“Big Surf Island is the purest expression of everything we learned from our players and the game a year after launch,” says Webster.
Internally, the team dubbed the time spent on the game between 20 as the “Year of Paradise.” This all culminated with the addition of a brand new island, which was absolutely bursting with challenges to take on and places to explore.
#BURNOUT PARADISE GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION SERIES#
The studio kept fans up to date through an ongoing YouTube series called Crash TV. There were bug fixes, new cars, and a handful of additional multiplayer modes. For Paradise, its post-release life was key.Īfter realizing how players were actually engaging with the game, Criterion continued to alter the experience to better suit its audience. But in 2008, this practice wasn’t widespread some games would receive a few patches or content updates after launch, but it wasn’t a huge part of the experience. Months or years after launch they can look and feel like entirely different games. The concept of games as a service is commonplace today the biggest games in the world, like PUBG and Fortnite, are constantly updated and expanded with new features and improvements. Perhaps the most forward-thinking aspect of Paradise was the idea of ongoing, post-release support. “We figured we were the best people to decide what a Burnout game was.” “The modern Criterion started when we launched Paradise,” says Webster. In a lot of ways, Paradise marked a turning point for the studio. Along the way, the studio teased a promising new action sports game, called Beyond Cars, which would ultimately be cancelled.
After the success of Paradise, which included a solid year of post-release support, the studio moved on to the Need for Speed series and most recently helped out on Star Wars Battlefront II, crafting the game’s vehicular sequences. A decade later, it’s a surprisingly modern experience the original Paradise was a pioneering racer, and many of its advances still feel fresh in 2018.īut 10 years later, Criterion is in a very different place. It’s mostly the same game, but with upgraded visuals and a year’s worth of downloadable content included.
#BURNOUT PARADISE GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION PS4#
Today sees the launch of a new remastered version of Paradise, available on the Xbox One and PS4 (a PC version is expected later this year). “After the second week of launch, we looked at some of our data and realized we didn’t know our audience at all.” “We thought that’s what our audience was,” says Matt Webster, a producer on the game who now serves as Criterion’s general manager. Instead they opted to focus on the game’s social features and explore the big new world.
Soon after launch, though, they realized they had it all wrong: 90 percent of players didn’t even touch the races.
They expected players would really dig into the hardcore racing aspects, battling against each other in online races and competing in the ranked progression system. But for Paradise, the team moved in a slightly different direction, spreading out a huge range of challenges across a vast, open world. Previous entries in the series were focused on arcade-style challenges, where players would attempt to crash cars with pinpoint precision. When Burnout Paradise first launched in 2008, the development team had an idea of the kind of audience it would attract.
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