I would say that I am kinda a NFS Fangirl. But in all honesty, the NFS Franchise was lacking the last couple of years. They even took some steps back and went from full customisation to non-customisation.
Rivals was far away from beeing a good game. There is the locked down 30 FPS Rate wich makes the game unplayable (At least for me. I got a headache after 1 hour of gameplay) and their "personalisation" is nothing more then a rudimentary vinyl system. It wasnt even a good one. A few pre-mades and thats it.
The graphics were ok, but that was all.
I watched some of the livestream yesterday and I must say I am very surprised how good this looks and how huge the map is. In my opinion the NFS developers need to come up with something decent now to compete with The Crew. They cannot afford to recycle another Hot Pursuit title.