Need for Speed Shift Interview

18 Jun 2009 at 16:56:50 by Tim McDonald

Back at E3, Tamer Asfahani cornered Patrick Soderlund, the senior vice president of EA Games and the head of DICE, and questioned him about just what's going to make Need for Speed Shift special. Our interview is in video format below, but right below that is a text transcript of the entire thing.

How does it feel to be doing Need for Speed Shift?

It feels great. I mean it's good to be involved in kind of a strategy shift in Need for Speed, where we've moved away from forcing the same team to try and crank out a a game every year, and we now have multiple development teams working under the same brand. I think that's paying off, because you can see the increase in quality in this, versus what we shipped last year.

So what's different about this? We know that it's more about simulation, we've seen the head stuff, we know that there's a different game for the DS, we know that there's Nitro for the Wii, but the focus really is on the hardcore gamer.

That's obviously the kind of crown jewel for this year, the main game. I think if you look at what we wanted to do with Shift – I race cars myself, relatively professionally, and we just sat down and... I haven't seen a game yet that gives me the same emotion and feeling as I get when I race a car. I played Gran Turismo, I played all those games for years, and as good as they are, [there's not that]  same adrenaline rush you're feeling, and I just thought that's an opportunity for us to make something different in this space.

How do you go about doing something like that, though? Because you mentioned GT, and it's a huge game. There's Forza out there as well – there's a whole host of games that have tried to crack that and make it that definitive racing game. But some of them end up being more of a simulation, some end up being more arcadey... there's no real balance to be struck.

I think that's right, and that's obviously something we're working on and fighting with still. It's hard to get that balance to make it a real simulation versus something more arcadey. My take on this is that it's all about the perception of what reality is. After all, this is a videogame – this isn't reality. So to me it's more about a feeling than the need to be accurate. I think that approach helps us to do shift.

It's the driver that's important as well, because you don't get in a car without knowing your vehicle, knowing what it's capable of, and what you can do with it. And a lot of feedback from the driver needs to be put back into the teams, so presumably it's the same on racing as it is with developing a videogame.

You're right. The first thing, when I started explaining to the development team what my vision was, they didn't get it – they were like, “What do you mean?” And so I said okay, this isn't working. So we rented a race track, I brought my whole race team there, and I just put them in the car together with me and afterwards they're like “Okay, we get what you want, we understand.” That's the only way for them to understand what I'm after, and that really helped. So we've actually, continuously through the development of this, we've done stuff like that. We've put them in race cars so they can remember how it feels and what we're after and that really helped us get to this. And then the development took that to heart, and they've done a fantastic job of portraying that in the game. To be honest, that's what I think.

Whose idea was it, with the head shakes? Let's be honest here.

To be very honest, that was my idea.

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