With the arrival of the new wave of consoles, we didn’t have time to fully check out Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered when it came out, but Criterion’s masterpiece especially deserves our focus now, as support has been added for nex -gen consoles, opening the door to a 4K experience running at 60 frames per second. More than that, in the wake of the news that Criterion’s new The title for Need for Speed has been postponed, it is also an opportunity to reflect on an amazing series of iconic racing games from the Guildford-based developer.
It is something that I was discussing with John Linneman recently: what exactly is the Peak Criterion? Some may say it is Need for Speed Hot Pursuit – a game that radically restarted the franchise, bringing out the best in Burnout, while respecting the central DNA that made the original NFS titles so good. And then there was Autolog, of course, a remarkably successful attempt to merge social media into a video game. But despite some remarkable coding resulting in input latency that equaled or even beat some 60fps games, Hot Pursuit was a 30fps title in an era where 60fps was the trademark of Criterion. So, maybe Burnout Paradise is the peak criteria? But what about the incredible Burnout 3: Takedown? Or perhaps the purist’s favorite, Burnout 2: Point of Impact?
Perhaps it is simply enough to say that from the arrival of Burnout 2 to Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Criterion was the undisputed master of the racing genre, with each game a must-buy – and going back to what was the last truly great offer of Criteria run, it is very business as usual. Yes, Hot Pursuit has not evolved radically visually from its PC version and despite running at higher resolutions and (in at least selected formats) higher frame rates than the original console versions, it is a game of its era. But the main point is that the game still works beautifully, the handling is sublime and the concept is straight to the point, immediate and brilliant. Perhaps the best of all is the view-like presentation: the promise of an open road that stretches out into the distance. And yes, the increase in resolution definitely helps in that.
John Linneman and Rich Leadbetter share their experiences of Hot Pursuit Remastered on the new wave of consoles.
It is interesting to see how Stellar Entertainment handled remastering and its translation for the various platforms. Hot Pursuit was basically a 30fps game, just like most ports. PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch target 1080p30 (with 720p30 delivered in the mobile version). Only the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X had the option to improve the frame rate, with the choice offered between 4K30 and 1080p60 games. The recent update is not really a patch that specifically targets new machines: a new maximum quality mode simply removes the frame rate limit from existing Pro and One X versions, allowing the back-compat support inherent in the new ones. machines work, taking us to 60 frames per second. So, yes, the PS5 and X Series facing modes are also available on state-of-the-art enhanced machines. It is not so much ‘back compat plus’ as such, it is more of a simple mechanism to allow the existing game to achieve a measurable performance increase without the potential requirement of migrating to a later cross-gen compatible SDK.
What does that mean is bad news for the Xbox Series S? Anchored by the Xbox One S codepath, there are no extra modes added, so 1080p30 is the best you’ll ever get. Despite offering a relatively large increase in GPU power, and being easily able to deliver 1080p at 60fps, there is no update for S Series users – and that is a big shame. And it’s really interesting to see that the new Maximum mode sees PS4 Pro in unlocked 4K normally running in the mid-1940s, while the Xbox One X by default is at a touch distance of 4K60 in many scenarios – but what stands out in the performance analysis that running unlocked, Pro and One X are perhaps much closer in output than the spec gap between the two systems would suggest.
In theory, at least, moving the same code to PS5 and Xbox Series X should deliver a foregone conclusion then: with a 2x increase in GPU performance minimum, both should be braking at 4K at 60fps with plenty of power to spare. And that is definitely the case with the PlayStation 5, which simply works at full frame rate in our tests. However, we found a specific problem area on the Xbox version map, which could cause performance to drop to 40s – and indeed to 30s on Xbox One X. It appears to be just a specific area on the map, close to the coast, but because the Hot Pursuit tracks are all built around a single world, you find yourself revisiting the same place quite often and therefore encountering the same drop in performance. It’s flawless on PlayStation 5, but clearly an issue on the Xbox side … and it seems to be a GPU issue since 1080p60 mode is still available and works well there. To be clear, though, it is clearly a software problem – after all, Hot Pursuit Remastered appears to be based primarily on the original PC, which was exceptionally well assembled at that time.
So, ultimately, a game that must have a great deal of overhead on the new machines (based on its unlocked behavior on the next generation enhanced consoles) should offer a seamless experience on its shiny new equivalents. That’s the case with the PlayStation 5, but the drop is significant enough on the Xbox Series X that we hope to see EA revisit the Hot Pursuit Remastered to solve the problem there – and exactly why there are any problems is a little disconcerting. Meanwhile, the lack of S Series updates is also disappointing – there is no technical reason why Microsoft’s next-generation junior console should not deliver 60fps. Improvements like crossplay are welcome, but at the end of the day, the 30fps limit was the only real technological limitation that delayed the original game and at full frame-rate, one of the best racing games ever made feel sublime. Years after its initial release, Hot Pursuit is still an absolute gem.