Tech Retrospective: Burnout Paradise Comments by Richard Leadbetter

I have a lot of respect for Criterion. If someone's going to make me buy a Need for Speed (shudders), it's them.
Now go and make Black 2!

fantastic insight in how projects like these are tackled.

I vote: give us more of this!

thanks df.

Excellent. If only more devs spoke like this.

Oooo, a double-ramp, nice.

Great article. I feel a bit guilty for paying so little for the game now...

Having said that I've probably spent about £25 on the downloadable content though.

alex is the daddy.

Great article. I have to say, these newer tech articles that are about games rather than different versions on different consoles are very enjoyable. I'd probably even stop whining and get Big Surf Island now, knowing how frustrating it must've been to create.

Nicely done Criterion :)

Never got into this game. I simply found it dull and repetitive. Perhaps I'm just tired of racing games altogether, because I haven't touched a racing game in a long while.

Good article, really enjoyed the insight,
they could state a few differences just to fan the flame though.

I enjoy these Digital Foundry pieces, but for some reason they feel a bit like advertorials.

Nice guys, Fry and Parr. Amazingly good at their jobs.

Excellent article - first of the DF pieces in fact to deliver on what is promised. More and similar, please =)

great article, really gives you an insight of what problems occur in games dev

It's no surprise to me that these guys made a great engine. RenderWare was a massive engine last generation. I find it odd that EA hasn't take advantage of Criterion Games pedigree in this area and had them make an 'EA Engine' of sorts for all their games.

Hmm, I was hoping this article would address the issue of Xbox 360 DLC data sizes. It has frankly pissed me off, and made me give up on the game.

How come they have a DLC model that requires Xbox 360 users to download *ALL* download content again, every time there is an update? V1.6 required a 750MB download. Why? To re-download the Cagney and Bike packs, along with the 250MB V.1.6.

V1.7 followed merely two weeks later. It was an 800MB download. Why? To RE-download Cagney, Bikes and V1.6 again, in order to include 50MB of new car data, for an optional priced car pack.

I'd hate to have gone out and bought the new retail disc thinking, "Right, this is all updated! No need for downloads!" and STILL been confronted with an 800MB download straight after!

Then there was V1.8. Guess what happened?


Look, I have a slow internet connection and a 20GB hard disk, and I can't do this every time. I have never seen any other game do such a thing, and frankly, I'm wondering why it never got any attention by the gaming press. Why have no journalists noticed this and kicked up a fuss? Do you all have such fast broadband that you didn't notice?

Even on my creaking computer Burnout Paradise ran superbly at a great level of detail. The engine certainly puts to shame a lot of other developers' efforts that's for sure (although it's not that surprising given that Criterion were responsible for the excellent Renderware engine)

EDIT: due to painkillers killing my grammar

It's not a bad game and the engine is pretty impressive but to be honest I think the decision to go open world was a huge mistake. It's clearly the singular vision of someone at Criterion but really they should step back and be objective about how they've hurt the gameplay.

I spent most of my time checking the map to see where I was supposed to be going during a race, I never learned the layout of the city in the same way I would with a GTA game and I think this resulted in a less fun game. I never really enjoyed a race as they were usually interrupted every few seconds for me to pause and check the map. It's not as if learning the city is necessary either, I was able to win 90% of the races first time with only a few near the end of the game needing retries. And why is the map screen mapped to d-pad right? Why not just use the pause button or at least a normal face button like most games do?

In the end I think the open world mechanic was ill-judged. You had to drive miles and miles to get to a junk yard just to swap your car for a specific event and then you had to drive miles again to get back to that event. The open world map just ended up being a very slow and clumsy alternative to a menu. At least when Need for Speed Underground 2 went open world they had the sense to include an alternate menu system to bypass all the driving. As for the race events themselves, like I said, the open world nature meant the AI was just dumbed down too much to make it a challenge. The races would have been better served if they were like the classic Burnout games where alternative routes are blocked off by large "transparent" walls with flashing arrows on them. Hopefully the next Burnout will resolve these shortcomings.

Really interesting article.

It's just sad how so many other cross platform developers don't share the knowledge/skill/attitude of the guys and girls at Criterion. And it really highlights how badly ripped off PS3 users have been by the bulk of cross platform developers.

@photoboy

I agree with a lot of what you said, though my issue isnt so much with the open-world decision, but with the lack of quick-jump buttons to take you back to places like junkyards or starting lines for specific races - or a retry option if you lose a race. It was annoying, and meant you spent as long driving TO the next race as you did racing it, if not longer.

@squeakyg:
I guess that you know it already, but, since you've mentioned x360's 20GB hard disk, you *can* delete the older update files and keep only the most recent one.

I cannot really address the rest of your concerns (which, I assure you, are very understandable), however it may have to do with a preferable necessity to load only one additional (update) file than several ones which may or may not be present in a hard disk. It may also have to do with a uniform environment for all players over Xbox Live (or PS3 users, who, I assume, are treated the same way).

@berelain

Yes, that was an issue for me as well, thankfully Criterion listened to feedback and with the most recent patch they've put a restart option in so you can retry an event without driving back to the otherside of the map to do it. Slightly annoyingly though it's hidden in the menu you press right on the d-pad to open, and after years of hitting pause in Burnout games to restart a race I frequently hit the wrong button! Still, the restart is godsend if you want to get gold in every event.

Good article, but I had more fun playing Burnout 3 on the Xbox than BP on the PC.

Criterion, thanks for the 60fps!
Sadly most games this generation are 30fps only.

I love Burnout, I've bought them all. I'm just back from hols and been playing Burnout Legends and Domniator on my PSP solidly for a week. I can keep going back and back to these games.

I take my hat off to Criterion for putting the restarts into a patch for Paradise as that was my biggest bugbear with the game. Still not totally sold on the open-world actually.... but I'm really looking forward to the next game these guys are going to release. Whether that's another Burnout or not.

ps Great article, I'm loving to the new DF channel.

egpaidlol

@photoboy

This is exactly how I felt when I first got the game, but after playing it solidly for the last couple of weeks, I've completely changed my mind. It's genuinely one of the best racing games available and tons of fun. It just takes a LONG time to learn the map. Also, you can restart races now.

For once the M$ points thing works in our favour. Cheaper on the 360.

Sounds like they have a great approach.

Despite all the content that Criterion have added to Burnout Paradise, of which I'd downloaded all the freebies, I still don't rate it as the best game in the series as I found it a bit lacking compared with other open world racing games, most notably the Midnight Club series. Also it was all too easy to take a wrong turn during a race and end up losing it, made more unbearable by the lack of a restart until many, many months later.

Yeah it's impressive that it looks nice (although it's bizarrely a very empty-looking location without drivers or pedestrians) and runs at 60 fps with online integration but the game just lacked the excitement of the earlier instalments for me. Having to drive around looking for specific events because certain ones sucked and said lack of a restart option initially pretty much killed the game for me. The city felt recycled from the previous games too.

Superbly supported and far from being terrible but very overrated IMO.