Need for Speed Shift 2 Unleashed

Totally agree bobcat, it's a superb game - most visceral and exciting racing game I've played in years!

I've refrained from posting in this thread until now as I wanted to get far enough with the game to make an informed opinion about it. It takes quite a few hours to get used to the handling, because it does feel very different from Forza, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as arcadey. After driving with Forza's handling model for hundreds of hours, it takes time to adjust. The cars you start off with aren't upgraded, have way too high tyre pressures and too soft springs and drive like bouncy castles, but once you upgrade the cars and tune them they handle really well. The GT cars are breathtakingly good, amazing sense of speed and I actually feel like I'm in a racing car unlike Forza's R-class cars which I've never taken to.

Getting the controller settings right is crucial - especially for people who've got years of Forza experience. It's a well known fact that on the controller, Forza uses a 'controller buffer' or 'controller filtering' to automatically reduce the steering lock when correcting a car (you can see this on the telemetry where the corrections don't match up with the inputs on the controller). This makes it very easy to catch the car when it starts to lose traction. Shift 2 doesn't do this, and it's down to the driver to correct the car themselves, so you just can't get away with being rough and aggressive like you can on Forza and this takes time to adjust to. I've been experimenting with different steering deadzone, sensitivity and speed sensitivity settings and the best for me (and most Forza like) are:

Steering deadzone: 15%
Steering sensitivity: 35%
Speed sensitivity: 85%

Reducing the steering lock (in the tuning section) improves stability, as does stiffening the suspension. I recorded a video using the above settings, firstly in a C-class Caterham so you can see how the steering inputs are mirrored by the front tyres moving, correctly responding to the opposite lock and corrections, unlike Forza's artificial buffering of the controller inputs. The second clip is in the GT3 Porsche, cars jostling for position into the first corner, battling it out under the bridge and retaking me again into the hairpin. (sorry poor quality, laptop webcam!)



As for the rest of the game, well the graphics are superb, sounds are quite incredible (especially in Dolby Digital 5.1) and the Autolog and career mode are excellent too. The track list is quite frankly astounding, I've still not driven all the tracks, and every one I've been to has been great. I've been racing with the games producer (Tom Curtis) and Lead Designer (Andy Tudor) a few times over the past week, really good to actually get to race with the developers and chat about the game, bugs that need fixing etc. A couple of things they told me were that they never wanted to put any drifting in the game, but it was enforced on them by EA (but thankfully limited to just those 10 events). The 'marble getting stuck under the car' feature is a bug and will be fixed in an update and the current level 20 cap will be increased at some point.

So the game gets a big thumbs up from me - it's not Forza, and that's not a criticism, it's something entirely different and good in it's own right, and with any luck will give Turn 10 a few things to think about for their next game.

Cheers

Mark

Cerberus F1

Twitter: @CerberusF1

Nice write up Cerberus, well put forward.

I have a question though regarding tuning. I can't really tune. I have a basic understanding of it but I'm not great at it. If this game requires cars to be tuned then are there any basic tips on getting them to be more realistic?

Very thoughtful review and well put.
Our review will be out in the podcast tomorrow evening. For those who want to have their input on the show the Chatbox will be open for comment from 8pm BST tomorrow

Richy wrote:I have a question though regarding tuning. I can't really tune. I have a basic understanding of it but I'm not great at it. If this game requires cars to be tuned then are there any basic tips on getting them to be more realistic?

By default, most the cars seem to have too high tyre pressures, high ride height and soft suspension - just changing those things makes a massive difference. I bring the tyres down to around 35, reduce the ride height a couple of clicks and increase the suspension stiffness 2 clicks front and rear. The tuning works very much like Forza, just some of the terminology and values are different, e.g. soften the front sway bar (rollbar) to reduce understeer. To be honest, I've not really done any in-depth tuning with diffs and dampers etc, most of the time I just want to get on the track and race!

Matt wrote:Very thoughtful review and well put.
Our review will be out in the podcast tomorrow evening. For those who want to have their input on the show the Chatbox will be open for comment from 8pm BST tomorrow

Cheers Matt, I shall listen with interest Most of the criticism of the game seems to stem from the fact that it doesn't feel like Forza, but I think that's the same for most other racing games - GT5, iRacing, etc, it takes time to learn how the cars handle and react to the controller inputs. For me, it started to click after about 3 days, I got past that mental barrier of analysing what I was doing with my fingers and just started to drive naturally as I do on Forza, and I think that's the biggest hurdle, getting comfortable with something that feels different. But different certainly doesn't make it bad!

Richy wrote:

I have a question though regarding tuning. I can't really tune. I have a basic understanding of it but I'm not great at it. If this game requires cars to be tuned then are there any basic tips on getting them to be more realistic?

I found the best thing to do is to pick a car and a track preferably an easy one and try and get the best possible time or feeling you can out of the car by tweaking and re-tweaking doing this you will learn what different things do. i.e rear springs fast bump etc it as helped me on both this and forza.

ps. nice write up magicturbo

sick of guys glitching times just been in a party with the guy who,s no 1 on monza and he showed me what he did to get the time,I,m in two minds to go and do it 6 seconds quicker than mine and magics ,will there be any hope of the developers sortin this,i dont think so

You never know, Bungie resets leaderboards from time to time if people start finding ways of getting silly scores or doing the impossible. The NFS team might be the same.

That happened with Race Pro back in the days of the ''fast glitch'', they sorted out the glitch, but never sorted out the leaderboards..

If Simbin can fix something, i'm pretty sure EA can!

I asked the lead designer Andy Tudor last week what was going to happen with the glitch times and he said they were working on a solution and they think they can remove them without doing a full leaderboard wipe.

i really hope they sort it,this could be a game recker for me,i reckon other people will feel the same way.

Virtualr.net has just posted their review for the game. See what you think:

http://www.virtualr.net/need-for-speed-shift-2-unleased-review/

We did out review last night on the Podcat. Give it a listen and tell us what you think. iirc we gave it a 7/10.

Looks like they like it then

I would love it if they would fix the steering!!! Cmon...pretty please!

VVV worm wrote:I would love it if they would fix the steering!!! Cmon...pretty please!

lol and the glitches

Will be picking up this game today during lunch.

going from shift 2 to driving on forza is so hard! Was all over the place!

EZT Ash wrote:going from shift 2 to driving on forza is so hard! Was all over the place!

The weight of the cars don't help, because it is like the Shift 2 cars are light. While having a spring installed. But will I buy the game, after renting it out.

Well my answer is no, because quite a few events have annoyed me. Which is a rare thing for me in racing games. Along with that, the following isn't pleasing:

*AI
*Some of the track's - I feel Shift 2 has ruined the Green Hell name.

http://www.virtualr.net/need-for-speed-shift-2-unleashed-first-patch-details/

patch!

i hope this helps the steering!

thats a pc patch only

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

novelty is waring off faster than the Lamborghini going down the monza strait!! might be traded in pretty soon

i thought a touring car series on this might be good.

FWD cars are way easier to drive on here than the RWD cars.