Question Of The Week [September 25th 2024]

Q: What Game Announcement Do You Want To See?

A: A new Burnout Game.

While I’m sick to death of remasters and remakes, and I think the industry needs to start far away from churning out the same handful of IPs that they pump out year after year, there is something to be said about bringing back an older game series. One that has resonated with everyone back in the height of its popularity, and hasn’t had a release in a long time. Bringing back fan favorites isn’t a bad thing, when there is intent behind it and it seems like this is the prime time to bring back one of my favorite racing series… Burnout.

Back when Burnout first debuted, it was just a normal racing game, nothing too spectacular, but with the second game, it introduced its widely loved “Crash Mode”. Where the entire goal was to crash your car into traffic and accumulate a certain amount of property damage. When the 3rd game in the series came out, it’s what I considered the peak of the series. Along with my favorite gaming commercial ever, where two guys are running through a grocery store, destroying everything in sight, it really became a big cultural touchstone for gaming at the time.

Once Criterion came out with Burnout: Paradise City, I felt a lot of the charm left the series, even though this is the game most people actually remember the most/prefer. I felt the open world was too boring, and even though it felt kinda small, it took forever to get to each race. Back when it launched, if you failed a race, you had to drive all the way back at the start, just to turn around and go back the same way yet again. With updates,you could just restart the race from a menu.

Sadly, the Criterion of old doesn’t exist. Like a lot of our favorite publishers, the group of people who made up those companies have moved on to different companies, positions or left the industry entirely. The main driving forces behind Criterion left a long time ago and formed Three Fields Entertainment, and they’ve slowly been working their way up to creating some classic Burnout style games. One of my very first few podcast episodes, I ended up talking about Dangerous Driving, where they basically took the full formula for Burnout 3 and remade it (albeit with a much smaller budget, and it felt like it). But they were getting there, and I had a blast with it, before I hit a game breaking bug. It’s since been fixed, and I’d love to go back and finish the game someday.

But if I could have a new Burnout game announced, with Three Fields Entertainment developing it, with the EA sized budget behind it, I’d be ecstatic! Hopefully, one day I’ll get my dream announcement of a new Burnout game developed by the right people.