Criterion Games Had Plans for Burnout on Moon, Wild West

burnout-paradise-surf-island-490Criterion had some ludicrous plans for Burnout Paradise DLC – read on to find out.

Criterion Games, developers of last year’s uber-acclaimed Burnout Paradise revealed in a blog post about what the game could have been. It’s clear that the design team behind the game is completely nutty – in a good way.

The game’s original plan was ambitious – Paradise was going to be a series of islands, all connected to Paradise City by boats or islands, and each focusing on a different style of racing, such as an off-road based island (Big Surf Island, hint hint). One of the islands was going to be circuit based and be marked up like an F1 Circuit!

Criterion quickly got interested in the idea of DLC, and being a developer well in-touch with fans and their demands, they started discussing ideas for DLC that get progressively insane and awesome:

  • Planes. They wanted Planes in Burnout Paradise. They even got around to doing it, but the city didn’t look so good from the top, so they scrapped the idea.
  • Helicopters. Probably tied in and cancelled with the Planes idea, but Criterion wanted Aerial Challenges with Helicopters, an interesting idea being helicopters carrying hoops that other cars have to jump through. Zany? Yes. A whole lot of crazy fun? Definitely.
  • Cars vs. Bikes – A clear homage to the brilliantly classic Road Rash line of games, the plan was to have both cars and bikes running simultaneously instead of in separate packs. The plan didn’t work out, not only because it would have caused a “pandemonium”, but would have made things a little unbalanced – bikes can’t exactly take down cars, you know.
  • Underground – drive under the city for fast underground racing and open areas for challenges. We don’t know why this got shot down, though – it sounds practical.
  • Time Travel. Criterion discussed time travel in the game, so that a portal would take players to the Wild West for a while. Again, a plan that some within the dev team considered “going too far”. Going too far in a Burnout game? What’s that?
  • Boats! Criterion wanted to add boats to Burnout, to connect the various islands together and to race on water, too. Didn’t work out as the idea was considered “too sane”.
  • Moon. Yep. The idea spawned from a joke one of the crew members made, and the plan went ahead so far so to map the Moon surface and make it drivable as well. The idea was to have a rocket pad on Big Surf Island that players could use to fly up there. And that’s not all – Lunar Challenges would have been completely unexpected, think Zero-Gravity challenges and takedowns.

But alas, none of this made it to the game and most likely never will. That is no cause to grieve however, Burnout isn’t over at all! Criterion better get all that craziness into the next version of Burnout, or even the next version of Need for Speed that EA has graciously dropped into their hands.

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