Need For Speed Payback will add online free roam mode

Cars are mechanical goats. Sure, you can teach them tricks and make them move with purpose, but they'd rather lark about chasing and butting each other. It's silly, then, that Need For Speed Payback does not let cars scamper freely around together in a multiplayer free-roaming mode. Plenty of that game is pure daft--especially the writing, our John will tell you in his Need for Speed Payback review--but a car playground could go some way to redeeming it. So huzzah hooray, EA have announced an Online Free Roam mode is coming free to Payback some time in 2018. Better late than never.

Right now, Payback has a little multiplayer free roaming action while players are waiting for lobbies to fill up - but only then. Imagine the woe of only getting the mode you want in short bursts while the game counts down down to taking you away to something it insists you'll enjoy more.

2015's Need For Speed, also made by Payback devs Ghost Games, had multiplayer free-roaming built in. Why EA decided to launch Payback without it is a mystery they don't care to explain.

Yesterday's tweet announcing the addition said "Online Free Roam coming 2018" without any more details. Further tweets clarified that the mode will be free for everyone, and that it's still being worked on so the devs can't give a launch date yet.

Payback sounds enough of a mess that, even as someone who enjoys doofy posturing carcrimes, I haven't been interested so far. But if a few friends are enticed by multiplayer free roam and the game goes cheap enough in a sale, ah, maybe.