There are no roots at this point. NFS suffers from identity crisis, period. The devs just throw a piece of meet on a wall, see where it sticks and plan upon that idea. I believe with all mistakes done Ghost did a fine job with NFS 2015 (bear with me here) as seen in this article from speedhunters they actually tried. They were going in the right direction with street racing scene, witch is more grounded to everyday guy who like cars and spends his last dime on new rims or new paint job to show his appreciation for car culture as his hobby. It's all about the community, the love for cars and the themes. If only Ghost stayed with that idea today we would have in our hands a better game, better story, better features and better mechanics. To hell with new iteration that no one asks for. It's like they rebooting the franchise with each new game release, diminishing the franchise to it's bland standard making NFS the COD of racing genre. Perhaps it's E.A fault for playing with devs heads. But at this point it does not matter, shit hit the fan a long time ago. With that Need For Speed makes the same mistake again, running away again from what works well replacing it with new ideas that displease and divide the community over and over. We give out thoughts, suggestions, concepts and ideas to devs and we are greeted with ignorance. They make the decisions for us and our support becomes irrelevant.  

It really bugs me that a title with so much potential chooses to fade away in this constant mutation of games mixing themes and concepts that bring more issues then mends.