Where does the time go? Ever since we came back from the Christmas break, I've been meaning to write this update, but I have an excuse!! We've been busy!

In case you haven't read Eneko's (Technical Director of NFS World) blog, we've been preparing the build that will be used in our upcoming Closed Beta here in North America and Europe. Exciting stuff. What's even more exciting is how far it's come since the build we did for our Taiwanese Closed Beta. Even more exciting? Where it's going next!! Having worked on plenty of Need For Speed's, I'm genuinely excited at the potential this game has to surpass them all. It won't happen overnight, but the ideas this team has on evolving and expanding this game over time should make for some fun, new experiences never before seen in an NFS.

I like keeping everyone in the loop as much as my time allows, but this is probably going to be the last episode where I'll show before and afters of the environment art. Every month or so I have to bug a number of SEs to try to figure out a build of the game that is a year old. We've evolved so much over that time, that everytime I go and boot up that build it has one problem or another. So hopefully with this last batch, you'll see the hard work that the environment artists have been doing and going forward I'll focus on showing nothing but the latest and greatest from our current build.

Fortuna District - Chunk of rock becomes private tennis courts for the rich and famous.

Fortuna District - Improved lighting. Sharper wall textures, and improved contrast between sidewalks and roads makes for better visibility.

Kempton District - Complete do-over. Simple, generic shapes replaced by more elaborate buildings and improved textures.

Kempton District - Cranes are more detailed and have better sense of scale. Some wall re-work and the road is better defined.

Kempton District - Complete rework. Added elements overhead to increase sense of speed, road is defined and twice the resolution from before. No longer muddy, now nice and crisp.

And now for some random news and highlights:

We're getting our very own website...although some of you have already been poking around and probably knew this. This will become the definitive place for all your NFS World news. Of course this will also be where you can sign up for the Beta!

We have our first dedicated fan page! The World Online Garage has some of our most vocal fans who love to discuss all things World AND NFS related. Great to see the anticipation is building!

And finally in the environments department:

The environment team is knee deep in renovating Downtown Rockport. Of all the areas in Most Wanted, Downtown needed the most love and being the opportunists we are, we've re-imagined a few areas in the process. Hopefully the new look for Downtown Rockport will meet everyone's approval. Here are some sneak peeks. Most of the team hasn't even seen these areas yet!

For those of you that saw my video interview, here's a close up of the area that was on display on my desktop. One of my favorite spots. I made all the signage, but our own Kevin Hsu jacked it way up and became an honorary Italian in the process.

This is one of the areas I've personally been working on. Who will you be cheering for? The Rockport Tigers or the Palmont Unicorns?

I'll leave you with one last note. I recently was following a thread on our World forums about seasons and weather. It seems some of you would like to see us include this in our game. We couldn't agree more.  Our #1 priority is getting the core game experience nailed, but as I said before we have many plans on expanding the game and this is one of them. No guarantees on the exact timeline, but needless to say we want to do it right and make it special.

Hope you enjoyed the read! Let me know what you thought...

Cheers,

Eduardo