So weekend before last I was quite fortunate to get accepted into the Need for Speed World beta which was up for just the weekend. The first night I was a bit upset – frequent disconnects coupled with the initial learning curve made things a bit frustrating but after that things got awesome.

For those of you not aware, World is essentially the two cities from Most Wanted and Carbon (Rockport and Palmont) merged together and open as an MMO. Yes, you read that right – a need for speed mmo! The first “wow” moment was seeing Palmont by day as Carbon had been set at night time. The graphics are beautiful and the city actually feels alive as the npc traffic goes about its buisiness.

Unlike previous NFS games online, you are essentially getting to play the Free-Roam mode online and you have the option to drill into set races either single player or multiplayer. I think I spent about 50% of my time zooming around in Free Roam with some people in cruises though, just seeing the sights and feeling cool.

The races have retained the arcade feel (this isnt Shift thankfully!) and gone a little Mario Kart-esque with the addition of power-ups like the infamous “Call Traffic Magnet” which when used makes every NPC car near the player in first place swerve towrads them. The power-ups have been heavily attacked by a lot of players but I think the majority of them are either the racing purists who prefer games like TDU and Shift or just suck at the game and have latched onto an excuse.

To hear more about my thoughts, check out these two videos:

Need for Speed World Exp Part 1

Need for Speed World Exp Part 2

Im also an admin over at the World Garage now which you can find at www.world-garage.com