Need for Speed Payback to add online free roam

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Free for all players.

Need for Speed Payback fans have had their calls for an online free roam mode (belatedly) answered: it will be added to the game in 2018. Currently, the only time you can roam around with friends is when you're waiting for a lobby to fill up, but in the new mode you'll be able to muck around in the streets of Fortune Valley with friends or randoms without having to jump into a race.

It's something that fans called for before the game released and its exclusion caused a bit of a stir, which has no doubt in part motivated developer Ghost Games and publisher EA to act (and it's not the first time fan pressure has caused the game to change).

It'll be free for all players, and there's no release date yet: the game's Twitter account said it's "still being worked on".

It won't fix the structural and narrative issues with the game that Phil outlined in his review last month, and I reckon it's unlikely to tip any fence-sitters over the edge. But for anybody that did enjoy Payback's arcade handling, and perhaps has some friends that did too, it'll be an excuse to get behind the wheel again.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.