New NFS and Skate Announcements Soon?

At EA’s “Meet the Makers” event held in Singapore yesterday I had a chance to talk to John Doyle from EA’s Black Box studios, Vancouver, Canada. In case you didn’t know, Doyle and his team are the people behind both the Need for Speed series as well as last year’s Skate.

When asked about the new Need for Speed game (pardon the horrible Photoshop job), Doyle told me that EA would be making a formal announcement in the next 3-4 months. Even though he didn’t quite come out and say it, he was hinting at the fact that they may go back to the whole Most Wanted-ish sandbox style of gameplay (finally!)

Also expect a brand new game mechanic since Doyle claims that every NFS game out there brings something new to the table. Undergound had the whole tuner scene happening, Most Wanted was just plain awesome, Carbon had Autoscultping and Canyon Duels, while Pro Street was… uhh, crap?

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

Prying any sort of information from these guys is a Herculean task and no matter how many questions I bounced at him he just kept smiling at me, probably wishing I would shut the f**k up. Anyway, before I moved on to another producer, I asked him what plans he had for Skate since (a) it was very well received; and (b) there’s no way in hell EA’s letting a successful game get away that easily.

Once again, he gave me that smug smile and said that the guys back at Black Box would kill him if he said anything. But there was something about his smile that said “Yes we’re working on one but I can’t talk about it or they’ll kill my family”. So yeah, I’m guessing we can expect a “formal announcement” in the near future.