{"id":14362,"date":"2018-03-06T09:04:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T09:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/315213"},"modified":"2018-03-06T09:04:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T09:04:00","slug":"devs-reflect-on-the-impact-and-legacy-of-burnout-paradise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/03\/06\/devs-reflect-on-the-impact-and-legacy-of-burnout-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"Devs reflect on the impact and legacy of Burnout Paradise"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNobody was interested\u201d in Burnout Paradise<\/em><\/a> prior to its release, series co-creator Alex Ward tells Gamasutra.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember taking it to E3, and pretty much nobody came to see it. The folks running EA [the game\u2019s publisher] were thinking: \u2018get that game done and then make another one\u2019. We were just happy to survive it, really.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team did a lot better than survive \u2013 they created one of the most-loved driving games of all time. Fans\u2019 passion for the open-world racer remains to this day, and EA is poised to capitalize on that by releasing a remastered version<\/a> of the game later this month, a full decade after the original’s 2008 debut.<\/p>\n

So what made it so special? And how, if at all, did it change the racing genre?<\/p>\n

According to one of its creators, the idea for Paradise<\/em> can be traced back to open-world games like Crackdown<\/em>, Test Drive Unlimited<\/em> and \u2013 in particular \u2013 Pandemic Studios\u2019 Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“I wanted it to be about discovery and exploration”<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cMercenaries<\/em> was like my GTA,\u201d Ward says. \u201cIt was the first game I was able to overplay, to spend far more hours in it than the designers intended. The main realization I had was that the world, the landscape, was<\/em> that game. You could have a lot of fun doing quite inconsequential things: can I make these cars crash there? What happens if I crash a helicopter here?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
“The main realization I had was that the world, the landscape, was<\/em> that game. You could have a lot of fun doing quite inconsequential things.”<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was that sense of freedom that Ward tried to carry over to Burnout Paradise<\/em>. \u201cMy philosophy was that if me and you both played it for three hours, we\u2019d both do different things. The idea was that it was this incredible world built with things to race and chase and smash, and you\u2019d play with your friends, and it\u2019s your<\/em> game, and you can do whatever you want whenever you want no matter how many conventions that breaks. I wanted it to be about discovery and exploration.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result was a racing game without any defined tracks. Every junction in Paradise City could launch a new event, be that a race, a takedown mission or a stunt challenge. Players could start these at any time and exit whenever they wanted by stopping their car and then driving off to do something else. During races, players were simply given a finish line, and could take whichever route they thought would be the quickest.<\/p>\n

The freedom extended to multiplayer, too: Ward says his aim was to create a space where people could make friends, almost like a \u201cdriveable chat room\u201d. Players could roam freely about the city alone or\u00a0in groups, making their own fun or completing challenges at their leisure.<\/p>\n

And while it didn\u2019t work for everybody \u2013 some fans disliked the lack of structure \u2013 it worked for most players, among them other developers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was blown away by it,\u201d says Paul Coleman, chief games designer on Codemasters\u2019 DiRT<\/em> series. \u201cWhen it first came out I 101-percented it, got all the licenses, smashed every billboard, and played all of the DLC up until the Toy Cars pack [more than a year after release].\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It was the game\u2019s open-world setting, Paradise City, that kept Coleman coming back. Series such as Need for Speed<\/em>, Midnight Club<\/em> and Test Drive<\/em> had already taken stabs at open-world racing by the time it released in 2008, but Coleman says Paradise<\/em> was the first game to do that style of play justice \u2013 and he still believes it\u2019s the most complete open-world racer ever built.<\/p>\n

Laying the foundation for a generation of open-world racing games<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cI think the Paradise<\/em> world just felt so much nicer to exist in,\u201d he argues. \u201cIt made people take note that you didn\u2019t have to have a predefined track to enjoy a driving game. You see it today in games like [Forza<\/em>]\u00a0Horizon<\/em> and The Crew<\/em>, those areas have lots to do, but I still don\u2019t think anybody has captured the right kind of size of package like Paradise<\/em> did. The scale of the city and outlying area felt right for what Paradise<\/em> was setting out to do. There was something to do at pretty much every junction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The open world is also what Lee Mather, creative director of Codemasters\u2019 Formula 1<\/em> series, best remembers about Paradise<\/em>. As Mather argues, it was a \u201cbrave\u201d decision to ask the players to rely on instinct and memory to win races but, ultimately, one that paid off. \u201cComing to the end of a race you\u2019d see the culmination of everybody\u2019s different routes, joining you coming from different directions, so it still produced an exciting finish to a race\u2026without being on the same piece of tarmac.\u201d<\/p>\n

The handling of the cars was spot on for the setting: a mixture of speed and control blended with the close-up crash physics that the Burnout<\/em> series is famed for. Mathers recalls just how well it flowed: \u201cYou\u2019d get into a rhythm, and you\u2019d pick your shortcuts and crash through the signs, and from start to finish it was exciting and fast, it was never jarring. If you clipped a wall you had an awesome crash and then you were straight back in the action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Far from simply admiring Paradise<\/em>, Coleman says that other developers used it as inspiration for their own games. Paradise \u201copened up\u201d possibilities for the DiRT<\/em> series and gave the development team \u201cconfidence\u201d that a more free-form style of play would work, particularly in multiplayer. \u201cIn DiRT 3<\/em> we were able to shape some of the content choices and discipline choices around the style of play that Paradise<\/em> had opened up. We made our first foray into open areas, and it started to become more Tony Hawk<\/em>\u00a0in terms of driving around and doing tricks rather than going from point to point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burnout<\/em>\u2019s \u2018Freeburn\u2019 multiplayer \u2013 which allowed a small group of players to drive around the city in a single server \u2013 was particularly influential on Coleman.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the notion of mucking about in an open area, having tangible rulesets to all either compete together or against one another,” he says.\u00a0“Without Burnout<\/em> doing some of that stuff up front, there would\u2019ve been a lot more question marks about what worked and what didn\u2019t work. It gave us a lot of confidence…what we were doing was different but spoke to that style of competitive and co-operative play.\u201d<\/p>\n

The game\u2019s influence can be seen clearly in other games that came later, says Coleman, particularly in 2012\u2019s Need For Speed: Most Wanted<\/em>. \u201cYou feel like you\u2019re driving around in Paradise<\/em>, but it\u2019s a different city with licensed cars. The challenges and billboards, they\u2019re all there, I really enjoyed the opportunity to play another Paradise<\/em>-style game. It worked for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

As well as offering inspiration, Paradise<\/em> provided \u201cmotivation to want to do better\u201d, Coleman says. That\u2019s especially true of the amount of content it offered, with multiple, meaty updates after its release, including ones that added motorbikes, a day-night cycle, new game modes, and a sizeable island built for stunts.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on what’s perhaps the world’s first social driving game<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cIt was incredible value for money, with reasons to keep coming back,” he continues.\u00a0“It certainly set a difficult precedent for everyone else to try and follow. We\u2019d more likely be expected to release two games for that amount of development. It was a challenge for us to step up to that level, and I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve ever really achieved that.\u201d<\/p>\n

But despite its influence, Alex Ward says that when the game came out it \u201cdidn\u2019t feel like a big success\u201d. That perhaps stemmed from its time in development. He was never told what he could or couldn\u2019t put into the game (it was his brainchild, after all), but it was clear than many people disagreed with the direction of Paradise<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n
“It was a challenge for us to step up to [Burnout Paradise<\/em>‘s] level, and I don’t think we’ve ever really achieved that.”<\/span><\/h6>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cNobody else wanted to make an open-world game,\u201d\u00a0he says, adding that EA was always reluctant to put as much cash behind the Burnout<\/em> series as they could\u2019ve because they thought it lacked the \u201ccultural relevance\u201d and showbiz appeal of the Need For Speed<\/em> series. \u201cThat just used to annoy us because we all worked really hard on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, part of Paradise<\/em> was about defying expectations, and making sure that the EA sales staff were inundated with orders from retailers that had sold all their copies of the game. And it worked: the game sold a million copies in its first three months, and the decision to carry on pushing out content stopped players from trading it in, which was a major concern for publishers at the time.<\/p>\n

Ward says that whenever he returns to the game, it\u2019s \u201cvery hard to look at it without saying \u2018that\u2019s wrong, that doesn\u2019t work\u2019\u201d, and says there are lots of features that he wanted to add but that never made it into the game. But equally, he recognizes that it was \u201cahead of its time\u201d in almost every way, as well as being \u201cthe world\u2019s first [and arguably, only] social driving game.\u201d<\/p>\n

However you remember Burnout Paradise<\/em>, the influence it had, and the respect it still commands, is clear. The remaster of the game is not just a good excuse to revisit Paradise City \u2013\u00a0 it\u2019s a chance for a new generation of players to get behind the wheel.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m looking forward to going back to the HD remaster,\u201d says Codemasters\u2019 Coleman, \u201cpartly because I want my three-year-old son to experience it for the first time. He\u2019s probably a bit young for it, but he loves cars, and I think with the right, smaller PS4 controller he\u2019s going to thoroughly enjoy playing in that area.\u201d<\/p>\n

He won\u2019t be the only one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNobody was interested\u201d in Burnout Paradise prior to its release, series co-creator Alex Ward tells Gamasutra. \u201cI remember taking it to E3, and pretty much nobody came to see it. The folks running EA [the game\u2019s publisher] were thinking: \u2018get that game done and then make another one\u2019. We were just happy to survive it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}