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

Been a bit busy recently with all the start of year stuff (you know, coming out of hibernation and so on) so I have a fair bit to blog about.

First up, the holiday to Milton Keynes to see the other half’s family for Christmas. This was epic fun except I managed to catch a nasty head cold the first day there and subsequently spent the entire holiday suffering. One very nice thing that I always like about going to Milton Keynes however is getting cans of Jolt and/or Mountain Dew.

Second up, been doing a lot of short story intros – apparently its safe to call them “flash-fiction” pieces – but as soon as I have something actually completed Ill be uploading them!

Thirdly, been doing a lot more NFS recently while I wait for World Online to be unleashed. If you check my YouTube link (look to the right there!) you’ll see my attempts at breaking/setting records.

Lastly, Ive opened a small forum for the World Online community over at www.wogarage.com. Its still small but with next to no advertising its managed to get 20 members already in a week so Im pretty confident about it.

Anyway, a more detailed blog post to follow at a later date!

At the begining of the month, Andrew Collins at EA interviewed John Doyle, the Senior Producer for World Online, about his ambitious online project. After some discussion over at the NFS fora, I volunteered to transcribe the interview so it could be translated by other fans into different languages for the benefit of the non-English fans. Anyway, heres my finished product:

http://fasckira.com/nfs/wo_interview_transcript.pdf

It was bloody difficult to say the least! In parts, theres a lot of ahh-ing and um-ing going on, not to mention quite a few sentences that stopped midway and suddenly changed! All told it took about 3 hours to complete.

So with all the recent dev blog posts over at needforspeed.com and general hype building created by the beta sign up page being discovered, it seemed that a closed beta was imminent. However in a podcast tonight with John Doyle, the senior producer for WO, it was revealed that this was not the case and that the beta would not begin till into the new year, possibly as late as March. One of the devs, VancouverBlade (Andrew Collins), confirmed that the beta sign up page had been up for testing and was not an legitimate sign up page.

So yes, extra all around! A lot of questions were answered though (including some of my own): I asked if the same customisation options found in NFS:U2 would be found in WO and also how the payment model would pan out, like if we were going to have to pay for cars or just the parts for example. The responses were that we can expect to see the customisation options found in the likes of Carbon (so pretty much inbetween Undercover and NFS:U2 quite neatly!) and that the payment model hadn’t been decided yet. Now, I dont know if this means there is still a chance the game could become pay per month – I personally hope this does happen as even a small token payment monthly and then car part purchase on top for example would still be acceptable and make me feel like I can rely on the games future more – but we’ll have to wait and see.

Awesome point though – turns out a good recently accquired online friend of mine, Kaizeras (who was responsible for some of the best WO sneak preview youtube videos), shunted one of the dev’s unknowingly in one of his videos. That be a pretty decent claim to fame right there in the NFS world!