E3 2011: Need For Speed: The Run Detailed & Shown

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It’s Press Day at E3 in Los Angeles, where all the big companies are holding their press events for the benefit of the media. At their presser, Electronic Arts detailed further information about Need for Speed: The Run, the next game in the Need for Speed franchise. Looks like The Run will be a bit of a departure for the series as they’re adding some story elements and even out-of-car levels. Kiss of death?

NFS: The Run will basically have the players engaged in a race from San Francisco to New York. The social networking “Autolog” connectivity that lets you share you in-game achievements with friends that first emerged from Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit will return in The Run.

As for the on-foot segments, they showed a short gameplay demo where the player character was running through a building. It was basically an extended quick-time event (QTE) where occasional timed button presses were judging the character’s success as he tried to jump from building to building or beat up somebody. In the segment shown, the player was running from the Mob in Chicago. Eventually, he eludes the Mob, then steals a cop car from the police who are investing the disturbance. Just then, a Mob helicopter starts shooting at the player in the cop car, and the Chicago Police Department, thinking that a random civilian helicopter is shooting at cop cars, respond in kind.

At that point, it was back to driving, as the player is running from the helicopter through Downtown Chicago. Eventually, in a scripted crash, the cop car with the player crashes upside on train tracks, just as a train is barreling towards the crashed police cruiser. The QTE events are back as the player character struggles to get out of the cop car before the train, and just as the train is about to hit the car, the demo fades out and we see the logo. Pretty cool demo, no mention of multiplayer or co-op, as they just showed the single-player bits.

I was concerned when they first said there would be on-foot out-of-car stuff in Need For Speed. After all, on-foot segments didn’t do so well for Driv3r and I imagined it would be awful. However, from what we saw, it looks good. From the videos, looks like Need For Speed: The Run will be one to keep your eyes on.