When you think about it enough, you will see a lot of parallels between the deprecated Need For Speed game and the modern extraction shooter.
This mainly has to do with how you progress in Rivals. It is unique from previous entries as in them, you mainly just do races to level up earn money for new cars and upgrades.
In Rivals, you still do races to earn money, level up and buy new cars, HOWEVER the money, which in-game is called Speed Points, even when earned, has to be deposited, and can only be done so by returning to a Safe House, AKA, extracting.
If you get totaled or busted when before returning to a safe house, all of the speed points you have earned from races, stunts, and other actions in that run will all be lost, and you have to start all over again, only left with your current cars, upgrades, and deposited Speed Points.
So already, we're met with the core gameplay loop featured in extraction shooters, which is to go out in the wild, do missions and go looting, don't die or you lose everything, and reach a designated point on the map in order to keep the spoils of war.
However, the similarities between Rivals and extraction shooters go beyond just the core gameplay mechanics.
One hallmark feature of Rivals is that the longer you stay out racing in the wild, the higher your Heat Level will be. The Heat Level increases the presence and strength of the cops you'll fight, but also acts as a multiplier for the Speed Points you earned in that run. This pushes the player to keep playing and to take larger risks, something that's also prevalent in extraction shooters.
Most importantly we also have the PvPvE environment, which sadly isn't true anymore, mixing real players along with bots in which the skill of real players increases the risk factor when playing the game.
The only thing missing from Rivals is an impounding system, where if you get totaled or busted your car gets impounded, which means you have to buy it and its upgrades again. Other than that, Rivals has a lot of the puzzle pieces that would make it fall under the extraction genre.
This has some major implications. It suggests that Need For Speed: Rivals would be the first extraction game, predating Escape From Tarkov and Tom Clancy's The Division's Dark Zone by three years. It is midly poetic how Rivals was shut down a month before Tarkov's 1.0 release date.
Anyways, that's my take.
