Need For Speed World

Need for Speed: World is an MMO for gamers who love to race cars.

The goal for Need for Speed: World was to take the NFS series to the next level, and it did this by presenting it as a massive multiplayer online game or MMO. Rather than battle dragons or pilot spaceships, you drove cars across a huge open world. The project was quite ambitious, and we’ve seen some reasonable successes since, such as The Crew, based on a similar model.

World launched as a free-to-play game and remained F2P throughout its existence. There were also various content packs that you could purchase. Packs would provide access to new cars, performance upgrades, visual customizations and even new sections of the map. The game offered a diverse selection of event types, and there were special events hosted on a regular basis that players could participate in.

The notion to get people to experience the game via F2P was not a bad one, and it actually works quite well for many MMOs today. The misstep that EA arguably took with Need for Speed: World was the pay-to-win aspect. F2P players generally had no chance against the cars of those who did pay, and in retrospect, that likely contributed to the game’s downfall more than anything else.

NFS: World is an online-only game by design, and in 2013, EA chose to end support for the game, which included eliminating the servers that facilitate the online gameplay. That doesn’t mean World is dead. The community has developed its own servers, and you can play either online or offline, but that may involve more effort than the average gamer will want to sign up for.

Pros

• A racing MMO
• Many cars and upgrades

Cons

• EA shut the servers down