Need for Speed Payback - Platinum-Grade Excellence

Need for Speed Payback (I'll call it Payback from now on) is the latest installment in the 23-year-old racing game series. It was made by the Swedish developer Ghost Games and released in 2017 for PlayStation 4, XBox One, and PC. I played the PS4 version.

Payback worked very well for me. I enjoyed playing it all December. Thanks to its excellent core gameplay mechanics and casual overall attitude, I found it easy to return to the game day after day. After finishing the main storyline I didn't feel like dropping the game quite yet, so I continued happily grinding through its various optional achievements until I had unlocked its platinum PlayStation trophy.

If you're not familiar with PlayStation trophies, there's at most one platinum trophy for a game. It commonly means completing the game and combing it through for hidden things, repeating some parts to level up, and performing difficult optional feats. Getting the platinum trophy could be a total drag. But when the gameplay is excellent, you want to return to the game, and the platinum trophy is just the excuse you need to keep doing it.

Payback iterates on the previous game that was released two years earlier, simply called Need for Speed (NFS), also by Ghost Games. I liked it equally much and ended up getting its platinum trophy as well. I'd like to dig into a couple of things that I think makes Payback–and also its prequel–so enjoyable to me.

By the way, feel free to listen to some of the nice tracks from both NFS and Payback while reading on. Both games feature "real music" from many less known artists and a couple of well-known artists, all chosen with good taste. I compiled a short playlist of my favourites.

Mechanics of driving

The most important factor of joy is the mechanics of driving. A racing game wouldn't be fun if the experience of driving a car wasn't engaging. Payback has the same excellent feel to driving as NFS did but tops it by providing not one but five unique driving experiences.

In Payback, there are five classes of cars, each designed for a specific driving style: Race, Drift, Drag, Offroad, and Runner. Race cars are the all-round fast and maneuverable class for driving on tarmac. Drift cars skid very easily and are not that fast. Drag cars accelerate really fast to high speeds but due to inevitable wheelieing the cars are impossible to steer when accelerating. Offroad cars have the best traction and therefore suit driving on dirt but tend to be too stiff in turns on tarmac. Runners are sturdy like tanks and are therefore good for police pursuits.

When you buy a car you choose its class permanently. If you buy a Koenigsegg Regera from a Race shop, it will perform well in turns. If you buy that same Regera from a Drag shop, you'll have a hard time in turns due to wheelies. This feels very different from how you tune and specialise cars in real life and doesn't quite make sense but I'll try to explain why I think it does good service to gameplay.

This max-pimped Regera is traveling
500 meters through the air.

Almost all the driving challenges that you can take are available for one class only. To enter an Offroad race you'll have to switch to an Offroad car.

The brilliance of these arbitrary sounding limitations is that because the game can guarantee that the player will be driving a car that has the right kinds of attributes, e.g. good traction in an Offroad race, the level designers have been able to take the races further and express their unique characteristics clearly. Driving Offroad feels very different than driving Race.

Compared to the prequel, Need for Speed, the difference is dramatic. NFS featured eight different kinds of driving events, though their differences were small. Using Payback's terminology, they could be lumped under the Race and Drift classes. (I'll ignore the few Drag events for simplicity.) Many event types were mixtures of Race and Drift, such as Gymkhana where you had to be fast enough to beat a time limit but also drift a lot to reach a drift score threshold.

NFS let you participate in drift events with a car that didn't have much drift in it, letting the player feel incompetent for reasons out of his control. The game had no means to prevent this because event types didn't have clear defining characteristics. In just about all events you had to be fast on twisty tarmac but often you also had to be able to drift enough.

Because challenges in NFS were muddled together like that, there was mostly just one kind of driving experience to be had. This in turn determined how cars were upgraded. The main bulk of it was that you just purchased the best parts. There were about 20 performance parts you could upgrade in a car but nearly all of them had one clear best option. Tyres were the only part where you could choose between grip and drift. Because driving was mostly about one goal, to go fast, all the performance parts could only be upgraded in that one aspect.

Upgrading my drag Beetle. Replacing concrete
parts with symbolic cards was an inventive
and bold choice from Ghost Games.

Payback's forcibly distinct car classes is a solid design choice when you think of it as a pure game mechanic and not a representation of the real world. Making the classes behave so differently provides more variety in gameplay. The fact that the player is forced to use only cars of the appropriate class prevents him from wasting time attempting to perform feats with cars that are simply not capable to do them. Finally, having the class choice as a single event (when the car is purchased) instead of the product of dozens of choices (which could happen for example every time you upgraded a part) makes it clear what your car is capable of. It rules out a multitude of suboptimal in-between builds where you could mix Race exhaust, Drag block, and Offroad transmission (figuratively speaking, because such items don't exist in the game). This is sensible design in an arcade racing game.

Seamless and Engaging World Traversal

The second important factor that makes Payback and NFS enjoyable is that their core gameplay mechanic is also the glue that ties their more focused content pieces together. Let me explain.

Traveling to all the points of interest
is engaging thanks to the complex
core mechanic and unbridled use of
obstacles like mountains.

Payback and NFS are essentially open-world games. There's a large city map where you can drive freely. The map is littered with various activities such as races, collectibles, and story cutscenes. It's a setup that you see in most open-world games.

The major complaint that I keep having with games where the protagonist travels mainly on foot is what I termed the Lunar Rover syndrome in my earlier Skyrim article. Most of of the time you spend in the game is all about walking from place to place. The walking part is completely uninteresting as a game mechanic. At worst, you turn to the right compass bearing and push the stick forward for a couple of minutes until you reach your destination. It's trivial. It poses no challenge to the player. In Skyrim, the Lunar Rover syndrome was alleviated by ensuring that every 5 seconds the boring traversal is interrupted by something–a hostile encounter, a little dwelling to ransack, or maybe just a bunch of berries for you to consider picking up.

Collectibles are scattered in surprising
places. They're fun to discover
but frustrating to look for.

In open-world racing games such as Payback the Lunar Rover syndrome doesn't exist. There is an equally large amount of traveling from place to place, as in Skyrim, but now it's the core game mechanic–driving a car. It's a non-trivial activity. It's much more than just pressing the controller towards where you want to go. First of all, there's never a straight road to your destination. You need to read the map and the navigational assistance, avoid crashing into other cars, stay on the road, control your speed, and keep an eye out for hidden collectibles around you while blasting ahead at a high speed. On top of it all, managing all this is an enjoyable activity. It poses a challenge at a level that the player is able to control. It's quite a beautiful solution.

As a side note, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes a huge leap forward in solving the Lunar Rover syndrome for on-foot open-world games. Its trick is to add lots of verticality to the world map and make climbing an engaging activity. My plan is to write more about BotW in a future article.

Staying in the Flow

The third important factor that makes Payback and NFS thrilling is that they manage to keep me engaged in the action.

Drag racing downtown. No worries,
there's very little other traffic.
The paint job is by another player.

When you drive fast and recklessly, small mistakes can have big consequences. Driving 300 km/h into a brick wall or falling off a winding mountain path is catastrophic in real life. In Payback it's only a couple of seconds of penalty. You'll be repositioned quickly on the road, with most of your forward motion, and the driving can continue.

This kind of pampering is essential to let players like me to stay in the feeling of the moment and the excitement of beating a challenge against the odds. Dropping the player completely out of a race after one crash could be punishing and could result in building up frustration for some players. Frustration is essential in "hard fun" but Payback and NFS cater for players who like casual fun.

The police don't follow the laws of physics.

One way that NFS tries to alleviate frustration–and has received criticism for–is the well-known rubberbanding technique. In essence, the computer opponents get noticeable speed boosts when you are in the lead. In Circuit Races it's helpful to drive the first lap without using the nitrous boost. The AI opponents will then adjust their skill level to that lap time. If you then drive another lap with nitro, you'll easily get the fastest lap time.

Payback implements rubberbanding better. The only place where it's glaringly obvious is in police pursuits. Police cars shoot past you no matter how fast you're going. It's very silly but also understandable because pursuits are designed to be about physical contact with the police.

In other races, I've witnessed multiple times how the AI opponent has crashed into a tree, lost multiple seconds recovering from it, and never got even close to me again. Similarly, if I crash during a race, it gets much more difficult to gain lead again. If feels fair and much more believable than in NFS.

Payback seems to implement some kind of dynamic scaling, too. When you replay old races, they always seem challenging enough. It feels better than rubberbanding. It seems that at the start of a race the opponents' cars are adjusted relative to the level of your car. This is not the case when you enter a race for the first time.

Final Words

This article is about select aspects that I found appealing in Payback. I omitted car customisation, social play, and loot boxes. I actually wrote quite a lot about loot boxes but in the end the text decided to evolve into an article of its own.

I have started Payback a few times afterwards, and to my delight I have noticed that Ghost Games keep improving the game in meaningful ways, responding to feedback from players and keeping the game fresh.

-Ville