With the arrival of the new golf consoles, we did not have the time to fully review the Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered when it was launched, but the Criterion masterpiece especially deserves our focus, as support for the nex added are -gen consoles, which open the door to a 4K experience at 60 frames per second. More so, in the wake of the news that Criterion’s new The title Need for Speed has been delayed, it’s also an opportunity to reflect on an astonishing series of iconic racing games from the Guildford developer.
This is something I recently discussed with John Linneman: what exactly is peak Criterion? Some may say it’s Need for Speed Hot Pursuit – a game that radically recharged the franchise, and the best of Burnout, but with respect to the core DNA of what made the original NFS titles so great, respect. And then there was Autolog, of course, a remarkably successful attempt to merge social networks into a video game. Despite remarkable coding, which resulted in an input latency matching or even beating 60fps games, Hot Pursuit was a 30fps title in an era in which 60fps was Criterion’s feature. So maybe it’s actually Burnout Paradise that’s the highest criterion? But what about the incredible Burnout 3: Takedown? Or maybe the puris’ favorite, Burnout 2: Point of Impact?
Perhaps it’s simple enough to say that from the arrival of Burnout 2 to Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Criterion has been the undisputed master of the racing genre, with every game a must-buy – and to return to what last was really an excellent Criterion racing offer, it’s a lot of business as usual. Yes, Hot Pursuit has not evolved visually from its computer version, and despite being at higher resolutions and (at least in some formats) higher frame rates than the original version of the console, it is very much a game from its era . But the bottom line is that the game still runs beautifully, the handling is sublime and the concept to the point, immediate and brilliant. Best of all, perhaps, is the outward version: the promise of an open road that stretches into the distance. And yes, the resolution improvement definitely helps there.
John Linneman and Rich Leadbetter share their experiences of Hot Pursuit Remastered on the new golf consoles.
It’s interesting to see how Stellar Entertainment handled the remaster and its translation to the various platforms. Hot Pursuit was fundamentally a 30fps game, and so were most ports. PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch are all aimed at 1080p30 (with 720p30 on the mobile version). Only PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X had the option to improve the frame rate, with the choice between 4K30 and 1080p60 games. The recent upgrade is not really a patch specifically targeted at the new machines: a new maximum quality mode simply removes the frame rate cap from the existing Pro and One X versions, allowing the inherent back-up support in the brand new machines can be kicked. inside, which drives us to 60 frames per second. So yes, the modes aimed at PS5 and Series X are also available on the latest improved machines. It is not so much ‘back compat plus’ as such, more a simple mechanism to give the existing game a measurable performance improvement without the possible requirement to switch to a later SDK.
What does this mean is bad news for Xbox Series S? Anchored by the Xbox One S code path, no extra modes have been added, so 1080p30 is the best you are going to get. Despite the fact that it delivers a relatively large increase in GPU power and can easily deliver 1080p at 60 fps, there is no upgrade for Series S users – and that’s a shame. And it’s actually very interesting to see that the new Maximum mode PS4 Pro sees unlocked at 4K, usually running in the mid 40’s, while Xbox One X is standard within touching range of 4K60 in many scenarios – but what stands out from the performance- analysis that the opening of Pro and One X is perhaps much closer to the output than the specification between the two systems would suggest.
At the very least, moving the same code to PS5 and Xbox Series X should, in theory at least, be a done deal: with a 2x increase in minimum GPU performance, both should close up to 60 fps at 4K, with plenty of horsepower left. And this is certainly the case with PlayStation 5, which simply works through with full frame rate during our testing. However, we encountered a specific problem area on the map on the Xbox version, which may show that performance drops to the low 40s – and indeed the low 30s on Xbox One X. It seems to be just this particular area on the map is, close to the coast, but because the tracks of Hot Pursuit are all built in a single world, you happen to visit the same place fairly often and thus experience the same drop in performance. It’s flawless on PlayStation 5, but it’s clearly a problem on the Xbox side … and it turns out to be a GPU issue, as the 1080p60 mode is still available and works well there. To be clear, this is very clearly a software problem – it seems that Hot Pursuit Remastered is mainly based on the original computer, which is extremely well put together today.
Ultimately, a game that should have a large amount of overhead on the new machines (based on their unlocked behavior on the latest generation of improved consoles) should deliver a flawless experience on their shiny new equivalents. This is the case with PlayStation 5, but the drop is significant enough on Xbox Series X that we hope to see EA look at Hot Pursuit Remastered again to iron out the issue there – and why there are issues at all, is a bit surprising. Meanwhile, the lack of series S upgrades is also disappointing – there is no technical reason why Microsoft’s junior next-generation console will not deliver 60 fps. Improvements such as cross-country play are welcome, but in the end, the 30 fps cap was the only true technological limitation that held back the original game, and at full rate, one of the best racing games ever made. bird exalted. After years of first release, Hot Pursuit is still an absolute gem.