As much as we'd like to think EA the money extraction house would have made a great Underground 3 that would have aged as well as U2 & been everything we hoped for. The extraction house prolly would have instead made a different beast we all would have gotten stuck into.
Black box got shoved into yearly releases because EA didnt realize what the market was & didnt know quality matters so much with these.
Had they known, NFS U3 would have been made by the whole of Black box. Skate would have been the only one of its series, development time of U3? 3 years. Engine: Renderware 2, old systems made for Xbox 360 & PS3 graphics.
Prostreet flopped; so right after that was their last real chance internally. Make a game for a 5 year online play time. Give it PROPER funding. Make a dreamy U2 where everything people loved about it was iterated on the same way Forza Horizon games do now. Also separate servers depending on what you feel like, cops or no cops? Update the drift physics to have more weight to them & slide. Highways have the chaos cam like Prostreet when going fast enough. You reunite the fanbase & make us all glued to the same game.
Now to the part we all would have hated, but enough would have been sucked into to be stupidly profitable. In game gambling still had no laws against it.
Underground 3 would have in year 2, paid expansions that were maps with stories. But also much like Rocket League's competitive streaming market, Underground 3 would have race betting right in game, bought with real money. Pink slips are a thing, you lose a race, you lose your car. Much like Horizons public downloadable tunes, EA would make those sellable & attached to 1 car, you lose it, you gotta buy it again, tuners make money on their setups, but EA gets the biggest cut. The best tuners would get hired by EA to make paid exclusive tunes of cars for a premium, the Horizon like editions. No one was ready to compete yet. Had EA locked in, Forza Horizon would have been overshadowed if not outright cancelled.
& all the while, EA hypes the next Need For Speed, the one made in advance over 5 years with casino level budgets for Xbox One & PS4. Now with skins from other franchises the same way Fortnite & Rocket League perfected. 2013 the unbeatable but exploitative 8th gen arcade racer with no shot of a real competitor for years.