- Primary Subject: Need for Speed: Ghost Games Era Retrospective (Need for Speed Rivals, Need for Speed, Need for Speed Payback, Need for Speed Heat)
- Key Update: A look back at Ghost Games’ four Need for Speed games, from Rivals losing its online world to Heat as the studio’s high point.
- Status: Evergreen
- Last Verified: October 14, 2026
- Quick Answer: Ghost Games made four Need for Speed games from 2013 to 2019. Heat was its best before EA returned the series to Criterion in 2020.
With EA parking Need for Speed indefinitely, I'm revisiting the racing franchise I grew up on, one developer at a time.
After Criterion and Black Box, this entry covers Ghost Games, the Swedish studio that held the series from 2013 to 2019.
On February 12, 2020, EA told GamesIndustry.biz that the talent it needed to run a full AAA studio in Gothenburg was "just not available to us there."
Ghost Games became EA Gothenburg again, a Frostbite engineering hub, and Need for Speed went back to Criterion.
The studio opened in 2011 and took the Ghost name in November 2012 under former DICE executive producer Marcus Nilsson.
In 2013, Nilsson told VideoGamer that the series could no longer swing "from black to white" between Black Box and Criterion.
Need for Speed: Rivals (2013)
I've written about Rivals here and here, so I'll keep this short. EA switched off its online services on October 7, 2025. The campaign still runs offline, but AllDrive, the shared world that made Rivals what it was, died with the servers.
TurboRivals is an open-source private server on GitHub, which brought AllDrive back for up to six players over LAN or VPN, and it has gotten real mileage on our ZeroTier setup.
Its developer has since launched public servers with a server browser, so the VPN is optional now. The launcher has the telltale polish of an AI-assisted build. That puts it in a vibe-coding renaissance in modding that won't stop at Rivals.
None of this is an endorsement or anything; I'm just really happy it happened, so try it at your own risk. Rivals still drives beautifully, with sharp handling and a real sense of speed.
The world lacks Hot Pursuit's highs, but its biomes are a joy. Some nights we roleplay as patrolmen, cruising under the limit until a racer tears past. The balance is still iffy, and I can see why Heat later capped night-time repairs at three.
Need for Speed: (2015)
The 2015 reboot has all the visual sauce, and the sense of speed is genuinely good.
The hammy live-action cutscenes are a welcome return. Seeing Ken Block among the Icons hits hard after his death in January 2023.
Then I tried to drive it. The March 2016 PC version added an unlocked frame rate and manual transmission. Even so, my controller needed a stack of workarounds before its sensitivity stopped jumping around.
The handling is rightfully dunked on. Style over substance somehow leaked into the physics, and every drift feels wrong.
I finished the campaign without ever getting used to it. Mods try to fix it, but judging the game through them feels like cheating.
Cops are present but never felt. That makes the game an accidental callback to the Underground titles it borrows its nostalgia from.
It's also the last mainline Need for Speed with any Toyota in it. The AE86, listed as the Sprinter GT Apex, is right there for some Takumi roleplay.
Of the four, this is the one most at risk. It needs a connection even in single-player. Its servers have no shutdown date, but a volunteer moderator on EA's forums has said no offline patch is coming.
Thankfully, the community is hard at work on an unofficial patch.
Need for Speed: Payback (2017)
Payback is a product of its time, blockbuster dialogue and all, but mostly for the worse. It wears its heist movie influences openly in Fortune Valley, its stand-in for Las Vegas.
It's also the most scripted Need for Speed I've played. Sadly, some of the coolest driving, the kind that should demand a skilled hand, happens in cutscenes. Three protagonists were a nice spin.
Tyler covers racing, which is what Need for Speed is about. I enjoyed Mac's off-roading and drifting most, which puts me in the minority.
Jess frustrated me because she could have been great. I've always wanted to be a getaway driver, and her storyline spends that on eavesdropping and wiretap missions with no momentum.
Like Carbon, you take territory from rival street leagues. Most of the ones you beat end up backing The House against you in the final race. Offroaders, drifters, and classic racers are fascinating concepts for crews, but none of them has any personality.
On the road, Payback is a big step up from 2015. I always felt in control, and my beloved brake-to-drift is back. So are head-to-head challenges against roaming racers, carried over from Rivals.
Cop chases are tied to missions and bait crates, so they feel curated (for better or worse).
The cops go down easily, but fodder beats no cops. X Ambassadors' "The Devil You Know" never got old on the road. Neither did tinkering in the garage to Gorillaz's "Ascension."
Then there are Speed Cards. Upgrades came from slot machines at the tune-up shops, which suits a casino town, and mixing brands was fun, but the system as a whole was still frustrating.
Loot box shipments were also sold for real money, though, and upgrading really became a slog.
Payback launched on November 10, 2017, the same month the Star Wars Battlefront II loot box backlash blew up. Within two weeks, Ghost boosted Rep and Bank payouts and called the changes "just phase one."
I eventually bypassed the system with mods (I know, cheating, given the 2015 statement). Payback scored 61 on Metacritic for PS4, yet about 85 percent of its Steam reviews are positive today.
Need for Speed: Heat (2019)
Heat is the Ghost game I've played most with friends. It perfects the risk and reward loop that Rivals left unbalanced and easy to cheese.
In Palm City, daytime sanctioned races pay Bank. Night street races pay Rep, which climbs with your heat level and shrinks if you're busted before reaching a safehouse.
My friends and I finished the campaign and reached Rep 50 together, and it never felt too grindy or too easy. Event unlocks kept us at the same pace, and everyone ended up with a distinct car.
Speed Cards and loot boxes are gone. Payback locked builds into preset classes, but Heat's deeper tuning lets any car become a grip racer or a drifter, on-road or off. Engine swaps are incredibly cool.
Night chases have the sauce again. Palm City looks gorgeous after dark, and the sense of speed holds even in open stretches.
Need for Speed is best flat out in traffic with plenty to lose. The cops are overpowered, honestly, and certain jumps cheese them, but the game felt too good to drive for me to mind.
Ghost finished the job and never got a sequel
Heat's last update added cross-play on June 9, 2020, making it the first EA game with the feature. Criterion's Matt Webster announced it, four months after EA folded Ghost back into EA Gothenburg.
The studio's best game took its final bow under somebody else's name. Criterion made one more Need for Speed, Unbound, before EA's Rebecka Coutaz said in July 2026 that the studio is "solely focused on Battlefield."
Ghost spent six years building the game; my friends and I took to Rep 50, then never got to make another.
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