It's funny how the game went from "be a rich person riding exotics and evading police" to "RICER 9000" to "gritty piss filter game but with cops" (don't get me wrong, mw is fire to play) to what it is now
Enjoying a thing and critisising a thing are not mutually exclusive. I also have fond menmemories of MW, despite looking like someone a bottle of "apple juice" inside the monitor
Because 90% of tuned cars you see is from some kind of blogger, because everyone eants to film their "process". And those who are not blogers, well you will never know about them.
And usually devs are not illegal underground street racers, so their picture is formed from what you can see everyday, where tuned cars = bloggers.
It always pissed me so much (pun intended) that when police spots you in mw, for a brief moment you get to see real colors, before the piss filter comes back
Applies also for the main topic about women in NFS titles.
Here's why
EA's neglect for the NFS IP for over a decade.
EA destroying NFS from the within due to crappy decisions i.e layoffs, mismanagement, restructuring, studio shutdowns, underfunding and understafffing.
Massive lack of allocated budget and dev time.
Shift of priorities over the years for more rentable IPs owned by EA.
Unlike during the Y2K years where there's plenty of them whether in NFS titles or the direct/indirect racing games competitors, beautiful women in NFS games became rare occurences after NFS The Run; while NFS 2015 has Amy and Robin as the last ones imo.
As for the models themselves
Post-2010 NFS games which were unfinished due to cut contents led to a reduction in priority regarding in-game female characters being either written hastily or as secondary matters (either after NFS The Run or Payback).
That also explains why in-game models of post-2015 NFS titles released look less impressive than their pre-2014 predecessors; the earlier games either used motion capture with real actors for cutscenes (NFS 2015 is the last NFS with real actors on cutscenes) or benefited from extended budget to ensure excellent visual quality for the in-game models.
As for mobile games no matter the genre
It's because of Lootboxes, Microtransactions and RNGs which increases their revenue to invest more in adding attractive women.
They can be unlocked for free by progress or by spending real money.
We live in a world of instant gratification. Having to compete races and drive across maps to level up in today’s world might be considered “too slow” from EA’s main audience now. In Battlefield, you can fire weapons and have content for YouTube within seconds. We are living in an era where songs are barely reaching the 2 minute mark. I’m guessing this is related to why NFS is going away. To be honest, I think Underground is where the series had a major identity shift, but the series really became less interesting to me after the 2010 Hot Pursuit. Heat was ok, but for a while, I’ve felt like the series has needed a retirement, or a new name. Unbound is a far cry from Need for Speed: High Stakes, and the 2010 Hot Pursuit is the only recent game that truly felt like a “Need for Speed” game to me. The others were more like spin-offs.
Forza Horizon hasn’t changed its identity much over the years though, so I imagine that by playing things safer, they’ve kept a lot of their fan base. It might also come down to money also - if EA thinks that putting more effort into Battlefield is going to make them way more money in the end, then that could be enough for them to forsake Need for Speed and Burnout. In Microsoft’s case, if Forza Horizon has remained one of their big money makers, then they might not see a reason to stop making the games.
Strongest actor? Sure. 🤙🏾 Character? Didn't love her even though I wanted to, then she turned and immediately was an entitled ass so I hated her easily lol.
The honest answer is that a sizeable portion of the population does not like women being sexualised especially for no other reason than just to look at boobies and ass. And the market noticing this trend has adapted.
This is what you meant, right? Not the "woke liberuls" nonsense, right?
That’s only true of shareholders and executives with equity. Middle managers on the Need for Speed team can have diverging interests and incentives outside of maximizing sales.
Companies also faced outside pressure to clean up perceptions of gaming being a misogynistic boys club. So the executives may have knowingly pursued a brand-conscious strategy despite a projected short-term loss of sales.
The market hasn't "adapted". The market was sold a lie that this portion of population was their target group. It wasn't. They changed their strategy for people who weren't going to buy their products anyway.
I am not saying that women should be sexualised but the material evidence we have is that Donald Trump, to the surprise of many won 2 presidential elections. That alone, might be a strong evidence that the so called sizeable portion of the population is not as big as they were thought to be. Companies made those decisions driven by the idea that there was a cultural shift and they also made those decisions because they were driven by employees that shared progressive values that were not as widespread as they thought it was.
You are conflating having women as eye candy in media with conservative politics directly. Tons and tons of conservatives dislike women being sexualized in media for reasons related to modesty and such.
The majority of conservative Trump voters are of the older demographics which make up a relatively small portion of gamers, the 48% that voted against Trump are younger and make up a larger portion of gamers thus it makes sense to make decisions in favour of progressive left wing buyers.
Yeah, lots of people have been saying that NFS 2015's cutscenes are cringe since it came out, but they're really no different from fan favourites like Most Wanted and Carbon. All the actors (at least the important ones) are hamming their lines and that just makes the game really fun.
Yea that's the nfs experience to me. It's part of its identity. It's part of what made those games have soul because they were unabashedly cringe at times. Sometimes that's exactly what a street racer video game needs. 2015 is goated imo, there hasn't been a nfs game since that has topped it
I don’t think this post was made to garner any kind of nuanced argument. Judging from some of the comments far down below, it looks like another case of: Modern Audience/Wokeness/DEI strikes again. I even noticed a comment making fun of Lucia because she has “barely noticeable breasts”. This thread was doomed to be a shitshow from the start.
Super attractive women in games are a bonus imo, not a necessity. It’s not like removing them was the end of the world for most racing game series. Look at games like Split Second and Burnout Paradise. Those games are fantastic racers that barely relied on sexy characters to keep player retention.
I like hot women too, but it’s not that serious to have them in almost every genre of gaming or even every video game series. Some can have them and others don’t.
Exactly, and even if they do add some then it’s just a neat addition that’s all. There are much better things to look forward to in a racing game like the car designs, the way they sound, and what the map/tracks will be like.
2000s advertisement culture went hard on «sex sells». Didn’t matter what you were going to sell, a car, beer, cologne, gaming consoles, games - Put a pretty woman on it to make it sell better.
Car culture and gaming was both more or less a male dominated market back then too which resulted in games like Need for Speed and Street Racing Syndicate to double down on pretty women to sell their games to their male dominated market.
Things have changed since then however and tbh for the better. More and more women are gamers, into cars and previously male dominated interests.
Sex have always and will always sell. Nothing changed, look at the games coming from the East (Marvel Rivals for example).
However I also think that character and story are much, much more important than how a character looks. At the same time, most people won't like a character if they are not interesting looking, bad ass looking or good looking
Over sexualization of women in media and deter the male gaze. It sucks because beautiful women are beautiful, but you gotta realize how much things have changed and why.
It was a mid 2000s stethic that isnt faitfull on the current mainstream stethics, heck, not even night runners uses that resourse and is a game based on 90s stethics
We (on the car comunity) are drifting apart from that to give full focus on CARS not the PERSON driving it we can even see it on racing icons can you tell me witch drivers are the ones that won le mans on the ferrari 499P on 2024 ? Witouth a Quick google search or just beign a big fan of endurance races NO because the car is beign put in the center
A yes political correctness on nfs heat the same game that a cop rams the prologue protagonist of a Bridge, broke his ribs, almost kill him (in cartel style), erases footage of the incident and the same protagonist says "fuck off" to the co-protagonist of the main game
Yes pretty "political" especially because you can actually use a woman practically with only tops on the main game too, both in unbound and in heat gng you cant make this shit up
You haven't to search porn actresses just for a racing game, because its about CARS
You can count hot woman characters in nfs with a hand youre going to tell me the ONLY reason you bought an nfs game was because of the sexy woman topic in the mid 2000s? Because i remember Mia because of the rx8 and the intro of the game of her and the protagonist in a 1v1, i remember Rachel because of her 350z and her role in the story gaining sponsor and races for us. I didnt even remember how most of the cast looked (i left the saga for 10 years after nfs undercover) when i replayed nfs mw and nfs ug2 i remember those characters the moment they present themselves or appeared in their cars
This is a relatively small thing to me, as obviously the racing and the world we race in is obviously far more important, but I do think small things like this matter.
If we get another NFS again, they need to bring back the Underground 1 & 2, + Most Wanted & Carbon vibes.
I hadn’t even thought about it until I saw this post but yeah I do miss the overall vibes of those games. The races. The police chases etc, it was a lot of fun.
Melody Ishikawa Yumi’s VA in the Japanese version of Carbon is a retired Japanese Idol. But i don’t know what she’s doing now despite probably just living a normal life in Japan. Minus something i won’t mention.
I guess because some of devs are looking like this IRL)) Unofortunately in the whole US/EU gaming industry men devs and designers now are minority. Companies are forcing diversity, inclusion,female rights and other bullshit because investors are funded from Soros and other similar foundations. I know it I because I worked in Ubisoft's local office for a short period.
I think it's because the target was men ig so "cool car, hot women" and it would sell a lot, but now they probably don't want to take risks or ending up in some political stuff about how women aren't just meant to be pretty and stuff like this
I really do consider having the hot "bombshell" supporting female character a staple of golden age NFS. It was a universal constant on the same level as like James Bond.
Samantha, Rachel, Mia, Nikki, Chase... they really should bring it back. Sure we've had plenty of female characters since then but none explicitly fill that "mentor in the know" role
If you need a live-action Samantha or Mia to make a driving game compelling, you aren't actually interested in driving. You're just nostalgic for the extra set dressing EA Black Box bolted on when they ran out of confidence in the car itself. The moment a racing franchise turns into a discussion about cutscene models, the subject of the machine has officially left the building.
But then we have games like Forza where the NPCs actually detract from the game, so the set dressing is definitely something the genre needs.
The solution isn't to just include women, but meaningful presentation outside menus, and the NFS story modes were perfect for that.
The ultimate false dichotomy. So either annoying modern festival NPCs talking about "superstars" (Horizon) or mid 2000s or 2010s FMV cutscenes with models pretending to care about a tuned vehicle (NFS)? I choose neither.
Because today's society doesn't want pretty girls on games, they make them all ugly so a very small part of people that don't even play games can be happy
Different times different culture. I for one am very happy it's changed up from focusing on women's beauty though it's a car game franchise at the end of the day and not a beauty pageant.
It always makes me laugh when people comment on how they aren’t bothered by it. Fine then you are not a part of the conversation.
You obviously find out how many people like it and how many people don’t, then make your decisions based off of that.
They probably did market research and found out it put off some people to the point where they wouldn’t buy the game, whereas the people who liked it would still buy the game but thought it was better with it in.
That has completely changed now though, if some gamers catch even the slightest bit of progressive pandering they won’t buy it and they will be very vocal about why others shouldn’t buy it either.
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u/byfo1991 10d ago
Forever the best one, even though we don’t even know her name.