Since the announcement of three new Need for Speed games a couple of weeks ago my inbox has been filling up with people asking questions about the new games. I’ve collated the most popular ones and will be asking each of the game teams to run through them and shed some light on their projects. First up is Scott Henshaw; as the producer looking after the Black Box side of development for Need for Speed World Online he’s in an ideal position to answer your questions.

What is Need for Speed World Online?

Need for Speed World Online is a downloadable, free-to-play game built around the best elements of Need for Speed, designed exclusively for the PC. Players can explore the world, race against friends and engage in massive pursuits across the largest open world in Need for Speed history. As well as this massive game arena World Online will feature more cars, parts and game modes than ever before. This is a whole new type of game for Need for Speed fans, entirely online and constantly evolving.

With the game launching in Asia first does this mean we’ll just be getting a port in North America and Europe?

What you’ll see debuting in Taiwan over the next few months is a version of the game designed specifically for Asian audiences. Our North American and European versions will be tuned to the gaming styles and expectations of those players. We’re still very early in the design stages at the moment so we’ll reveal more details as the project progresses.

Didn’t you guys already try this with Motor City Online?

We tried an online game with American muscle cars on a subscription basis. Some of the experience and the things we learned about the community features will translate, but NFS World has some marked differences. The new game plays in an open-world environment with a huge number of cars and events. Modes such as Co-op, Team Events and presence of cops all provide a very different experience than Motor City Online delivered.

The screenshot you released for Need for Speed World looked very similar to an area in Carbon – is this just a “recycled” version of the older game?

We were impressed how quickly people noticed this when we released the screen; they clearly know our games well. It’s true that we’re using the city of Carbon (we’re actually merging it with the Most Wanted world too) but these games are two of the most popular and best loved games we’ve shipped, so we’re excited to bring our players back to those cities. We chose Most Wanted as a baseline for this game and have been working to significantly improve the look of both worlds. You’ll see Carbon in daylight and experience an entirely new atmosphere in Most Wanted. While the streets will be familiar, the uniquely customizable interface, game and player progression will be entirely new to Need for Speed.

Is the game really free or will it be a stripped down version of the overall experience? Will I be "nickel and dimed" when I want to upgrade my car to something better than an entry model?

The gameplay experience will be available for free. As I mentioned earlier we’re still hard at work on the designs but it’s safe to say that we’re working hard to ensure we create an interesting, engaging experience if you pay $0 or $5.

Are there cops?

Definitely! You can’t have an open world game without the police. We will be bringing back our pursuit gameplay from Most Wanted, Carbon and Undercover - we’ve spent some time innovating on co-op and team-based cop play as well.

Will this run on my PC? What are the min specs?

We plan to keep the min spec quite reasonable, our engineers are working hard to make sure the game runs well and looks great on the lower end machines... think close to the min specs for Carbon.

Can I play against users across the world, or just in my local region?

This is one of those topics we’ve not decided on yet. One of the key stages of launching any game like this is the Open and Closed Beta stages. This is where we test a lot of our design to make sure the game is a fun experience.

When does the Beta launch, and how do I become a part of it?

There were a lot of questions about this but we’ve not got a lot of details to share just yet; the best way to find out information is to keep an eye on Needforspeed.com for sign-up details later this year.

While we were discussing the Q&A with Scott earlier this week I asked him if he could get me any more screenshots from World Online. Since it’s still pretty early in the development cycle there wasn’t a lot of screens available but he did find one shot he wanted to share with us. Before letting us see the shot Scott stressed it was still a work-in-progress image so shouldn't be judged as showing the final quality of the game.

When he'd sent the screen I asked him to give me a bit more information about what we’re looking at and he was happy to help out: “Key to the concept of NFS World Online is the user interface which has been built from the ground up to take advantage of the PC architecture. Instead of a traditional console view of a game, we’re using a user-selectable gadget interface designed specifically for the PC. The system allows the gamer to choose which components of the interface they want to add to their game. The gadgets are really flexible and offer a wide range of display options: docked/undocked, floating in the game window or just sitting outside of the game space. A lot of gamers now have more than one monitor so you could keep the game window entirely clean and then have all the gadgets sit in the other monitor. We think it’s about time PC gamers had games that allowed them to arrange their information their way.