There are few pure driving games from the last several years that have earned as much admiration in the wider gaming community as Burnout Paradise. It’s a game that’s remembered fondly for its radically unrestrained driving mechanics and its pioneering sense of openness and freedom. With these elements in tow Paradise deliberately reached beyond dedicated fans of the racing genre and appealed to the broader gaming collective. That being said, it’s also a game from 2008 and even for titles under a decade old it’s easy to look at them through rose-tinted glasses. So in the interests of either shattering some comfortable illusions or renewing praise for what might become a classic of video game driving, let’s take a look back at Burnout Paradise.

One of the fundamental traits that defines Paradise is how Burnout as a series has come to think about car crashes and competition between drivers. Where most other multiplayer games are about achieving victory through direct confrontation between players, racing games are more often about players trying to achieve victory by performing the same task in parallel and trying to outclass each other at it. In racing games you can often block the space other cars can move into or even ram them, but play is mainly about who can run through the same track and get to the finish fastest. There is a neutral goal which you are all trying to use the fundamental mechanics of the game to forge your own path to. But this isn’t how, for example, a shooter works.

In a shooter game you and your opponents are not reaching for neutral targets, you are each others’ targets. The way to beat players or AI becomes far more direct and confrontational: rather than just doing better than them and making passing clashes, you must consistently interfere with them and remove them from play, even if only temporarily. Sure, shooters might have neutral elements in their gametypes like flags or capture points, but these are in themselves ways to set up individual players as targets for elimination. You can see how this concept of direct confrontation extends out to fighting games, strategy games, and most other multiplayer genres. Kart racers somewhat blur the line between this kind of overtly aggressive competition and traditional racing game fair, but Burnout is an even closer melding of the concepts, making elimination of opponents a big focus of play and creating entire modes out of attacking or avoiding attacks by other drivers.

A couple of key features that Burnout carries over from action games specifically is that it has this very immediate turnaround from you making an attack on a player to them being affected by it and there’s a very tactile sense of hitting your opponents. It’s comparable to the way shooters and fighting games think about making contact with enemies. The crashing system also means that if you get taken out and have to reset, then at least there’s a little spectacle to watch in the meantime. Does Burnout treat crashing as worthy of punishment? Sometimes. But where most other driving games view crashes in purely negative terms, Burnout performs anarchic celebrations of them. It’s also no coincidence that this game has a simultaneous focus on crashing and moving at absurd speeds.

Acceleration and movement speed in Burnout are taken beyond what other driving titles would consider sensible and this would be impossible without the high probability of you and your opponents frequently crashing. Because of this the game needs a system that turns crashes into something fun, otherwise play would just be an annoying conga line of failure. So it pulls that essential mechanic out of the hat: drivers can manipulate each other into crashes as a form of attack. You can also view it the other way around: the game has a fun crash system, but it would rarely enter play unless players have a reasonably high probability of colliding with objects at any one time, and so the developers have to crank the speed way up.

A nice little touch is that taking down another driver saves you from any imminent crash and puts your car back on the track, moving in the correct direction. It takes colliding with another player at an awkward angle from a mutual suicide that you wouldn’t attempt, to a risky but viable maneuver where only one can come out unscathed. When it goes correctly there’s this moment of euphoria as you move from a position of danger to happy success. This mechanic also means that once you’ve ploughed your opponent into a truck, wall, or other object, you don’t then have the anti-climax of backing up and getting going again. Instead, the game moves ahead smoothly and keeps up that blistering pace.

Of course, a lot of that pace is conveyed by the game’s boost mechanic. The fact that you don’t just have a frighteningly high top speed, but have to hold down a button to move that bit faster lets you feel a very deliberate sense of being behind many of the game’s most intense moments. Additionally, if the game let you get to this ridiculous speed with the accelerator alone you’d constantly be having to let off on that accelerator to handle turns, which is both unintuitive and not particularly thrilling in a game like Burnout. Nobody comes to Burnout to constantly take their foot off the pedal. The boost isn’t just a cool feature, it helps amplify almost all of the best things about this game. What do you want to do most in Paradise? Go fast, perform stunts, and crash other peoples’ cars. What do you have to do to get more boost? Go fast, perform stunts, and crash other peoples’ cars. The boost itself then comes back around to help you do those things more effectively. It’s a delicious feedback loop.

I wonder if this whole speed-crash dynamic is why there have been few to no other games like Burnout Paradise. Depicting the inevitable high speed crashes of Burnout with even a passing realism also means depicting severe damage to the vehicles involved. While Burnout uses unlicensed cars, most other racing games have a borderline fetishistic attachment to real car brands. Car manufacturers are notorious sticklers for their products remaining in a reasonably presentable condition in their video game appearances, and as discussed Burnout’s speed and crashing mechanics aren’t separable, so perhaps no unlicensed vehicles then no Burnout-like elements. Granted, there is 2012’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted which is a game very similar to Burnout Paradise that also has licensed cars in it, but that still wouldn’t exist without Burnout developer Criterion, and the radically sanitised crashes of Most Wanted look just wrong. They don’t have the punch and personality of Paradise’s spectacular wrecks. I hear it frequently said that product placement in games is only ever coincidental to the rest of the content and that we should only think of it as window dressing, but Burnout Paradise may be an honest to god example of how branding and marketing (or the lack of it) can radically change the way a game plays. However, if you, like me, remembered the way Paradise handles crashes also being one of the principal problems with the game, you’d be right.

Burnout’s extreme speed means that even slight twitches of the left stick at one point on the road can mean a broad difference in where you end up a second or two down it. It also means that even the few seconds lost when you wreck often translate to falling behind 2-3 places. In short, the crash dynamic has the potential to be punishing and to repeatedly break pacing, and so it’s especially important that hazards and opponents on the road be properly telegraphed to the player, and that the number and nature of the obstacles in a player’s path be carefully controlled. This is easier to do on the kind of closed-off, tightly engineered race tracks the Burnout mechanics are built for, but those same mechanics are not necessarily built for driving around an open-world. Paradise City is thickly populated with vehicles, buildings, and other geometry, which is great for imparting the sense of this urban and rural hub full of character, but not so great for players being able to easily recognise everything that’s in front of them in a fraction of a second, and in Burnout a fraction of a second is often the difference between crashing and surviving. Even the slightest chip to your car can mean you wreck out and for what is clearly meant to be a game of empowerment, it’s surprising how vulnerable it sometimes makes you.

It probably doesn’t help that a lot of things on a road are grey. With a lot of speed and a bit of distance streets, walls, ramps, and highway dividers begin to blur into each other. It also didn’t help that in the launch version of the game some event types had car damage represented through contrast being drained from the screen, only making it harder to distinguish between items in your environment. Similarly, it can be tough to tell at a glance whether a car is a civilian or a foe, which is frustrating when hitting the former will crash you, but hitting the latter will put you ahead in an event. From a distance they can both just look like a set of tail lights. There’s also no way to predict if oncoming traffic is about to swerve into you, obstacles can be created by vehicles ahead of you crashing into each other with no warning, reversing can be a needless struggle, and there’s no means to tell if there’s an obstacle around the next corner, over the next hill, behind another vehicle, or in any area that’s obscured from you. Unless you’ve experienced it for yourself it’s hard to convey how annoying it is to turn through an intersection into a four door you couldn’t have possibly known was there or to have a competing racer slam into a van up ahead and you be punished for it.

Burnout Paradise is a game that demands precision control, but does not give you precision controls. It’s a game that forces you to take split-second decisions when it cannot properly convey information about the game state in split-seconds. It’s a game that insists you take in a complete picture of the road in front of you while frequently obfuscating information about that road. It’s a game that is trying to be about freedom and fluidity, but where gameplay can often feel oppressive and pacing becomes choppy. It is a chaotic experience and that is part of what’s so thrilling about it, but chaos is inherently unpredictable, and unpredictable gameplay is unfair gameplay. This is a very physics-based game and sometimes it just feels like you’re getting tossed about in the semi-random pinball machine of Paradise City.

We often talk about game quality as though it’s just a product of weighing up a game’s positives against its negatives, but it matters where in the experience those positives and negatives exist. Sometimes a game can have huge flaws, but their damage to the overall experience can be limited if they only exist in one facet of the design or for limited sections of the playtime. However, if a game’s flaws are baked into its fundamental mechanics you’ve got more of a problem, because whatever activity you’re performing in the game at any one time you’re going to encounter its ugly side. This latter scenario is what makes Burnout Paradise’s flaws generally so noticeable. But you may recall all of this. What’s easier to forget is that this game is also missing a bunch of features that we take for granted now and really weren’t particularly advanced when it was released.

You cannot set waypoints, there are no guidelines on the map or in the environment, there aren’t any arrows to show you where to go, and the game was out for more than a year before Criterion added a “Restart Event” button. The option remains pretty well-hidden to this day. You can also lose entire races because turns are frequently not signaled long enough in advance and now and then the game will reset you in the wrong direction after a crash. These issues create hitches in both open-world roaming and competition against other racers, although definitely in that second one more than the first. Because the game is poor at guiding you, events often demand you look away from the action to check indicators or the mini-map, but taking your eyes off of the road for even a second can easily cause you to wreck, so you’re stuck in a paradox. Due to its extreme speed and capability for punishment, Paradise is the kind of game that’s most in need of features like breadcrumb trails and properly highlighted restart buttons, but just does not have them. The designers’ hardline stance against using the environment itself for GUI elements is probably part of a commitment to putting a realistic city in front of you, but that only accounts for half the problem, and that’s a slightly confusing decision when Burnout is clearly not going for total realism. It would also be easy to throw the absence of fast travel and the elusiveness of the “Retry Last Event” option into the same basket, but they’re actually somewhat conducive to what the game is going for.

One of the nice things about Paradise is that just where one fun section of the game leaves off another picks up. When you pass the finish line for one event there’s always another nearby, if you get one collectible there’s likely to be an additional collectible close, and you can chain together tricks like drifts and “Near Misses” as you move between places. Heck, just the basic experience of driving really fast down one of the game’s roads is fun, making the game one, long continuous string of exciting things to do. Notice that many roads curve into each other and that you can sometimes cut corners between streets, often allowing you to keep moving across the city without ever having to break the flow of your movement. Many open-world games make these huge, sprawling maps to explore, and put a lot of fun things to see and cool activities to perform in them, but don’t allow smooth transitions from diversion to diversion or make the mechanical process of moving across their world compelling. Burnout Paradise does, and that’s why there’s no fast travel and why it held back on the “Retry” option. It doesn’t want you frustrating yourself by replaying the same race over and over when you could be seeing all the other content the game has to offer, and it doesn’t want you just skipping between places when you could be using Burnout’s thrilling driving mechanics to get there and discovering its world along the way. Related to this is just how Burnout wields its mass of activities and collectibles.

Even by today’s standards Burnout Paradise provides a huge quantity of tasks to get lost in. There are 400 gates to smash, 120 billboards to break, and 50 super jumps to perform. I remember in 2009 when Assassin’s Creed II came out and people thought its challenge to collect 200 feathers from around virtual Italy was nuts, which it was, but I also want to reach back in 2009, shake people, and tell them “Burnout Paradise came out a year before and it has 570 collectibles to find”. Then there’s the 120 events to beat, the 75 cars to obtain, the 500 online challenges to fill in, the 35 drive-throughs to find, the 50 achievements to unlock, and the 64 roads which each have their own minigame score and time trial to attain. Yet this abundance of content is not what made you remember having so much fun with Paradise’s events and side-activities. Plenty of games go for scale, but here Criterion go for something more.

As mentioned before, the density with which this content is packed into the world is important, and that may be another reason we’ve not seen many other games like Burnout Paradise. With the size of maps in open-world games today it would be hard to chock every tiny corner full of this quantity of events and collectibles, not to mention that with an enormous map, depriving players of a “fast travel” option would be right out of the question. Part of the reason that Burnout can survive without fast travel is because you can move across its environment so quickly, which again, wouldn’t be possible for many other games. Compare Burnout Paradise to Playground Games’ 2012 title Forza Horizon. Horizon attempts to place a Burnout Paradise-like shell around Forza’s track racing dynamics, but even though there’s an enjoyable game in there, the open-world isn’t nearly as fun to just sandbox about in as Paradise City. Sure, Horizon may have a large map, collectibles, little Paradise-style bonuses like the “Near Miss” and so on, but not only does it not have Burnout’s off-the-rails driving, it has nowhere near the density of content. The map is large, but as opposed to feeling like every other road is brimming over with pleasant surprises, so much of it feels empty and barren, and you end up thinking “It’s appropriate it’s set in a rural wasteland, and of course it has fast travel: it’s there so I can skip over all of this”.

Burnout Paradise also has a wonderful variety in its activities, more so than most driving games. From moment to moment it might be a racing game, a stunt game, a deathmatch game, or whatever the hell Showtime was. Paradise wouldn’t be able to pack nearly as much content into itself if it weren’t for this diversity; the game’s multiple event types allow it to get a relatively large amount of playtime out of relatively small portions of the map. You may retread the same roads hundreds of times over, but not only is Paradise’s gameplay very enduring, you cover these areas in greatly different contexts. Additionally, the Burning Routes (time trials for each vehicle) mean that you get some time out of every single car in your garage, instead of suboptimal vehicles just rusting away in there for all eternity. The variety here is helped along by the fact that Paradise’s cars aren’t just separated by their stats, but also by the mechanics they apply to boosting. Although, that’s not to say there aren’t cars in the game it’s unpleasant to have to drive.

Another inescapable factor in the quality of Paradise’s content is how you collect the collectibles. Many other games spend time fine-tuning mechanics that feel fantastic to engage with, but then when it comes to collectibles throw those mechanics to one side and make the process of obtaining these additional items a case of dryly running over them and pressing a button. I think there’s a lot to be said for the steady sense of productivity that this can create, but at the same time the way most AAA studios deploy collectibles builds a picture of lingering cynicism. It feels like many action games don’t understand the divide they’re creating when they have their main content be about their exciting story or mechanics, but side content be about these slow, meticulous object hunts. Worse, it’s hard not to feel like many games jam in a bunch of collectibles due to the AAA industry coming to place too much value on quantity over quality, padding games out with playtime for the sake of playtime. Paradise may be many things, but it is not cynical. It wants to approach every idea it introduces with enthusiasm, and that’s how it approaches its collectibles, bringing an impressive combination of both quantity and quality.

In Burnout Paradise the mechanics you use to obtain your collectibles don’t just exist in addition to the great core driving mechanics, they are one and the same, and the dev team are probably able to treat the collectibles with the degree of care they do because they make them such a large part of the game. Speeding through breakable walls, crashing cars, and making jumps are your collectible content. The kind of spectacular, uninhibited things that you’d do in a sandbox experience if left to your own devices become part of the core gameplay and you are explicitly encouraged towards and rewarded for them. Titles like Just Cause and Red Faction Guerilla can be seen implementing their own versions of the same idea to great effect, and it feels like there’s so much to learn from here. Imagine if we had more shooter games where gunning down special targets got you your collectibles or platform games where you got to perform enormous jumps to tick off your optional tasks.

Also note that event playspaces, collectible locations, and the world map being part of the same environment allows you as the player to very fluidly transition between focusing on main content, side content, and the open-world. You don’t have pick a level or even go that far off your regular path to engage with most of Burnout Paradise’s collectibles, which means that you can grab them as you’re free-roaming or participating in another event, and the lack of load screens, menus, and breaks in between activities lets everything you do really feel like it happens in the city instead of a special box the game has laid out for it. This lack of instancing also allows you to approach activities on your own terms, lets the game gently present you with plenty of chances to engage with events you might not normally consider, and is essential to keeping up the sense of flow and freedom the game is going for. The only exceptions are the Burning Routes where having to end up at a specific intersection with a specific car does not allow them to be eased into in the same way.

It’s also worth turning, at least briefly, to the general philosophy behind Burnout Paradise’s world. Paradise City is made realistic, but only up to a very specific point: the game wants to be highly transparent that the world in front of you is moulded to be a utopia for drivers before anything else. It’s right there in the name: Burnout Paradise. You’re not making your mark on a city designed for its citizens like in GTA, instead the city was designed especially for you. Then there’s the game’s approach to story and characters. Many driving games have forgone these elements almost entirely, which is good for building a game that feels serious and technically-focused (the traditional Forza is a good example, as is Project CARS), but doesn’t work nearly as well if you want something light-hearted and highly stylised, and so in an effort to feel less cold and uptight many driving games have presented actual narratives. However, these games have often been able to only loosely commit to these stories, giving them a dull D-grade tinge.

Paradise finds a third way that probably would have fit a lot of other racing games better. The game has no human racers, which I’ve most commonly seen attributed to helping it achieve a 12+ rating, but it also means that it’s neither left with blank, faceless dummies in place of characters, nor does it waste its time on substandard character interactions and arcs that it only half cares about and that would break up the action. Paradise lets you just get into your car and drive uninterrupted by plot, but the game’s inclusion of “DJ Atomika” still buys it a little bit of human personality, and allows it to present new information without worrying about creating whole scenes between your character and others every time.

It’s not a coincidence that Criterion picked a laidback radio DJ as their sole character either. Notice that while many other driving games have played on underground street culture or professional track racing for their subject matter, Paradise comes from a more original place. The game wants you to feel like you just got a beautiful new car and are spending a summer on the road. The experience is like an aesthetic emulation of being a teenager finding freedom through getting your license and driving for the first time. I mean Paradise literally begins with you getting a provisional license and a second-hand junker. I get that same feel from the game’s alt rock soundtrack which occasionally descends into the lovably trashy or mopey. The vanilla game also had a skyline which would shift from its own version of sunrise through the day to sunset, which reflected the summery nature of the experience. The point is this is a racer that allows itself a personality more imaginative than just being about car culture. It’s very aware of its own status as a driving game, but “driving game” is a broad genre. The spirit of Paradise’s play is this rock-and-roll demolition derby which wants to remain none the less cool and approachable, and the game has a face to match that.

Burnout Paradise is itself a bit of a teenager. It’s often antagonising, self-contradictory, and reckless in ways that hurt it. At the same time it has this boundless energy, exciting appetite for destruction, and a limitless world of opportunity before it. When taken as a full experience it more than holds and as video games designed to elicit pure fun go, this is still one of the best. Thanks for reading.

Corrections: This post originally stated that console versions of the game were locked at 30 FPS and that there were no “Retry” or “Restart” buttons in the game. These mistakes have since been corrected.

Fucking immense game. I would ride hard for Burnout Paradise if they ever actually did game of the generation.

TL;DR?

But seriously read it. You're so right.

Honestly, that new car blasting past you leaving you no option but to drop everything and run it down may be the greatest car-based gameplay mechanic and collectible mechanic of all time.

I am almost a hundred percent certain the console versions ran at 60.

EDIT: Typed that on a phone. Yeah, all of the Burnout games ran at 60 from what I understand. At least all of them from Takedown on did.

I didn't like Burnout Paradise. I know a lot of people love it, but I always found myself crashing and the "steer your wreck to crash other players" thing didn't make up for it. I could have gotten past that if I didn't find myself opening the map to find out where to go during races. I want to like it a lot - the game feels incredible to just play, in a way that almost no other game does, and almost nothing else has that same sense of speed and danger. I guess you could say it's the things that make the game so special for others are the same things that break it for me. And I respect that, we need way more of it in the AAA industry. And I'll probably fire it up every now and then just to bask in its carefree, ridiculous, speedy glory, but I'll never make it very far before I get lost in a race because I made a wrong turn (and the tiny turn signal they give you is not enough).

EDIT: Also, the whole "I can't tell if that's traffic or another driver" thing was solved in Revenge, which for some insane reason people didn't like. If you hit oncoming traffic, you crashed. If you hit traffic going the same way as you, however, you just bumped them out of the way in some stupidly entertaining way. It was like running through leaves, only you're a car and the leaves are other cars. I thought that Burnout game was a lot of fun. Players who didn't want to risk it could stay in the same lane, and players who risked being in the oncoming lane got some boost for their risk, and in both cases players got to experience the chaos that the series is so well-known for, so you didn't lose anything.

It's interesting that you mention the ease at which you crash in Burnout Paradise. One of the reasons I still regard Burnout 3: Takedown as the best Burnout game is because that game was less forgiving when it came to crashes compared to later games in the series.

I've recently put another ten or so hours into Paradise, and I always come away wanting to like it much more than I do. Your issues with some of the signage is definitely on point, and then there are times when it signs too early and causes you to turn into an inescapable railway tunnel or construction site. Too many of the events, also, leave you on the west side of the map where there is sweet fuck all to do. Navigating the city is fairly quick, but the mountain roads are so spread out that navigating them feels often repetitive and fairly mechanical, as opposed to the fluid and tense flow that the city races have.

Part of me wishes that the entire game had been takedown events, because they're the only event I ever come out of feeling good about, even if I lose. Races are usually lost by a pedestrian driver swerving randomly into my lane, or some stray pole or barrier completely mashing my car and putting me down two or three places without time to recover. I can't speak to the Stunt events very clearly, because I didn't play a single one in my time with it this year. I just remember those being either mind-numbingly repetitive, as you did barrel rolls off of one ramp while drifting around, or frustratingly hard to even find a good stunt spot.

It's a game that I really respect and I do often come back to it, but it never fits together cohesively. Between the lack of travel options, the frustrating layout of the map, and the complete absence of guidance it's easy to just sort of fall off of.

@justin258: it did.

The best game of last generation in my book.

I love this game. I also lament the state of its DLC release on PC, it would have been nice to get Big Surf Island and the missing vehicle packs. That said, its performance and soundtrack was great, its controls decent for a console port, its graphics stunning for the time and I've always found the map more naturally laid-out than that of NFS: Most Wanted (2012) which acts as a bit of a spiritual successor.

That said, I really, really miss the Burnout franchise (and Black, I guess). Paradise is a great last title before being placed on Need For Speed, but man...

I have owned Burnout Paradise three different times with varying degrees of success:

1. On 360 when it was still the launch game, where the feel and graphics did not gel with me at all and caused me to not be able to see what was happening very well on-screen and had a lot of trouble with the events. I quit pretty early on.

2. On PS3 where the patches fixed every gripe I had about the feel and graphics, but I discovered that the PS3 controller cramped my fingers when I sat holding down the R2 trigger all the time for acceleration. I had to abandon my playthrough after I found that my hands were still aching the day after playing the game (I'm getting old).

3. Again on 360 where the patched version felt and looked great and I could play for long stretches without destroying my hands.

Third time was the charm. The game finally clicked for me and I plowed through all the single-player content it in about a week.

Burnout Paradise is so good. Also great write up!

Due to its extreme speed and capability for punishment, Paradise is the kind of game that’s most in need of features like breadcrumb trails and restart buttons, but just does not have them. The designers’ hardline stance against using the environment itself for GUI elements is probably part of a commitment to putting a realistic city in front of you, but that only accounts for half the problem, and that’s a slightly confusing decision when Burnout is clearly not going for total realism. It would also be easy to throw the absence of fast travel and lack of ability to retry failed events into the same basket, but they’re actually somewhat conducive to what the game is going for.

I really like that you mention this, as it's my most love-hate feature of Burnout Paradise. On one hand, at first it can be incredibly frustrating to miss a turn on a race because the game obfuscates the correct route, but on the other hand it forced me to really learn the city. As a result, Paradise City is one of the few open worlds that I know by heart even eight years after the fact. I mean, in other open world games with robust navigation, oftentimes I don't even consider the layout of the city as I'm only focused on the waypoint and it results in me enjoying those worlds less. There's no right answer where to place a game on the spectrum of accessibility and immersion, and it's tough for me to fault Criterion for their decision. That all being said, the lack of a restart feature at the game's release (which I believed they patched in later) was some serious bullshit. I recall nearly throwing my controller across the room after I lost a particularly long race on the last turn and realized I had to drive across town just to get another crack at it.

Also, now that I'm thinking about Burnout Paradise again I've got Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" stuck in my head. Thanks a lot Gamer_152. ;-)

Burnout 3, Revenge, and Paradise are all great games. I loved the open world of Paradise City. I'm not sure the Forza Horizon games would exist without it, and in terms of shortcuts, ramps, and other fun shit, it's still an unmatched world. It was like they combined the previous Burnout games with San Francisco Rush and Cruisin' USA, and results were impressive.

That said, Paradise is not my favorite Burnout game, because it shed my favorite feature from 3/Revenge, which was the crashbreakers/crash events. The crashbreakers were great because they gave you a chance to take out some others with you when you crashed. The crash events where you blazed a car towards and intersection trying to wreck the most shit were the definition of dumb fun. Revenge gets the nod in my book for the best Burnout game, but they're all good.

Criterion was a great developer. As mentioned, Black was awesome as well. I enjoyed NFS Most Wanted because it held on to some Burnout roots, but they have since sadly moved away from that style under EA as many of us feared they would. Oh well. I'm assuming they got paid, so there's that, but I'd love for the Burnout series to still be around.

@darth_navster: Criterion did indeed add a retry function eventually; though it was still hidden well enough that I had to look online for the way to find it, despite knowing the feature had been patched into the game. You could really tell they did not want it to be in there!

Great write-up! I had tried for years to get into driving games, but Burnout 3 was the first driving game I played that finally clicked for me. Paradise, then, took that game's core and expanded it into something broad (but dense) and magical I could have never anticipated. Easily my favorite driving game ever, for many of the reasons you expertly dissect, and I agree it should be considered among the best of last generation for all the wonderful stuff it introduced.

I have not found another driving game since Paradise that I've really enjoyed, and I've kind of been down on the genre in general (the 2012 Most Wanted was close, but at best an "almost but not quite" retread of Paradise). That drought has only gone on to intensify my appreciation for Paradise. What a game.

@walkertr77: I'm not sure I could go that far with it, but I still love the game. The original theme is under-rated.

@professoress: You're right. That's a better "hunting" mechanic than the mechanics I've seen other games use to represent actual hunting.

@justin258: I thought that while working on this I had read that the console versions run at 30, but double-checking it, as best I can tell they do run at 60. Thank you for the catch. As for the crash thing I can only assume that they thought being able to bounce off of oncoming traffic would either be too easy or not realistic enough, although Paradise didn't have the feature where you can steer your wreck into other vehicles.

@hassun: If Paradise was more punishing about crashes I probably wouldn't have liked it. It has such a tight pacing to keep.

@the_nubster: It's a shame. I'm certain that many turn-offs are actually impossible if you wait for the game to signal them and looking at the mini-map is more risky than looking at the indicators. You make a very good point about the west side of the map. This is essentially the problem with putting the events at intersections, it means that these long mountain roads are simultaneously lacking in activities and very hard to get out of. I maintain that the lack of fast travel in the game works elsewhere, but it's easy to find yourself wishing for it in those more hilly areas. As for the Stunt Runs they're not my favourite but at the very least you can't just do the same tricks over and over for points, once you've used a ramp it will not let you reuse it for points.

@arbayer2: The particularly weird thing is it's called "The Ultimate Box". It's virtually naming itself like an all-in-one pack and then missing the bulk of the downloadable content.

@whitegreyblack: I genuinely didn't think anyone would try to get back into the game that many times if it didn't click with them. I also wouldn't have thought it was possible to play through all the single-player content in a week. That's some loyalty.

@colonel_pockets: Thank you. I appreciate that.

@darth_navster: There's no one way to do it, but I would argue that a game should be cohesive with the option it picks. I love the idea of a game that gets you to learn about its world to compete properly, I'm just not sure Paradise is the game for it. In every other area the game is about being impulsive and being able to get straight to the action, and I don't think that kind of rote memorisation suits it. I was also a little surprised going back to the game how little Girlfriend came up in the track lists.

@notnert427: I'm certain that Horizon wouldn't exist without Paradise, a lot of the mechanics are just so close. I might have to check out Black as well. You're the second person to mention it here.

@majormitch: Thank you. I've found other driving games I've liked post-Paradise, but nothing I've liked nearly as much. I'm glad that there's so much of it to enjoy.

@gamer_152: The game is that damn good, once it clicked for me. I just looked at my Xbox achievements and I did indeed complete all the single player races in the span of 1 week back in Nov 2014! There were several feverish all-nighters in that span of time - the game is pretty addictive and it's hard to stop playing when you get in a roll.

Great write up for an amazing game.

On of my top 5 games of the last generation

Great article. Truly Burnout Paradise feels more and more like a unique thing because it is designed with a a philosophy that is entirely different than other games, even NFS Most Wanted...

Here is a video of a games critic that I consider one of the best of youtube, talking about the game, to complement your points. His points are similar to yours that BP is a different experience to almost any other racing game out there and he attributes it to two things: one is a carefully crafted open world that is not big but dense, similar to a child city road map and with collectibles that make you better at the game by rewarding exploration, shortcuts and stunts; the other is the childish appreciation (in the good sense) that the game designers have in cars themselves, not because they are fetishized pieces of engineering and status to be exhibited and barely touched, but because they are fun to play with. Brands, finishes and stats are secondary to things like "what can this car do? is it about running fast or is it about crashing others?"... The analogy is akin to people keeping toys in packaging versus kids playing with them...

Black was great. It was the Burnout of first-person-shooters, as it had a similarly "visceral" feel. The sound and soundtrack were true standouts, so it was one I always cranked up the volume for. There was just something about a smoky firefight with bullets flying everywhere and your cover breaking around you while an orchestral soundtrack blared in the background that was really awesome. I'm sure it's less impressive now, but for 2006, it was pretty damn cool. I wish more games would have destructible environments. I imagine it's pretty resource-intensive, but I've always appreciated it when it's there, and it's one of the reasons I enjoyed games like the Red Faction series and Mercenaries. I digress. Black was cool. Here's a sub-par capture of a portion of one of the best levels in the game. You'll know if it's a game you'd be into pretty quickly. (It doesn't hurt if you enjoyed The Rock.)

Yeah I don't think it would have worked in that setting. A less carefully guided, more freedom-oriented environment requires more leniency.

Best game of the PS3/360 generation IMHO.

Favorite cars from the game? I was always partial to the Kitano Touge and Carson GT.

I actually hate open-world racing, so the core gameplay of Paradise left me cold. But I did love going after the side stuff and aimlessly exploring. It's a weird relationship I have with that game.

I also own like three copies of it over different services, and I don't know how or why.

Great game, though I have an irrational hatred of that damn GnR song. Makes my skin crawl.

Still a big disappointment for me coming off takedown/revenge.

I know I'm a little late to the party, but I just wanted to comment on how awesome this analysis was. I especially loved your discussion of Paradise's lack of modern open-world conveniences and how that manages to be an essential part of its design. It took me a long time to come to terms with Paradise's mean unpredictability and weird commitment to avoiding load screens, but once I started to learn the lay of the land, Paradise City became a lot less frustrating and more fun to drive around in. The angsty teenager analogy at the end is also perfect.

Again, great blog!

@masha2932: Thank you.

@hermes: Thank you. Errant Signal is one of my favourites too and I think he's pretty bang-on here, it's just even though Paradise has a childlike quality to it in some ways, it feels a bit trashier or grittier in other places. That's really where it comes down as a teenage game for me, but in a more positive way than it feels like Army of Two or Gears of War were thought up by teenagers.

@notnert427: I'll probably look into it further, but I've got to say that clip doesn't grab me. It looks too much like the kind of dingy, generic shooter we began to overflow with at a point. Destructible environments are always cool though, but beyond the technical limitations one reason they often don't fit a game is because they allow you to undermine the level design. When you can just blow through walls and delete floors, it can easily ruin the pacing, challenge, and balance that a designer carefully builds into a map.

As for favourite cars, I remember using the P12 an incredible amount back in the day. The Inferno Van is also still lots of fun for Road Rage and Marked Man events. Now I have so many cars and have been flicking between so many different kinds of events I'm not sure I have one I'm into. I might download the DeLorean-like though.

@bizarrozorak: Thank you. I highly appreciate comments like this and I hope to write more in this style in the relatively near future.

Good writeup! Shame that the Burnout name seems destined to be used for nothing at this point; maybe they'll make more mobile games or something. Burnout's one of the last games I can remember where the anti-aliasing made it actually difficult to see what was on the horizon from time to time, which always made it a bit difficult to see what I was doing especially at the speeds you moved. I should load the Steam version back up with my new computer, though.