I’m worried about Burnout Paradise.

Back in August ’06, Criterion Games put out a press release for the fifth installment in the venerated racing series. Among the usual fluff that makes up press releases, there was this bit about the new direction the series was taking:

Burnout 5 gives players license to wreak havoc in Paradise City, the ultimate seamless racing battleground, with a massive infrastructure of traffic-heavy roads to abuse. Gone is the need to jump in and out of menus and aimlessly search for fun like many open world games; in Burnout 5, every inch of the world is built to deliver heart-stopping Burnout-style gameplay. Every intersection is a potential crash junction and every alleyway is an opportunity to rack up moving violations.

What they’re actually talking about there is taking the series away from the regimented, “complete event A to unlock events B,C, and D” format of previous Burnout games and moving to a more open-world style to accessing races and other events. In this new Burnout, the approach of having several tracks set in cities around the world is abandoned in favor of one large seamless environment called Paradise City that holds all of the game’s content. To begin a race, players simply pull up to one of the city’s many traffic lights, press a button or two, and immediately find themselves racing across town to a finish line on the other side of the map. This is a pretty standard way of accessing missions in open-world environments; think of it as Crackdown with cars, or GTA as a sequel to Maximum Overdrive. As development of the game continued and the trickle of game footage and developer interviews began, Criterion’s vision for the new Burnout was fully revealed: all the insane racing, stunts, and beautiful crashes the series’ place as the “racing game for people who hate racing games” was built upon, but as one seamless experience, free of load times and completely decided upon by the player.

Cue the worrying.

Open-world games are tricky things. By their very nature they threaten to throw the already delicate balance between designer intent and player freedom completely out of whack, threatening to create an all-too-common situation where, once given the freedom to do whatever they want, the player has no idea what to do next, causing them to get bored very quickly. The best open-world games remember the importance of having a narrative thread running through them that gives the player something they can always return to once they’re done exploring. Mass Effect does this – when you’ve gotten tired of shooting up religious crazies with superpowers or trying to bed strange new life forms, the main plot is always right there waiting for you. Fallout did it even better – spend all the time exploring you like, but if you haven’t completed your main goal within a few days, everybody you know will die of dehydration. A strong narrative thread is the lifeline of open-world games, ensuring that players who want to conquer and finish the game are just as happy as those who want a big sandbox to play in to their heart’s content.

This brings us to Burnout Paradise’s first major problem: racing games don’t have central narratives. They don’t have final bosses. They don’t have threats to the universe that can only be stopped by you going as fast as you can. And why should they? While beating a racing game, particularly one as inventive and clever as Burnout is know for being, speaks to many of the same parts of your brain as completing games of most other types does, the genre doesn’t require a reason for existing. There are other cars that go fast, and you must go faster than them. This is enough. Racing games don’t have a plot, and without a plot there’s no narrative thread on hand to save players from drowning in the sea of choices an open-world game presents. Which brings us to Burnout Paradise’s next (potential) sin: from the very start of the game, every single event is unlocked.

This isn’t a definite mark against the game, as there are some players who are going to genuinely love this. Including, theoretically, me. I understand locked content as a means of encouraging players to progress through the game, but part of me always balks at the idea as being unfair to the player. Not all players are created equal, and the threshold that some blow through will prove to be a brick wall for others. This results in players who paid just as much for your game as their more skilled brethren never getting the full experience, which is just mean. That said, I’ve never played a racing game that suffered from too much structure. Burnout games traditionally offers enough ways to play (and Paradise doesn’t seem to be any exception) that it’s very easy to create more than one path to unlocking all the content Criterion can come up with, which would handily sidestep the issue of some parts being just too hard for less skilled players. Instead of taking that path, however, they’ve seen fit to make everything available from the get-go. I’m very curious to see if this works as well as they intend it to.

You would think said curiosity would be sated by the demo released last December. You would think.

One of the 360′s biggest advantages in this latest round of the console wars is the ability to download demos of certain games before they’re released for sales. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the demos of Crackdown and Overlord sold me on the games – they were extremely well put together, showing off the best of what the full game had to offer while leaving me wanting more. Same for the demo of Bioshock, though I was sold on that several months in advance. When the demo for Burnout Paradise arrived, it was the definition of make-or-break time – reaction to the new direction was decidedly mixed across the internets, a mood not particularly helped by all the videos released up to that point focusing on the pretty hi-def crashes rather than the game’s actual mechanics. The demo claimed to offer a slice of Paradise City to run around in, complete with a handful of events to try out and the interesting addition of the game’s genuinely innovative approach to multiplayer (rather than going through the tiresome process of setting up and hosting a match, multiplayer is as easy as hitting a button the D-pad and selecting the friends you want to play with. More games should try this). What was delivered was decidedly less – as pretty as the demo’s corner of Paradise City was, there was little more to do than drive around looking for something to do. I’ve tried the thing three times now, and so far I’ve only found three separate events to try. Instead of getting a taste of the the full experience Criterion have promised for over a year now, all you get is frustration and confusion in the form of one stop light after the next displaying a “Locked In Demo” message. It might be asking for too much, but if the demo’s actual content is going to be so sparse some sort of visual indicator of what is and isn’t playable would be greatly appreciated. For example, why not indicate which events are open with green traffic lights, while all the closed content is marked with red ones? Or is that too much to ask?

To top it all off, as part of their war against loading screens Criterion have decided to do away with that staple of the racing genre and friend of the new player, the “retry race” option. Events the player is currently in the middle of can only be quit, never retried, and if you want to have another go at it you’ll need to drive all the way back to where you started at. It’s the developer’s hope that players will just move on to the next event, which is fine for those who don’t mind situations where one chance is all you get and less so for those of us wanting the option to try again when we’re hopelessly behind. I can understand trying to avoid loading times in a game, but to do so at the expense of a feature a large number of your players expect and enjoy is just asinine. Some early reviews claim it’s something you get used to, but I don’t completely buy it – would it honestly be so damaging to the designer’s vision of the game to include the option to retry a race without physically driving all the way back to the start?

Apparently so. Reaction to the demo was every bit as mixed as before, prompting Alex Ward, Creative Director of Criterion Games, to post a response to the more popular lines of criticism. You can read the entire thing here. Ward’s responses carry a number of bitter, passive-aggressive overtones to the problems some had with the demo and the new direction for the franchise in general, at some points seemingly going so far as to suggest that if you don’t like Burnout Paradise it’s because you’re too stupid to appreciate it or just hate innovation in games. Considering Criterion is a part of EA Games, the largest publisher in the world, I’m more than a little surprised he’s allowed to talk to would-be customers this way.

Has Burnout lost the plot? I honestly can’t say, since the full game isn’t out till next week. But based on the developer interviews and the demo of game, all signs seem to be point to “yes”. As a game designer, you’re first job is to be an advocate of the player, to remind yourself and the rest of your team that the game you’re creating isn’t just for you but for a wide range of players, including those who’ve never played a game before. What I’ve seen of Burnout Paradise so far isn’t a game designed to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, it’s Alex Ward’s personal preferences (and presumably those of his team) being forced on the audience. I can’t in good conscience knock the guy’s ambition, but his execution thus far leaves much to be desired. In the meantime, it seems the best I can hope for is that the guys who made Excite Truck for the Wii will put out a sequel, as nothing else has managed to capture the same mad rush of the earlier Burnout games. Selah.

Filed under: Burnout Paradise, talk about games