In Praise of Autolog

I’m sure many of you reading this will have heard of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit’s much lauded Autolog feature. For those of you who haven’t I thought I would write a few words in praise of autolog. It’s basically a glorified leaderboard system that lets you know your friend’s times on any given track. What sets it apart from other online leaderboards, and has drawn the most praise from game critics, is that it also alerts you when your times have been beaten. Then, with the press of a button you can instantly take up the challenge to win back that coveted 1st position.

Chuck in a few half-arsed social networking features stolen wholesale from Facebook, such as a wall to post messages on and an ability to share in race or even garage based photos of your cars and you get what EA is calling an, ‘innovative approach to connected social competition’. I have been playing the game and would certainly agree that it is an awesome feature. It adds many hours of gameplay as you are consumed in a constant battle of one-upmanship that continues long after the single player mode has been finished.

I am, however, confused as to why no developers have done this before. To me it seems more like a natural progression than a massive innovation.

Of course it is easy to look at ideas others have come up with and claim it seems obvious, but in this instance I really think it was. I’ve been crying out for a system like this for years and even if you don’t know it yet so have you.

Gamers are a notoriously competitive bunch, and it is developers who have trained us to be that way. The structure and design of nearly all games is informed by a sense of competition. This is especially true of consoles, where even seemingly uncompetitive games like Flower have trophies that can be added to your collection for ultimate bragging rights (even if one of them is just for leaving your controller on the side for so long it turns off – best trophy ever). PC gamers have been playing online since time began and console gamers for the last few years. So it baffles me as to why it has taken so long for a feature like Autolog to appear. It’s not a complex idea and one that would cost next to nothing for developers to implement into their games.

I’m not bothered about the social-networking side of it. I can’t for the life of me think why anyone would want to post a picture of their in-game car let alone look at someone else’s, but I really do hope that most games in the future use a similar leaderboard system. For one thing, it would save me texting my mates to let them know I have just smashed their times on Trials HD!