e spoke with John Doyle, EA Black Box producer for the Need For Speed ProStreet, and got a lot of juicy tidbits about the upcoming game, including details about the direction it's taking, new features and what kind of consequences players can expect even without a police presence.

Game Informer: You guys are trying something new every year, and this seems to be a little bit more of a realistic look at street racing.

John Doyle: We’re trying to get a realistic, believable street-racing vibe. We’re trying to reflect what we see the culture doing. The culture is really moving away from that bling, the neon, the fast and the furious thing; the cars that ride on trailers but don’t actually ever ride on the track. It’s moving much more in the direction of emphasizing performance and skill, and we try to reflect that. We’re a video game, so we try to reflect that in a way that’s as cool as we can possibly imagine it.

GI: Does that mean that you’re going to get away from some of the—and don’t mind me saying this but—some of the cheesy CG actors and plot movement.

Doyle: (laughs) It’s certainly not going to be anything like what you saw in Most Wanted or in Carbon. We’re not really looking at the green screen with the actors. We think it’s important to set the game experience in the world and in the culture, and we think it’s really important to make sure there’s a strong context of motivation that helps guide you through the games. There’s certainly going to be a story, there’s a reason to race, but I don’t think it’ll be as recognizable as anything that was in Most Wanted or Carbon.

GI: What are some of the main things you’re trying to accomplish with this game?

Doyle: I think the biggest thing we’re trying to do is make sure we release a really good Need For Speed game that people really want to play. And for us, the key for us is making sure that we’re looking at what people want to play, what the culture is doing, what makes sense, and really where can we push it next. We’ve spent a lot of time on this game. We’ve been in development for 15-16 months now on this, and we want to make sure in what we’re delivering is fun, accessible, adrenaline filled white knuckle racing experience. That’s what we try to do for all Need For Speed games. This year, we’re focusing on that it’s believable, it’s raw and realistic street racing.

GI: EA has been releasing Need For Speed games on a yearly basis, much like the sports titles. You said the game has been in pre-production for 15-16 months. Does that mean it’s been in development while Carbon was in development? So you have multiple Need For Speed teams working on games?

Doyle: We generally do. The production team and the initial design team were the guys who drove Most Wanted. They didn’t work on Carbon—they focused on the, “what is the next game going to be?” They were able to take a team that started at 20 people and built up to about 50 people, which is now well over 100 people, and started work on the long lead tech—things like damage take a long time to get right. Things like smoke you can’t do in a yearly cycle. So we make sure we start those technologies as early as we can so that we can get them into the game.

GI: So where are the Carbon guys, because I want to talk about the next game? (laughs)

Doyle: They’re in seclusion. (laughs)

GI: What you showed us of this game, you’re doing a lot more damage than seems to have been done before. How is that working with car manufacturers? In the past a lot of the car manufacturers—if you’re using a real car, they obviously don’t want to see their cars damaged.

Doyle: The manufacturers have actually been fantastic. We have a strong relationship that we’ve been working for on a lot of years with the Need For Speed games. Every manufacturer in the game has completely signed off on full customization and full damage to their cars, including flipping them, rolling them and totaling them. We’re excited by it. It’s a lot of work to make sure that everyone’s on board and everyone’s OK with it. It’s a lot of travel to a lot of corporate offices, but everyone’s on board and we think it’s going to be pretty cool.

GI: I met you when you were working on Carbon, are you happy about how Carbon turned out? Did you take anything you learned with Carbon and implementing it with this game?

Doyle: As a producer I’m never actually happy with a game.

GI: Is it your job not to be happy? (laughs)

Doyle: It’s my job to always want more. (laughs) The team sometimes appreciates it, and sometimes not. I think Carbon was a strong game, it’s done very well and people really enjoy playing it. There’s some things we’ve learned out of Carbon. For instance we didn’t want to do another night time game. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t doing the same thing year after year. While we’ve released a game every year for quite some time now, we want to make sure we’re releasing a new fresh experience every year. We took some key learning points from Carbon. Autosculpt is back this year. We think it’s a great innovation and it really drives performance and customization. We’ve improved it by adding the wind tunnel this year. It’s certainly strong and we wanted to keep it. We’ve rewritten the physics we have a new damage system the game looks a lot different. But I think what we got out of Carbon, the online features were pretty strong for us last year. While we’re not talking about them yet, we’ve been able to use that success to be able to springboard into something that’s going to be pretty cool, as well.