There are a rare few racing games as good as Burnout Paradise. You could argue there aren’t any, though the competition for the number one spot is fierce. The game is such a classic it begs the question: Why hasn’t anyone been able to make a racer quite as good since? Only a few people on this planet could answer such a question.
Thankfully, at Summer Game Fest earlier this month, two such people were present. Founder and CEO of Fuse Games Matt Webster, alongside creative director Kieran Crimmins, who are currently hard at work on Star Wars: Galactic Racer. With both having worked at Criterion when Burnout Paradise was created, they took some time to reminisce about the game and speak about why it’s so good, and how Fuse Games is trying to strike gold twice.
“It’s like lightning in a bottle sometimes,” Webster told Eurogamer. He pointed to the desire of the Burnout Paradise team to take its arcade racer experience and morph it into an open-world experience. Seeing as there wasn’t really any game doing that at the time, it proved a wonderful opportunity for them to be creative.
“We were making it up as we went along,” Webster said. “The online multiplayer in Burnout Paradise – you were just dicking about in a car, not playing the game was the game! Now you’ve got Forza Horizon 6, which does that to a wonderful degree. Like beautifully, wonderfully creative, but ultimately what you’re doing is a social driving experience.”
“Paradise was a leap forward in loads of ways, so you couldn’t just remake that and have the same cultural impact and give people the same experiences,” Crimmins adds. “So the answer to that is, people try all the time. Everyone tries to make the best game they can possibly make, and the most interesting game, but it is like catching lightning in a bottle. The only way you can get there is to try and do something new, try and do something innovative, and have the player experience at the heart of what you’re doing.”
Catching lightning in a bottle is, as the idiom goes, impossibly hard. Yet Webster, Crimmins, and their co-workers at Fuse are indeed trying to do so again with Galactic Racer. There’s a desire to push the genre forward again, with Webster believing he knows what the missing piece is in the genre right now.
“Consequence is missing,” he said “It’s tough to have consequence when you’ve got a rewind button, right? So, consequences are missing. How do we bring consequence into the structure? How do we have not just the consequence of crashing, but consequence in decision making? Take your build. What are you trying to do here?
“So we want to move the genre forward, and so there are similarities with Paradise in that regard, in terms of how we are trying to just invent new cool stuff, that’s what we’re trying to do here. It just happens to be inside a Star Wars racing game.”
Crimmins, on the importance of consequence, pointed to the “levels of depth” present in Galactic Racer as evidence of their intent: “It’s why we’ve got the amount of vehicles that we’ve got from the Star Wars universe, like having four vehicles larger than just cars, because we know that we need to take a leap forward to really be a transformative game in the industry. I really think that Star Wars: Galactic Racer has the potential to be that.”
To this, Webster cheerfully replied: “Yeah, it’s being brave, I think!”
We’ve got more on Galactic Racer coming soon on Eurogamer, so if this chatter about living up to Burnout Paradise has you keen, then keep an eye out for more from this duo.
