Those of you afflicted with the rare and terrible disease Needus Speedus or—in the vulgate—a “Need for Speed” will have to wait a bit longer for the cure. This morning, EA and Ghost Games announced the PC version of the upcoming Need for Speed “reboot” is delayed until Spring 2016.
But before you raise your fist to the heavens, know there’s a good reason for it. From today’s blog post:
“Part of the conversation includes hearing from our PC community that an unlocked frame rate in Need for Speed is a massive priority for you, and we fully agree. To deliver this, we’ve made the decision to move the PC release date to Spring 2016. This decision on PC gives us the necessary development time to increase the visuals that we can deliver on PC.”
Reading between the lines, the actual message here is “We heard you (rightly) complaining about how Need for Speed Rivals was a console-esque mess on the PC, and we don’t want to screw this one up too.”
That’s admirable. While people can argue all day about the necessity for high framerate, the fact is it’s doubly important in racing games where split-second reactions count. And as a rule, I’ll always take a delayed PC version over a disaster like Batman: Arkham Knight or Assassin’s Creed Unity, especially since I think Need for Speed actually looks interesting this time out.
The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of Need for Speed (presumably locked at 30 frames per second) will still hit in November, if you just can’t wait—though with Fallout 4, StarCraft II, and a bunch of other games slated for that month I don’t know if I’ll notice one missing.
