How EA's Autolog could (and should) change the way we compete online.
Online leaderboards have become so common in video games that we take them for granted. If a console or PC game has an online multiplayer component, you can be fairly certain there's a screen hidden in the menus somewhere where you can compare your accomplishments against those of your friends (and the rest of the world). It's a good start, but at a time when your Xbox Live Achievements are popping up in your sister's Twitter feed and your best friend is visiting your Farmville farm three times a day, the idea of the traditional video game leaderboard is becoming more and more antiquated.
That's why EA's Autolog experiment in Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is such a welcome change. Rather than hide the leaderboard in a stats menu, the team at Criterion essentially built the game around the idea of constant competition with friends. If you have friends playing Hot Pursuit, and if you're connected to EA's servers, you're constantly being updated about your successes, failures and opportunities. I've been playing around with Hot Pursuit's Autolog system for a couple weeks now, and I've been impressed with how deeply its integrated into the game.
Right from the start menu, Autolog fires up and greets you with tales of your wins and losses. If a friend has just bested you in a certain event, you might see their smug mug slide by with their new time below it.
Most racing games pull you through the single-player experience by starting you with the first event in a career and gradually opening up events, cars and upgrades. Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit takes that approach as well, but with a significant twist. By integrating Autolog into the single-player, Hot Pursuit has you competing directly against the people on your friends list, right from within the game itself. Here's how it works.
Let's say you feel the need for speed and want to race. Right off the bat, you have multiple entry points based on Autolog. Go to the Wall section of the main menu, and you can see a Facebook-style list of all the things your friends have accomplished recently. Maybe someone has beaten your time in a Time Trial event. Click on their post, and you can jump to that event directly from there. Once in the actual race menu, you'll see how the rest of your friends stack up, too. If you end up beating the guy whose wall post you entered the race from, Autolog will pop up a window asking if you want to post your victory to his wall in return. You can even customize your message (expletives are replaced by asterisks, which didn't stop me from using them).
The same approach works from the single-player map as well. If your friends have posted new times in events you've unlocked, they'll have Autolog icons below them, letting you know that your hard-won podium spots may be in danger. There's also an Autolog Alert in the upper-left corner of the main single-player screen that gives you a quick snapshot of your standings since the last time you logged in. In my current game, the Alert is telling me that, within the last five hours, my friends have beaten my times in two events. Tapping the PS3's R2 button (right trigger on Xbox 360), takes me directly to the Autolog Recommends screen, which lays out a list of the events I'm behind on and who's challenged my times lately. Just like the Wall, I can just click on an event to go straight to the race.
Autolog works for both Cops and Racers events, and it goes farther than just straight race times. The system will tell you how many seconds better you are than your friend in a particular event. It'll tell you how far away he is from reaching the next Wanted level or Promotion. It'll even tell you how many times he's tried to take the crown back from you, which is really the ultimate way to humiliate him. ("Couldn't help but notice you're tried to beat me six times and still can't make it happen. Keep on trying…")
The cool thing about Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit's Autolog isn't that it has a 'Wall' like Facebook or allows you to see pictures of your friends next to their race times, although those things are nice. What's great about it is that it creates a game within a game. If you want, you can plow through Hot Pursuit's single-player career without adding friends or caring about their accomplishments. But if you get bored with the monotony that eventually sets in with every racer's career mode, you can turn to Autolog to spice things up. In my time with Hot Pursuit so far, I've gotten so obsessed with beating my friends' times that I've all but ignored some of the events I've unlocked along the way. Because isn't thrashing your buddy in an event a lot more satisfying than beating a computer?
Hot Pursuit is not the first video game to integrate your friends' accomplishments heavily into the experience. But it's definitely taking the idea to a new level. And why should that idea stop with racing games? Epic Games is building a similar idea into Gears of War 3, and other developers are searching for ways make online competition among friends more relevant. Autolog is certainly a step in the right direction.
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit hits stores on November 16 in North America, and we'll have plenty more about the upcoming racer in the weeks ahead.
Source
Right from the start menu, Autolog fires up and greets you with tales of your wins and losses. If a friend has just bested you in a certain event, you might see their smug mug slide by with their new time below it.
Most racing games pull you through the single-player experience by starting you with the first event in a career and gradually opening up events, cars and upgrades. Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit takes that approach as well, but with a significant twist. By integrating Autolog into the single-player, Hot Pursuit has you competing directly against the people on your friends list, right from within the game itself. Here's how it works.
Let's say you feel the need for speed and want to race. Right off the bat, you have multiple entry points based on Autolog. Go to the Wall section of the main menu, and you can see a Facebook-style list of all the things your friends have accomplished recently. Maybe someone has beaten your time in a Time Trial event. Click on their post, and you can jump to that event directly from there. Once in the actual race menu, you'll see how the rest of your friends stack up, too. If you end up beating the guy whose wall post you entered the race from, Autolog will pop up a window asking if you want to post your victory to his wall in return. You can even customize your message (expletives are replaced by asterisks, which didn't stop me from using them).
The same approach works from the single-player map as well. If your friends have posted new times in events you've unlocked, they'll have Autolog icons below them, letting you know that your hard-won podium spots may be in danger. There's also an Autolog Alert in the upper-left corner of the main single-player screen that gives you a quick snapshot of your standings since the last time you logged in. In my current game, the Alert is telling me that, within the last five hours, my friends have beaten my times in two events. Tapping the PS3's R2 button (right trigger on Xbox 360), takes me directly to the Autolog Recommends screen, which lays out a list of the events I'm behind on and who's challenged my times lately. Just like the Wall, I can just click on an event to go straight to the race.
Autolog works for both Cops and Racers events, and it goes farther than just straight race times. The system will tell you how many seconds better you are than your friend in a particular event. It'll tell you how far away he is from reaching the next Wanted level or Promotion. It'll even tell you how many times he's tried to take the crown back from you, which is really the ultimate way to humiliate him. ("Couldn't help but notice you're tried to beat me six times and still can't make it happen. Keep on trying…")
The cool thing about Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit's Autolog isn't that it has a 'Wall' like Facebook or allows you to see pictures of your friends next to their race times, although those things are nice. What's great about it is that it creates a game within a game. If you want, you can plow through Hot Pursuit's single-player career without adding friends or caring about their accomplishments. But if you get bored with the monotony that eventually sets in with every racer's career mode, you can turn to Autolog to spice things up. In my time with Hot Pursuit so far, I've gotten so obsessed with beating my friends' times that I've all but ignored some of the events I've unlocked along the way. Because isn't thrashing your buddy in an event a lot more satisfying than beating a computer?
Hot Pursuit is not the first video game to integrate your friends' accomplishments heavily into the experience. But it's definitely taking the idea to a new level. And why should that idea stop with racing games? Epic Games is building a similar idea into Gears of War 3, and other developers are searching for ways make online competition among friends more relevant. Autolog is certainly a step in the right direction.
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit hits stores on November 16 in North America, and we'll have plenty more about the upcoming racer in the weeks ahead.
Source
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