Need for Speed™ Carbon

[atrophocy]

first thing i found with the demo is that neither the install or the game itself with Folding@home. i had to stop it. i dont like the interface. it has a very console ish feel to it. in fact i dare say it is exactly the same as the interface for the console version. it also has quite an arcade kinda feel but the racing itself is interesting. not realistic but difficult. very slippery and slidy but fun.

it looks good, but nowhere near as good as most wanted, imo. it's hard to tell at this stage though as it doesnt give you the range of display options available in MW and i dont think it's using the SLi properly. i turned gfx down to the mid-high range and was getting 40-60fps. whereas, for example, MW at maximum looks much better and runs and 80-150fps.

[Koroush Ghazi]

OK, found some time to download and install the demo and play around quickly with it.

Gameplay

In general the game doesn't appeal to me as much as NFSMW, as it appears to focus too much on street racing and not enough on the general free-roam cop pursuits in NFSMW, but obviously hard to tell in the demo version. It has drifting mode in it again like the Underground series, and in most respects it feels like NFSMW was a deviation, and this game returns firmly to the Underground path. If you liked the Underground versions I suspect you'll like this one.

Screenshots/Movies

Some quick screenshots:




Sample gameplay movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqgLZSqfUgI


Performance

After installing the game, each time I tried to alter the settings and launch the game it would crash. It turns out I had to alter all my settings, close the game, then open it again for things to work.

The game's appearance looks a bit different to NFSMW, not dramatically so, but the motion blur in particular has been ramped up and might annoy a fair few people - luckily it can be turned off. The use of AA in the game makes a noticeable difference, as it really blurs things a lot more when enabled. It seems some of the added touches make the game more strenuous than NFSMW.

The game has a reasonable number of in-game graphics altering options. Running it at 1280x1024, 2xAA, Anisotropic Filtering (doesn't say how much), all settings max I get around 15-20FPS in the game. However because of the blurring it actually feels surprisingly smooth. Also make sure to disable VSync as usual for maximum FPS.

The advanced settings for the game are found in the Registry, under the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Electronic Arts\Need for Speed Carbon Demo\] key. Most of the settings are those which can be altered fully in-game. You can switch Rain effects on/off with the Rainenable key.

The cachesize and swapsize options can also likely be safely increased to reduce any stuttering. Note these are the same settings as was used in NFSMW, so check the NFSMW Tweak Guide page 7 for details.

I'm not sure if I'll do a guide for this game or not as I'm under pressure with the other games getting guides right now, and it also doesn't seem highly tweakable, but we'll see.

[Beach]

it seems that even IGN, who is notorious for overrating the games they review have given NFS Carbon: 8.2

http://au.xbox360.ign.com/articles/742/742381p1.html

what a let down..

[iamhurtin]

the last good nfs was hot pursuit 2, the underground series were simply awful, i guess just have to buy a 360 or a ps3 and get new burnout for a good street racing game, lets hope one day we get fight night and burnout on the pc

[alexandros1313]

Does anyone else think that the graphics look too cartoony?I really hate this year's graphics,NFS Most Wanted looks way better than this.

[atrophocy]

mmm. there is something kinda weird about the looks of the game. i still cant quite pick it but it really grates for me.

[Koroush Ghazi]

I think both of you have picked up on what I also referred to as the increase in blurriness - it almost makes things too 'cartoon smooth'. The motion blurring is applied to a lot more things in this game, and the brighter colors at night also help make it bit more cartoony perhaps?

I really hope the game doesn't just have night-mode driving, and that there are plenty of daytime levels and a daytime free-ride mode, but I don't think it will.

[alexandros1313]

Nah,I think this year is the "night" year.Probaly next year we'll get NFS most wanted 2.Stupid EA...

[Koroush Ghazi]

Remember that NFS Underground 1 & 2 were very successful in terms of sales, so clearly EA is simply trying to do what it feels will have the greatest sales success. I don't agree with it necessarily, but as discussed before it's a question of taste, and look on the positive side: at least we got a very polished demo of NFS Carbon to use to decide whether we should buy the game or not.

[asdfsauce]

I just finished playing around with the demo and man, it's unreal how bad this game performs considering how awful it looks. The buildings/road textures are horrible, they're so low res it looks like they slapped some motion blur on a 6 year old game and then imported some new car models.

I had 8 FPS with shader detail on high, turning that to medium brought my fps up to 25.

I mean just look at the road texture in this image koroush took:


Seriously, NFSMW looked amazing and ran so well on my old comp... I really don't understand what happened in this game.

Also, no widescreen resolutions? come on...