In case you were worried, Burnout isn’t dead. IP owner and publisher of the franchise, EA, has been keen on teasing this fact in the past, but now a smidgen of evidence has emerged to support the existence of a new game in the franchise. The Australian Classification Review Board, a service similar to the US’ ESRB, has rated a brand new Burnout title dubbed “Burnout Crash,” a PG-rated joint set to be published by EA.
And, well, that’s all we know for sure at moment. As for speculation, though, there’s a lot of that out there. On the developer front, it’s been suggested in the past that Criterion, now fresh off the release of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, could be resuming its work on the Burnout series with this new title. Criterion is of course the studio behind all the Burnout games, and did an especially good job with the last iteration, Burnout Paradise. And while you’d figure that Criterion would just be slated to work on the next NFS title considering the praise Hot Pursuit has received, it's been strongly suggested by EA’s Partrick Soderlund that Black Box is the next in line to give the NFS series a spin.
== TEASER ==As for what “Crash” actually is, there’s also some good speculation based on its name. Crash mode, a Burnout fan favorite that had users demolishing as much stuff as possible in exchange for points, was omitted from Paradise. Plenty of users made it clear that they wanted the mode in Paradise, so “Crash” might be an olive branch to those of you who really miss banging up your expensive fancy racing cars. And if the name implies the scale, we could be looking at a purely downloadable game. On the other hand, “Crash” could just be a safe subtitle that speaks to what the game does best, and still describes a full retail release. Speculation!
Really, though, we’ll just have to wait and see. A minor note in all of this, but it looks like “Crash” is headed to the PS3 and 360. A LinkedIn profile indicated that these were the target platforms of the game, according to a GamerBytes post. Shocker!