It's Burnout Paradise with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit's Autolog system. That's the simplest way to explain why you should care about Criterion's reboot of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, down for release on 2nd November.
Having sampled the multiplayer - read our latest issue, out 4th September, for more - I sat down with executive producer Matt Webster and creative director Craig Sullivan for a chat about the science of rebooting, next gen transitions and the franchise's future.
There's a perception that Criterion "saved" the Need for Speed series with Hot Pursuit. Would you say that's fair?
Webster: I don't know. I mean, we asked to do Need for Speed and were quite surprised when someone said yes! It's quite a responsibility because for many people it was their first game - you know, people get into videogames at different points but Need for Speed has always been around. It's certainly one of the biggest gaming franchises in existence, so it's got a lot of history and it means a lot to lots of different people.
Sullivan: And that's a good and a bad thing as well, there's so much legacy. "Baggage" is the wrong term but it's like, I remember when I was at college borrowing my friends 3DO when he went on holiday - he had a lot more money than I did back in those days. And I borrowed his 3DO and I remember playing Need for Speed and just thinking "this is amazing".
It genuinely was one of the games that made me want to get in to the industry, and it's gone through lots of different transitions and lots of different changes, different teams - it means a lot to us. Which is why we chose Hot Pursuit, because we thought we could bring something new to it. The whole Cops versus Racers device was something we were really interested in, and completely splitting the game down the middle, and giving you a choice for the first time. We're always trying to push boundaries, whatever game we make.
And we introduced Autolog into that because we're really interested in friend mechanics and the connected generation - how can the game be more than just a disc that you put in the machine, and how can I be playing against my friends when my friends are not there or they live in different time zones?
The guys at Blackbox that put out The Run last year - they tried some different things, some of them worked and some of them didn't. But they make different games, they're an entirely different set of people than we are - different team, different philosophies on things.
Webster: I'm with you. I think it got a rough ride. My nephews - I've got 15 and 16 year old nephews - they love it. Totally love it. But as Craig said, there's lots of new things tried and some stick and some don't, and that's the risk game makers run, isn't it? You know, there's lots of people with an opinion, but only a few of them actually get to put it out on a disk.
