Next Need For Speed To Be First In Series To Have Full Two-Year Development Cycle

Who’d have thought it? Yearly iterations of titles have an uncanny ability to drive a series into the ground, and it was probably for the best that we haven’t had a new Need for Speed title in 2014. Need for Speed Rivals was, dare we say it, a bit crap, and it seemed to all intents and purposes like EA and Criterion / Ghost Games had run out of steam.The open-world racer was a mishmash of ideas from the series’ and Criterion’s past, but following a relatively muted launch the Need for Speed franchise looked like it was in a spot of trouble. EA has now confirmed that there will be a new Need for Speed title in 2015, and it will be the first in the series to benefit from a full two-year development schedule.Yep, it is indeed pretty shocking that apparently no Need for Speed title has taken a full two years to make, but that’s the words of EA CEO Andrew Wilson, who said “Need for Speed will be back in a year having had a full two-year development cycle for the first time in its history.”It looks like Ghost Games will once more be at the helm, a relatively new studio formed when previous Need for Speed and Burnout developer Criterion Games was shrunk down to just 17 staff, with many moving on to Ghost Games. EA hasn’t announced a direction for the title just yet, although in a financial call earlier Blake Jorgensen said they would be interested in targeting the South-East Asian market for the next title, citing it as “a huge opportunity to play off of some of our strong IP.”