Need For Speed World (Part Three) ~ All You Need to Know About Games

Safehouse

The "Safehouse" is where you would go to when you need to buy a new car, change to a different ride or driver profile, customize/upgrade your cars with better performance and visual parts, repair your current car's durability as well as the purchasing of card packs and replenishing of powerups.

You can access this safehouse from anywhere within the free roam world by simply clicking on the big "Safehouse" button at the top right corner of your HUD.

Change Car

If you possess more than one car, selecting this option would allow you to switch to a different car.
Customization

The "Customization" option is where you can perform various sorts of alterations to your car. These alterations would include parts that you install into your car to modify its physical appearance, boost its overall performance (top speed, acceleration, handling) and also improve its ability to take on specific race modes.

However, one important thing to note here is that these parts that you install onto a car actually sticks to the car so much so that it cannot be removed from the car without destroying it (or rather selling it). Therefore, it is prudent that you know what you want to do with the car first before you start installing those rare, hard to get modification parts on it.

Skill Workshop

Skill Mods are broken down into three categories, Race, Pursuit and Explore. They are mods that you can install onto a car to have it custom-made/tailored for certain gameplay features, particular race modes or perhaps improve the effectiveness of some specific powerups.

For example, if you often find yourself using a lot of "Nitrous" or "Traffic Magnet" in races, then you may find it beneficial to install a couple of "Super Shot" and "Magnetized" skill mods in your car.

If you like playing Pursuit Outruns in a particular car, it may be useful to customize it with skill mods such as "Ram" or "Cooldown". (Ram will increase the weight of the car so that it is more suited for collisions and ramming through roadblocks while Cooldown will decrease the actual amount of time required to escape from the police.)

Next, it is also important to recognize that each skill mod part has its own quality range as well as star rating (1 star to 3 stars). A two star skill mod would naturally offer a greater effect boost than compared to a one star skill mod. However, even if both skill mods were to be of the same star rating, they might still have different magnitudes in their effect boosting so please take note of that. (The basic skill mods can be directly purchased from the workshop while the stronger ones would have to be won from races or card packs.)

Aftermarket Shop

The "Aftermarket Shop" comprises of purely visual effect parts which you can install onto a car to change its outer appearance. And as far as I know, these parts do not seem to have any effect upon the performance of a car.

Performance Shop
Now before I talk about the parts that you can install into your car in the Performance Shop, I will need you to realize that each and every car that is found in Need For Speed World actually has a set of "hidden" parameters which are unknown to the players. Instead, the information that we do have about a car is all condensed into three general scoring categories, its "Top Speed", "Acceleration" and "Handling".

But even though we do not actually "see" these hidden stats, we are however able to feel and recognize their existence whilst we are driving the various different cars in races. For example, certain cars seem to be more apt in pushing away other cars when they collide, some cars can more easily negotiate a high speed corner than compared to others while some seem to oversteer (spins out of control easily) or understeer (feels sluggish like a tank).

Well if you are clear on that, then let us proceed...

In the Performance Shop, there are six kinds of parts which you can install onto a car, "Engine", "Forced Induction", "Transmission", "Suspension", "Brakes" and "Tires". And basically, what these parts do is that they help boost those "hidden" parameters of the car by a certain percentage, thereby helping improve the car's performance in a race.

Unfortunately though, since the initial parameters of a car isn't visible to the player, we simply cannot gauge how effective it will be to install certain kinds of parts onto a vehicle. The best that we can do is to infer its effects from how much of an increase the car will get, from its general scorings in the three categories.

But either way, I will have to tell you that, as far as I can tell, the actual benefits that you can get from the parts are pretty "limited" in a sense. For instance, if a car's top speed is already very low in its initial stats, then using a part which boosts its top speed by a high percentage would be pretty ineffective. Similarly, trying to increase a car's handling via handling boosting parts isn't gonna work too well if the car originally had a weak handling parameter to begin with.

Furthermore, I will need you to realize that if a particular car is programmed to oversteer or understeer when cornering at high speeds, it will continue to do so even if you try to tweak the car's "Handling" to a very high score. (Or so it seems to me, since I have a Lexus LFA which often spins out of control despite having a 713 "Handling" score.)

Anyway, if we add up all three of the general scorings of a car and divide it by 3, we will get an "Overall" rating for the car. This rating would then determine which class category the car would belong to. (This is particularly important when participating in a race with class restrictions.)

If the "Overall" rating is between:
- 0 to 249 (Class 'E')
- 250 to 399 (Class 'D')
- 400 to 499 (Class 'C')
- 500 to 599 (Class 'B')
- 600 to 749 (Class 'A')
- 750 to 1000 (Class 'S')

So depending on the parts that you install, it is actually possible to boost the car up to the next class category or two. But in order to remain competitive, you should try to make it such that your car's overall rating stay within the top end of one class category rather then making it become at the bottom end of the next.

Vinyl Shop and Paint Shop

For the Vinyl and Paint Shops, they are mostly there for you to slap in all sorts of logos and designs plus give your car different coats of paints to make it unique and personalized so I reckon its pretty much self-explanatory here.
Change Driver

If you have more than one driver profile, selecting this option would allow you to switch to a different one. Essentially, you can think of this as kind of like changing to a different character that you've created (in regular MMO terms).
Car Dealer
The "Car Dealer" option allows you to purchase new cars or sell your existing ones.

What you really should take note here is that most of the cars that you can buy from the Car Dealer actually costs "SpeedBoost" (which is a form of game currency that you acquire by paying real life cash). And though there are cars that you can buy using in-game cash, these will be limited to only a few select cars/styles per class category (excluding Class 'S') and is subjected to a periodic rotation system so cars that are sold for in-game cash changes once in a while. (But "SpeedBoost" cars will never be sold for in-game cash, if I'm not wrong.)

Personally, I feel that it is pretty unfair for the game to not have some sort of a comparison chart, recommended cars list or even a test drive option/period here. This is because, as I've mentioned earlier, each and every car in the game seems to have some kind of hidden stats to them so much so that all of the cars may handle differently when we actually take them out for a spin.

And since we do not know what the stats are, we can only find out how the car performs after we buy it...which by then may already be too late as the in-game cash/SpeedBoost is already spent and lost forever. What's more, immediately after the purchase, you will find that the car's resale value promptly gets slashed to a quarter of its original price so there's really no room for regrets. (For in-game cash bought cars at least, not sure about SpeedBoost ones.)
Powerup Console

The Powerup Console is where you can select what sort of powerups to bring to a particular race mode. This is also where you can recharge them using "SpeedBoost" if you've run out.

After you're done loading out, you can use them via pressing the keys (1, 2, 3, 4) on your keyboard whilst your within each of the individual race modes.
Card Packs

Finally for the Card Packs, there really isn't a need for much of an explanation here. They are simply a sink for you to spend in-game cash/SpeedBoost to acquire all sorts of cars, performance parts, aftermarket parts and powerups. At a random probability, of course.

All in all, apart from feeding on that innate desire to own and pimp up your rides, there's not much of a gameplay left to the game in my opinion...so frankly speaking, I wouldn't recommend that you touch this game unless your into this form of entertainment as well as desire the adrenaline rush of high-speed car chases/races.