NFSW is an online street-racer in the same vein of other games in the Need for Speed series. When it's not about racing, it's about avoiding the long, wheeled arm of the law. The game purports to be massively multiplayer and open world, and in some sense it is both of those. The world is indeed open, and as you drive through it you'll see a great many players, but that is where the ties to the MMO genre seem to end. The ability for you, the player, to interact with other players in this open world is minimal. You can talk to them, compare your stats, invite them to a match or a group, and that's about it. That would probably be enough under most circumstances, but NFSW is a racing game, and as such has no real cooperative mode, so grouping up becomes pretty much useless.
Gameplay in Need for Speed World is broken down into four parts – at least according to the power-up menu. The first is exploration, where you can drive around the game's city and…well, that's it. Exploration is really just how you get from place to place, although even that can be circumvented by simply using the game's map to teleport to a race location or join from a distance, leaving the mode almost entirely without purpose.
Participating in races and evading the cops also rewards players with a random powerup. This was a particularly missed opportunity, as currently the game has no player-driven economy. Players earn money that can only be spent in the game's store – no trades between players can be made. This feels like something that could have been very easily fixed by simply having things like car modifications as rare-drops from the end-of-race rewards, and allowing players to trade them. Instead, they're simply bought and used and there isn't enough player interaction.
