leaving the Need for Speed Franchise on Life Support
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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There's kind of fixed game-play mechanics around driving. Once you've perfected the experience, where do you go from there?
Thing is NFS kinda also died because they couldnt perfect the mechanics around driving in over a decade. Heat was good and enjoyable enough but far from perfect. Then Unbound straight regressed in that department. Driving physics are very hard to get right.
But even then you have track design, balancing, AI opponents, career structure, lobby systems for online play, rewarding clean drivers etc.
Especially ai drivers and a good multiplayer component are IMHO still unsolved problems.
Like Forza Horizon has pretty much the driving physics figured out since 15 years. For all intends and purposes they are near perfect for the subgenre of realism they chose to occupie. But the track design was pretty mediocre and only got a lot better with FH6 this year. Drivatars on the other hand are less engaging and more annoying they ever were. Careerstructure is still worse than the first entry in the series. Online is still a mess with huge possible improvements.
Wreckfest is a game with really good driving physics, rock solid netcode, dedicated community servers, interesting risk and reward mechanics because of the ecouraged crashing and dirty driving. But it has a narrow focus on fictional and a bit over the top folk racing. With the ground work they laid out with that engine they could have pivoted to eg rallying or touring cars to achieve pretty different gameplay. Instead we got more of the same again with Wreckfest 2 in early access with drip fed new content. Its still a good succesor with tons of improvements.
But the indie scene also shows that there is still tons of innovation possible. Inertial Drift with the two stick drifting mechanics which got copied rather midly by Screamer this year. Yelloe Taxi goes Vroom showed us that you can have a car based 3D platformer.
Idk, the original Doom with a modern engine port with mouselook still is relevant and a really good game but new FPS games with fresh mechanics release every year since then even though you mostly walk around and shoot enemies in the face with light puzzles sprinkled in.