YMMV / Need for Speed (2015)

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Earning Crew reputation is extremely rare than the other four (Build, Speed, Outlaw, Style) since they're mostly used very often.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Given that its official title is simply Need for Speed, the same one as the franchise and with no subtitle, fans tend to call it "Need for Speed (2015)" or simply "the 2015 game" or "the 2015 reboot", if not just 2015. In the same line, PC gamers and PCGamingWiki call it Need for Speed (2016), since it did not come out on Windows until that year.
  • Shortly after its release, it was called Need for Speed: Underground 3 due to its clear homage to/influence from the Underground sub-series, despite Ghost Games explicitly stating that it's not.
  • EA/Ghost Games themselves might have indirectly given the game a nickname of their own thanks to returning player rewards for Need for Speed Heat, as the custom license plate in that game featuring this game's design is called Genesis.
• Game-Breaker: Everyone and their grandmother uses the Lamborghini Huracán and Aventador, the McLaren 570S, the Ferrari F40, the SRT Viper GTS and the 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RSR 2.8 (including Magnus's "277" and Nakai-san's "Stella Artois"), as they have the overall best performance in the game when fully upgraded. In fact, the 911 Carrera RSR 2.8 in particular has been by far the best car in each of the three games that had Ghost Games as main developer (this game, Payback and Heat).
• Goddamned Bats: Cops especially fall under this for those going for the prestige medals. Not only do they swerve in front of the player, but they prevent the player from immediately restarting in the case of a mistake.
• Obvious Beta: The game was released on consoles without even a manual transmission option, which was a standard feature even in arcade racing games before the Criterion era. Some players even found a non-functioning "Semi-adjustable Gearbox" part, suggesting transmission tuning was cut. The PC version was delayed by 4 months to prevent the Porting Disaster issues Rivals had. By the time the PC version came out, every version of the game was updated to include a manual transmission option, but other problems came to light: gear ratios for most cars were not only un-adjustable, but wildly inaccurate, and most cars magically grew extra gears when power upgrades not related to the transmission were added. A Civic can have up to 8 speeds in this game.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Christina Wolfe, who plays Robyn, would later become more famous for her roles as Julia Pennyworth in Batwoman (2019) and as Kate in The Weekend Away.
  • While Faye Marsay (Amy) was already relatively well-known in her native Britain by the time she appeared in the game (having even appeared on Doctor Who's 2014 Christmas special), she would become known to international audiences afterwards thanks to her roles as The Waif in the fifth and sixth seasons of Game of Thrones as well as Vel Sartha in Andor.
• That One Achievement:
  • The SpeedLists Update may as well be a kick in the nuts for anyone who thought this game was an easy completion. "Gold Plated" requires you to win gold on all events in Prestige Mode (essentially a Harder Than Hard difficulty). To do that requires you to do things such as beat some ludicrously fast time or score an unrealistic amount of drift points. Simply put, you need near-godlike skills if you want to have a shot at those golds. Hell, even winning bronze is a struggle. To give you an idea of how hard the time and point requirements are, according to TrueAchievements, only 6 out of 40,000 tracked gamers have this achievement as of August 2016 (over three months since the update was first released). It's gotten so bad that there's an ever-growing petition on EA's website about making the requirements easier.
  • Another achievement from the update, "Speed Master", isn't much easier. It requires you to win all events in a Speedlist, which essentially means win 5 multiplayer races in a row. With the random traffic spawns (traffic cars spawning too close in front of you to avoid right when the race begins is not unheard of) and players out to ram you off the road at every opportunity, this is easier said than done.
• That One Level: The "Run 2 roadblocks in a pursuit and escape" is this in spades. Not because it's difficult, but rather because it's a chore. The problem is that, the police famously being much more sedated in this game than in other entries, you have to essentially babysit them in order to maintain the pursuit, whilst roadblocks rarely spawn during pursuits, making this mission a lot more tedious to work on.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The cutscenes use a combination of Live-Action Cutscenes for the characters and background, and actual in-game renders for your car. The final result is... something that looks really strange at low quality, and there's also the matter that the cars lack a reflection of the characters when they should have.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The game's renderings of the cars and the streets might be the best in the entire franchise, making it look the closest as if you're actually driving a car at night around a city than any game has ever come to, to the point it might be hard to believe that the cars parked in your garage aren't real; the only thing giving them apart is that they don't give a reflection of the characters when they should have, which in fact seems to be their most noticeable grey area.
• Win Back the Crowd: 2015 appears to be Ghost Games' attempt to do this for the whole fanbase, not just tuner-era fans in particular, especially after the nostalgia-pleasing Legends update.