Need for Speed is a racing game series that really needs no introduction. Spanning almost 26 years across multiple generations and games that pride themselves on being the ultimate street racing fantasy (for the most part), NFS established itself as the king of racing games in the ea☂rly 2000s ♊and held that title up until recently.
With the arrival of the eighth console generation, Need for Speed started to decline as a series, mediocre releases like Need for Speed, 2017's Payback, and 2019's Heat have tarnished the series' reputation. While these games did have some enjoyable aspects, ultimately in the eyes of the public, the media, and of course, Electronic Arts, they failed. EA decided to move development of the series back to Criterion Games, makers of the Burnout franchise, 2010's Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and 2012's Need for Speed Most Wanted.
The golden era of this classic racing series was early to mid-2000s, specifically, 2004 and 2005 when EA released Underground 2 and Most Wanted.
Underground 2 became well-known for its immense vehicle customization, expanded upon from its predecessor, Underground, and one of the main reasons why vehicle customization became such a big deal in racing games for the generations and years to come. Most Wanted, on the other hand, re-introduced police pursuits into the series, which further added to the illegal street racer fantasy that the series became so well known for around that tim🐷e.
As a result of the success and acclaim that these two games received, fans everywhere have been demanding that Underground and Hot Pursuit get the r🎀emake treatment. While this would be cool, and I'm sorry to be a party poope🐠r here, it is highly unlikely that such a thing will ever happen.
First of all, we have to remember that the developers of the series have stated numerous times that it's not in their best interest to work on remasters right now. It's just better to look into the future and see what kinds of new and exciting things can be brought to the table for NFS, instead of looking to the past and capitali💖zing🐎 on the success of those entries in the series.
Also, remastering games with so much copyrighted material (licensed cars, music and so on) wouldn't be all that easy. Not to mention that both of those games ha♚d licensed performance upgrades and licensed wheels made by companies that are defunct.
And finally, with how poorly the series has been doing, the last thing it needs is the development team splitting up their work and having one team focus on the remaster, while the other focuses on the next game in the series. The last time the dev team split up was around the time of ProStreet and Undercover, which resulted in two somew🎀hat unpolished and rusheꦺd entries.
So yes, while I agree that a remaster of the older NFS games might be a cool idea, it's definitely unlikely to happen. Personally, I think that Criterion Games should just focus on the next entry in the series and make it as good as possible. Meanwhile, all we can do is wait patiently and pray that we'll finally get a properly good (and properly polished) Need for Speed game next year.