[My journey through 2004 ends here with another guest post. I’m pleased to hand over again to Alexander Sigsworth, who you can find blogging at alexsigsworth.wordpress.com and who previously wrote about Driver and Mario Kart: Super Circuit]
In July 2003, as British gamers were playing Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, EyeToy: Play and Pokémon Ruby Version, EA Games were preparing for the launch of Need for Speed: Underground that November. It was to be a watershed moment for racing games, putting just as much emphasis on driving cars as on customizing them with body kits and vinyls. It was not the best racing game of its generation, but it still smoked its rivals every time when it came to presentation.
Until… the sequel.
That same month, while preparation for Need for Speed: Underground’s release was still underway, EA began development on Need for Speed: Underground 2. So confident they were that the game would be a hit, they decided to give themselves a head start on improving where it fell short by being even more ambitious than the first time around.
The most obvious starting point was by going open world. Need for Speed: Underground’s setting of Olympic City had been designed so that the tracks would connect with each other in order to create a single, cohesive environment for the game. It wasn’t intended to be explored outside of racing – and the free roam mod that enables this reveals how deceptively small it actually is.
But sequels have to be bigger, so Olympic City was replaced with Bayview, which could be explored freely. It had five times more road with multiple unlockable districts, diverse architecture and a complicated freeway system for extra believability. From the leisurely drives up to the Bayview sign and the observatory to the nightlife atmosphere of Jackson Heights and tight, twisted roads of Coal Harbour, Need for Speed’s first great map had arrived.
It is still one of the most beautiful video game locations. When you fall in love with a game, you fall in love with its world. For those of us who grew up playing Need for Speed: Underground 2, Bayview is like a second home.
It was never even about the racing. Not really. Half the time, all I wanted to do was drive up into the hills to look down upon the City Core from above to watch the sweeping search lights of the stadium and the blinking skyscrapers in the endless night. The suburban boy yearning for the big, bright city.
The perpetual darkness is the perfect canvas for the production design. In making their sequel bigger, EA included so many more car customisation options that even future Need for Speed titles would decide were too much. It wasn’t just variations on existing options, either – entirely new forms of upgrading a car were added. In fact, there are so many new customisation options that… it seems EA didn’t know what to do with them.
Put yourself in their position for a moment. You’ve already developed a racing game that has the unique selling point of how much car customisation there is. Now, you’re developing a sequel that players will – not unreasonably – be expecting to include even more. So you add features like nitrous purge, hydraulics, trunk audio, spinners and lights. In the end, there are so many unique upgrades that the car customisation is arguably the main game mode – but that creates another problem: if you’ve put so many unlockables in a game, how do you make sure that all of them are seen, let alone used?
In his initial review of the first game, Iain said “my enjoyment of Need for Speed: Underground comes tinged with the feeling that its most effective mechanics are one step closer to loot boxes”. In amplifying everything from that first game, this sequel takes yet another step, in the form of the visual star rating.
The progression system is structured around contracts which the player must complete in order to advance through the Career mode and become Bayview’s top street racer. Each offered contract rewards a different payout and signing bonus, with terms based on winning so many races of specified types, so that each player can agree to terms they think they can meet – the idea being that they can pick-and-choose their route to completion, rather than being funnelled through the same, linear series of events. I knew that drifting is my biggest strength but that I’m less than useless when it comes to drag racing, so I was able to avoid contracts with drag races as one of their terms and favour those with drift events as one of theirs.
This might sound as though the contract system enables the player to choose the way they play the game. The problem, however, is that, regardless of which contract is chosen, one of the terms is the player’s car being featured on the cover of so many magazines and/or DVDs – and to do that, the player must apply enough visual upgrades to it for it to achieve the required star rating. It is this that’s the fundamental problem with the customization in Need for Speed: Underground 2.
In street racing, the way you make your car look is a form of expression. The car is a blank canvas upon which you can paint anything. That can be a statement of intent or personal branding. Car customization is its own artform and art has no rules. The beauty of it is that you can make your car look however you want it to look, to be whatever you want it to be.
In Need for Speed: Underground 2, it’s the opposite. The particular parts or vinyls your car has are based on which ones can get it to the highest star rating. It’s not about creativity, it’s about meeting a certain requirement. There’s nothing of the player’s own identity in that. Instead, the more expensive, more difficult-to-unlock parts are objectively better. Your car will look however it has to look for those photographers to be interested and for your sponsors to keep supporting you.
After winning so many races or accumulating so many reputation points, an SMS message will inform you of a new part you’ve unlocked. You need to complete your contract to advance through the game. You need to get those photoshoots. You need a high enough star rating. Immediately travelling to the relevant shop to install the newly unlocked part is the only option you really have. It doesn’t matter if you prefer the one you’ve already got. You could choose not to replace it. But that will just keep you from progressing through your career. Your sponsors are the ones keeping your lights on. They’re the ones getting you up the street racing ladder. They aren’t paying you to be an artiste. So you’ll fit that new part and you’ll fit it now. Otherwise, you’ll stay where you are.
The fun of a game like this is how you can use the visual upgrades as a way to put your own personal spin on your ride, to get it just how you like it. To say “this is me”. Adding stuff – adding whatever’s new – because of contractual obligation? That… isn’t fun. At all. Plus, it can force you to waste Bank that could be spent on something practical, like a performance part – or even another car.
I started my career in a Peugeot 107. After buying every performance part I’d unlocked and applying every visual upgrade I had, I stopped winning races. There was no way to make the 107 any better than it was, so I invested in the best-performing car I’d unlocked at that point, an Audi TT, and added all the unlocked performance parts to that car as well. I didn’t apply any visual upgrades, though. I didn’t see the point. I knew that any I unlocked with the TT would be wasted if they weren’t applied to the 107. As their only purpose was to boost my star rating because the game required it, I decided to keep using the 107 as my “show car” because of how much work I’d already done on it.
From that point, I was using one car for taking part in events but any visual upgrades I unlocked with it were put on my other car. In that situation, being forced to spend that money in order to advance meant that splitting my budget in that way was the best option, economically. This does seem to defeat the whole point somewhat because when I eventually did unlock a covershoot event, it was for a car I wasn’t actually using for racing, as any visual part I did want to put on my TT was something I couldn’t afford not to put on my 107 instead. As a result, the car I was using for racing looked like stock and the car that looked like a racer actually just sat in my garage.
By the time I decided I’d played through enough of the game, it had become caked in so many layers-upon-layers of paint that it was less of a street racing machine and more like some tackily, glammed-up beauty contest winner. There were so many vinyls that I couldn’t see where one started and another ended. There were decals slapped all over it; logos of companies I’ve never heard of and that I couldn’t even make out amongst the sludge beneath. I had no idea what I was looking at. It was a mess of colour and patterns and questionable design choices.
This isn’t unlike what was happening in car culture of the time. Need for Speed: Underground’s whole concept was inspired by The Fast and the Furious and how it portrayed the import tuner scene – though that scene was itself then influenced by the film. Once it had codified the Hollywood version of car customisation, that subculture started taking its cues from the films, rather than the other way around. As a result, the early 2000s was when car customisation thrived. Cool became cooler – but tacky became tackier; it was when taste was optional and ostentatiousness thrived. It was when being seen was what mattered most and creating the biggest impression was the goal. As far as cars go, the early 2000s has become like fashion in the 1980s and nowhere is this more apparent than the SEMA Show, hosted by the Speciality Equipment Market Association. At that time, there was much more attention on the aesthetic upgrades than performance parts, with cars sponsored to show them off – so the use, in the game, of one car “for show” aligned with the real car culture of the time.
But Need for Speed: Underground 2 is a racing game. It’s not a car customisation simulator. The car customisation aspect of the game is brilliant. It’s still much more detailed than most racing games and is one of the most realistic cultural depictions of a particular, niche subculture at the time at which it was made. It’s also an aspect which is segregated from the racing. It’s two games in one. But advancing through either requires advancing through both, hence the player being forced to add as many visual upgrades to a car as possible without even being able to take it racing.
That’s not what car customization is about. Not in a game, anyway. In a game, it’s about being able to design the car I want to drive. It’s not about the player being obligated to add as much as possible. But then, this is EA Games, a company for whom less isn’t more. For them, only more is more.
Need for Speed: Underground 2 was the UK’s #1 game for ten consecutive weeks. Details of what else was top of the charts at the time are after the page break.
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