First Look at Burnout 5

GamePro has the exclusive first look at Criterion's Burnout 5 (working title), due out for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this fall.

Images in the April 2007 issue of GamePro

Images in the April 2007 issue of GamePro

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 series' hood. We jumped at the chance to talk with 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 -- you don't have to 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.



Table of Contents

Change Is Good

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 five 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, too, because Revenge's excruciating loading sequences hampered its flow.

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