Need for Speed: Payback has a very big problem, where the progression through the game by levelling up your cars, unlocking performance upgrades and customization items has been slow down to insure that the player spends a really huge amount of time grinding or straight out buy them with a system more reminiscent of "Free-to-Play" mobile games.

EuroGamer - Need for Speed Payback review - Sin city.

"There's an element of levelling up your car, though progression is slow and matched to an unsatisfying card collection game that makes little sense. You could always speed things up by buying a loot box, of course, which may well contain in-game currency."

"Its open world is a little too vast, its events too thinly spread and the sense of progression is slow enough to make it all feel like an absolute slog. There's vehicle customisation here - enabled, performance-wise, by a card system that's been sloppily and unwisely appropriated from the world of mobile, while cosmetic enhancements are now locked until you've managed a number of in-game achievements - but it takes an age to achieve anything, and well over half a dozen hours until your garage begins to flourish. Latter events require a soulless grind, and given the presence of loot boxes and microtransactions it's easy to be cynical of why exactly your progress feels wilfully stunted."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-11-08-need-...

PS. Reposted for visibility and awareness.

The fact reviewers were sent the special edition of this game with $100 worth of speed points and STILL felt like there was a bit of grinding needed says it all. What EA are doing is disgusting and i honestly hope it burns them badly in the end. This, fifa, battlefront, they've ruined so many games with it now...but i know deep down they'll get away with it. Too many idiots out there willing to support this crap.

I remember loving the shit out of the original Most Wanted when 360 launched. It was just so fun, and beautiful, and played great. Only EA could take such a great game and make such shitty sequels.

It can get fucked with a red hot poker with razor blades on the end.

Fuck EA and fuck this card style bullshit game. I was fucking furious to see all these small minded fanboys on YouTube etc defending this game and attacking IGN and such for giving it a bad review. I mean, what amount of greed and corruption are people willing to tolerate? It’s just so frustrating people can’t see how dangerous this is.

Better not to show those crap from ea

I despise this shit and wont touch these grotesque money leeching products EA dares to call games. I ever need to try the campaign of one of them, it will be tears later as a used copy. EA execs can go fuck them selves.
I'm looking forward to more Indie mid-tier games a`la Hellblade from now on. Most of the "AAA" is just overpriced mobile games with sleek visuals for the dumb masses.

Brah... appriciate the gesture but the original most wanted was on ps2 lol...

But yea screw EA... Also ubisoft is kinda shity ....

Lets support indi games more

I just read that, due to the battlefront 2 fallout EA is greatly reducing the grind factor in this game as well. It’ll be interesting to see how EA handles their AAA titles next year after all this ridiculously awful press