November 2017
While I agree that 30fps is enough, this game has some serious issues with maintaining that. I have been playing the game on a standard PS4 which I bought at launch. At the moment the game is really struggling. Cars, trees, cops, barriers appearing out of nowhere right in front of me, the render distance and time is shockingly bad. After every cutscene, getting back into the gameplay my car will be invisible for around 10 seconds while it loads back in. The city will also be completely empty for a ridiculous amount of time because no other A.I. vehicles have loaded. Worst of all though are the cop chases and action scene missions. As soon as you get two or more cops or house drivers chasing you the frame will drop drastically. At one point in the first few missions I had about 4 cops and 3 house drivers chasing me, this resulting in the frame rate dropping to what I would guess was about 10, maybe 15 frames per second. This made the car almost undrivable because of how unresponsive it was. Let’s be honest here, this game doesn’t push the boundaries in terms of visuals or content and gameplay. It’s a pretty standard game, and yet somehow it fails to perform at 1080p 30fps. That is a joke for a game that costs £80 for the deluxe edition from a developer as big as EA.
Just as a quick side note, I was really impressed with the customisation they brought back for the 2015 revamp and they have now managed to go backwards with that as well. Instead of earning cash to purchase upgrades like you would in the real world, to upgrade performance of the car you have to purchase speed cards. These are completely random which means that to upgrade any car you find yourself having to spend stupid amounts of money to try and obtain the specific part you want. Then there’s the visual customisation, everything is locked and can only be unlocked by completing stupid challenges which early on in the game are actually quite difficult because of the quality of cars you have access to.
The game unfortunately then has become another game which is just a grind to complete, replaying the same races over and over to earn enough cash to get a random performance upgrade which may not even be an improvement. Want to put a body kit on your car, we’ll be prepared to grind drift runs, jumps, speed traps and other things just to do so.
