Why Need for Speed Unbound moved to a live service model

Soon after Need for Speed Unbound launched in November 2022, the majority of staff at Criterion were moved to work on the next Battlefield entry as a support studio alongside DICE, Motive and Ripple Effect.

“When that decision happened we took the time to decide what we would want to do next,” Unbound’s Producer Patrick Honnoraty explained during a roundtable discussion celebrating Need for Speed’s 30th anniversary attended by Traxion.

Work on Need for Speed would continue, with a small team focusing on live service updates for Unbound instead of a direct sequel. This was new territory for the Need for Speed franchise, which, historically, has had limited post-launch support.

“No one had really tackled it in what we felt was the right way”

“We knew Need for Speed could be a compelling game that people could play beyond just the launch. But no one had really tackled it in what we felt was the right way,” said Honnoraty.

This led to Criterion adopting a ‘Kaizen’ approach, a Japanese term for continuous improvement, generating ideas that “we wanted to see come to the market.”

“We didn’t want to wait for another game to bring that out in say three, four, five, however many years it was going to be,” said Honnoraty.

 What followed was two years of live service updates, split into themed ‘volumes’ cherry-picking elements from fan-favourite titles from Need for Speed’s illustrious 30-year history. This year has seen volume updates themed around the popular Underground series and Hot Pursuit.

“We are very carefully cherry-picking and selecting stuff that we know resonates with the fans,” Creative Director John Stanley explained. For example, Volume 7 introduced a long-requested drag racing mode inspired by the Underground series: “I’ve been wanting to get that in for a long time,” said Stanley.

Meanwhile, Volume 8 paid homage to Hot Pursuit, adding a cops vs. racers multiplayer mode. For Criterion, the challenge is choosing which aspects from past games to cherrypick. Creative Director John Stanley explained how the goal was to bring “small iterative improvements” in this year’s volume updates rather than making Unbound an “everything game.”

“We can’t add in absolutely everything, but the big things that resonate, for sure,” said Stanley. “Let’s go back, let’s add them in, and then once they’re in, they stay in.”

“If they’re great and players love them, we index on them more. If they’re not, we just focus our attention in the right place. We start to build up this real core of Need for Speed and try to take that forward.”

Next week sees Unbound’s live service updates culminate with Volume 9, inspired by the seminal 2005 Most Wanted game. Launching on 26^th November, Volume 9 introduces the first playable motorbike in Need for Speed’s history and a new ‘Lockdown’ multiplayer mode, where teams of three players steal cars from lockups and attempt to escape with the loot in extraction trucks or lose it all.  

According to Stanley, Unbound’s last major update has been “a labour of love for the past three or four months.”

“This hasn’t been done before – we haven’t had a round-based multiplayer game mode,” he added. “We wanted to encapsulate that risk-reward flow that we have in our single player and take that to an online setting in teams of three.”

Although Volume 9 is inspired by Most Wanted, Criterion is adding its “own flavour and twist” to the new Lockdown mode, according to Stanley, who is “excited for people to play.”

Criterion wants “bigger” community input

As well as classic Need for Speed games, Unbound’s fan community has also influenced this year’s volume updates. “We’ve worked really closely with our community over this second year,” said Stanley.

“We’ve changed features mid-development this year because of the feedback they’ve given. There is stuff the guys have created like wraps for the current volume we’re about to put out – some of the wraps are in the trailer.” 

Honnoraty feels it’s important to work closely with fans. Going forward, Criterion wants the community to have a “bigger” input in the future of Need for Speed.

“It doesn’t really work unless you’re closer to the community that play your game and understand what your game is,” he said. “Trying to make a game for everyone creates something that gets titled ‘milk toast,’ and we don’t ever want to do that.”

“We need to try those ideas. If we go hard and we go down a route, we can’t do everything. We need to make sure we can check those things with people who are going to play the game. We love to play our games, but we don’t want to get held in a way where we’re making a game just for ourselves.”

“We’re ultimately making a game for a bunch of people to play, and we need to make sure those people are happy with the decisions we make. They constantly come with things we hadn’t thought of.”

“What you’ll have seen with a lot of the quality that we’ve delivered over this last year – a lot of it comes from them and their input. We would never stop that. We would want to continue that. We would want to go bigger.”

After two years, Volume 9 is expected to be the last major live service update and hopefully end Unbound on a high. From Criterion’s perspective, the studio is confident it’s proven that Need for Speed can adapt to a live service model.

“We wanted to crack the nut and prove that Need for Speed could do live service. And it has,” Honnoraty concluded.

“What we see from it is a continual return from our players. We see better metrics and everything we have shows that Need for Speed can survive as a live service game. That’s what we proved and that’s what we wanted to do.”