Burnout 5

This is Paradise City.

It's a sprawling metropolis of industry and commercialism and entertainment, tangled up in 90 miles of wheel-melting asphalt. It's a haven of interwoven pathways; of heart-stopping jumps at unfathomable speeds through unbelievable obstacles. It's a world tailor-made for racing and crashing, built from the ground up to steer the genre's most explosive franchise to the top of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 hit lists. This is Burnout 5: Criterion Games' latest and greatest ultra-speed destruction derby.

But this is no ordinary retooling of a square-pegged game to fit the round holes of the next-generation platforms. This is a complete reinvention of everything under the franchise's hood. We jumped at the chance to talk to Criterion about how their prized possession is evolving from a multi-headed speed demon to a streamlined, destructive machine, and we weren't disappointed one bit with what we learned.

It's still Burnout -- don't you worry about that. It's just got a new transmission and a hell of a lot more horsepower. Read on for all the gritty details.

Before mentioning some of the changes soon to come to the franchise, creative director Alex Ward quickly assured us that Burnout 5 (a working title only) will still be the game so many have come to love. "Burnout has always been about driving like a madman through traffic, and that hasn't changed at all." But, he said, "if we just made Burnout Revenge again on the PS3 and 360, no one would be satisfied with that-least of all us. [Burnout 5] is still based on the premise of driving like a maniac and crashing your car. But it's got some significant differences."

The granddaddy of all those differences in the game's new, seamless world. Paradise City may seem ironically named (considering its rambunctious denizens), but for those of us navigating its streets, it's a utopia of high-speed destructive potential. Split up into 5 districts, together comprising 18 different neighborhoods, the city's size is roughly equivalent to 15 older Burnout courses chained together. And every virtual inch of it will be accessible to the player, from the outset of the game, without loading between districts. "We want to do away with loading," Ward said. "That's a big goal. We don't even know 100 percent if we can pull it off, but that is what we are aiming for." It's a good thing-Revenge's excruciating loading sequences constantly hampered its flow.

The city's massive scope gives Criterion the freedom to do away with menu-driven gameplay, too. The Burnout Revenge experience was broken into discrete chunks: Gameplay was segregated by location, and each location had its own events that had to be unlocked one at a time.

No longer. The old menu system is all but gone. Burnout 5 will allow players to play how they want, when they want, anywhere in the city. "We want one thing to lead to another," Ward told us. "A race could become a Road Rage, which could then become a Pursuit, and then in the middle of that [the player] could get taken down and start flying through the air." From there, you could decide to record the episode as a crash, and "seamlessly blend into what you thought you knew was Crash Mode-because we are taking that to a whole new level. It really is about blending experiences together. We want the player to be able to start things and end things anywhere."

And from the very beginning of the game, the player really will have ready access to any part of the city. No walls will prevent you from getting to certain zones. No glowing barriers will direct races one way or the other. Unlockable content will be a thing of the past. Instead, Criterion has thought up a new method of tracking your accomplishments in-game: You'll earn yourself a driver's license.

Advancement in an Open World
Reflect on any huge racing game on any recent system and the juxtaposition of victory with one particular car is unmistakable. Especially in online play, players will generally gravitate towards certain vehicles-and that fact isn't lost on Criterion's developers. "If you've got one 'best car' in the game, that limits the online game," said Criterion. "If you've played Project Gotham [Racing] where everyone just drives the Ferrari F50, or Test Drive Online where everyone drives the Celine all the time," they said, you've likely noticed it. "Putting a 'best car' in the game really restricts game progression, choice, and player experience."

So instead of having a wide variety of cars with a particular best that gets unlocked by the end of the game, Criterion came up with the Burnout Driver's License, which logs your in-game accomplishments-crashes, high-speed runs, stunts, running other cars off the road, and so on-and levels up the driver's abilities to match. "The game is constantly tracking what you are doing, whether it be performing takedowns, speeding, or exploring the world to increase your driving skills," the developer told us. "These abilities are being tracked both offline and online."

While individual cars do have their own stats, those stats can be modified based on a driver's skill set. Thus, if you manage to track down a particularly awesome car early in the game, it will likely be incredibly hard to drive, as your driver stats will skew the car's stats. Level up your license, though, and you'll be able to take that wheel without much difficulty.

And as for managing your cars, Criterion's thought of that too: They've implemented permanent enhancement shops all over the city. Repair shops, for instance, can be used to fix up your newly-acquired cars after you've run them off the road. A chop shop in the game will allow you to add special abilities to any given car. You can drive through gas stations to grab speed boosts at any time, and, because dust and grime is persistent in Paradise City, there will even be car washes to help keep your paint shiny.

SUBHEAD: Technical Takedown Burnout 5 may find release on both the PS3 and the Xbox 360, but for the Criterion team, the PS3 version will be a huge focus. While Ward did say that it was simply too early to be able to accurately predict exactly what would be in either release, he noted that the team is attacking the PS3 with the same fervency they did the PS2-one hell of a lot. 1080p over HDMI, for instance, just isn't possible on the 360 at this point, although it's a foregone conclusion on the PS3. The PS3's Sixaxis controller will provide additional control options the 360's doesn't have. Plus, the PS3's advanced processing capabilities make it particularly suited to the physics-intensive crashes that are going to be taking place. And, boy oh boy, will those be some spectacular crashes. The new physics engine Criterion has implemented will allow fracturing of cars into 80 different parts, a massive leap from the 12 destructive components of Burnout Revenge's vehicles. You'll be able to shear roofs off of rides, shred doors and windows, and even tear entire cars in half during takedowns and crashes. The visuals are only half of the action, however; a huge amount of work has also been put into the audio, which has been beefed up to react dynamically with the intricacies of every crash. A devoted process will track the movements of each element in a crash sequence and assign sounds to match the visual proceedings. Thus, instead of the bland, regurgitated sound effects of previous titles, Burnout 5's audio will, figuratively and literally, blow its predecessors away.