“It’s not just back-alleys and side streets, it’s dropdowns and jumps,” Webster continues. In the finished map, there are roads where the biggest obstacle is the traffic, there are routes that require fishtail turns as you whip around corners, there are stunts, and there are sandbox areas that act as playgrounds for your car. Then we realised that naming the roads meant we could add gameplay to every road.” “We talk in those ways, so that’s why we began naming the roads. “If you were going to tell me where the nearest petrol station is, you’d be like, ‘Head down towards that street, do a right at the roundabout, then go towards the high street’,” Webster says. A successful race feels like an out-of-body experience, and navigating the roads becomes similarly intuitive once you have spent a few dozen hours drifting through Paradise City. This is a racer where the controls are so tight they feel like an extension of yourself. How can you make your knowledge of the world give you a competitive advantage? That’s why we didn’t block out the race routes.”īurnout Paradise demands that you learn it. “Suddenly it was backstreets that became interesting. “What takes it beyond closed circuit racing is choice and variety,” Webster explains. Once Criterion got to playtesting the looping and intersecting roads the developer had created, the team realised something: an open-world racing game should let you break the rules. You have to move things around to match the car handling.” We had that rhythm, but until you’ve got high quality car handling you can’t test what things work.
You have a point of view - we think we want something akin to a grid-like city area, but we want to go out into the rurals, we like the mountains. “It was like going to the moon,” Webster remembers.
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Criterion had to figure out how to make its racing series work in an open world, introduce a convincing traffic system, implement metal defamation for crashes, and make it seamlessly playable online, all while the game runs at 60fps. The studio thought the new hardware would allow the developers to let their imaginations run wild, so they set to work on the most ambitious Burnout yet. Burnout Paradise was about pushing it into an open world.”Ĭriterion was seduced by the power promised within the PlayStation 3. Burnout Revenge was about pushing it even harder. “Burnout rewarded and presented it in a rewarding way,” Webster says. It also gave races an intimate feel - rather than chasing your opponents or watching them in your rearview, rival cars were in the next lane, scratching up your paintwork. Suddenly, crashes were no longer a sideshow, it was a way to get an edge over the competition, shunting them into a wall in a shower of sparks as you boost to the horizon. If you can take people out and cross the line in first position, we thought that was way better. Most racing games have you keep away from your competitors, whereas we wanted to make it a lot more like you see in a movie, with people slamming into each other. “I think we called it ‘aggressive racing’. “Burnout 3 was about making the crashes more spectacular and making them a part of gameplay,” Criterion GM Matt Webster tells me. Crashes weren’t just a fail state any more: they were part of the game’s soul.
The introduction of Crash Mode in Burnout 2 made smashing your car into another vehicle an event of its own, with higher scores awarded for causing the biggest pile-ups at busy junctions. The first Burnout game was similarly brutal. The Burnout series exists because of Thrill Drive, a Konami coin-op game about driving as fast as you can through traffic, weaving and skidding between cars - hit another vehicle and it’s all over.