Gaming
Games
Meet the wild drivers speeding through Burnout Paradise
Burnout Paradise is already an incredibly fast game; we sat down with speedrunners who try to play even faster.
While racing through Big Surf Island under the moonlight, with computer-controlled cars flying by on both sides, Austin 'Espumbrajolt' Dickhute was weaving through traffic, both off and on the road. He was in the middle of a road rage mission, crashing into cars left and right to get the minimum amount of required takedowns.
Two brutal sideswipes later and he was on the board with two takedowns, one right after the other. But a small adjustment of the camera sent him directly into a nasty head-on collision that launched him up and off the pavement.
That’s one of the most frustrating, and exciting, parts of speedrunning Criterion’s hit open world racer, Burnout Paradise. Crashes are a huge part of the game, but also such a big waste of time, runners avoid them whenever they can but cherish the carnage whenever it happens.
“The destruction aspect is still there,” said Daniel 'MissingYew' Fox, one of the record holders for speedrunning Burnout Paradise. “But you don’t want to waste that time, so it happens less often and eventually you start to appreciate those awesome crashes more.”
Originally released in 2008, Burnout Paradise is back in the spotlight, with a recently released remaster for Xbox One and PS4, and with a PC entry coming later in the year. The racer was also featured in this year's Awesome Games Done Quick, a semi-annual video game speedrun charity marathon. It was the first Burnout game to ever make an appearance there.
Burnout Paradise's segment at the marathon was one of the event’s most enjoyable, showcasing how the game’s open world and intense crash mechanics make it both an exciting candidate for speedrunners and a difficult challenge to master.
Crashing is a bit of a hassle, but still a spectacle.
© Criterion
“Road Rage is the most hated event of the whole game, nearly everyone in the community agrees,” said Espumbrajolt. “Other events are about racking up points or getting to one point on the map, Road Rage focuses only on crashing and the random chance that comes with it.”
Road Rage is all about taking down other cars around you while soaring down the road at breakneck speeds. A lot of fans consider it the game’s best mode, but it’s the bane of many speedrunners' existence.
“The cars and how you hit them behave differently every run,” said MissingYew. “Sometimes one collision will push one car into another causing a big chain reaction, but you can’t predict that, so it’s always up in the air.”
“Road Rage can make or break a speedrun,” Espumbrajolt added.
Luckily, the default run (where runners need to finish the game with any percentage of it completed) starts with four Road Rage missions in a row, front loading all the random chance elements, giving runners an easy way to start over if they mess up. “It’s better to do that first instead of getting screwed over later on.”
Paradise’s sprawling map was a big roadblock for runners who memorised it.
© Criterion
Burnout Paradise’s biggest asset, its beautiful open world, is also a major speedrunning obstacle. Runners need to memorise the entire layout of the map to find the best shortcut for every race and the best overall route to complete the entire run. Most other racing games use tracks with laps that you navigate to with a menu – memorising those is a little easier.
“Planning the route to actually run the game is incredibly hard,” MissingYew said. “Looking through the eighty different events and planning which ones to do and then how to get between each one was a huge challenge at first.”
MissingYew was one of the first speedrunners to conquer Paradise’s sprawling city and countryside. When he originally started he had to find every shortcut and learn the intricacies of the map on his own.
“As more people got into the game, routes became easier to plan, as more people were seeing what worked best,” MissingYew added. “Getting better isn’t about finding a better way to do it anymore, it’s about shaving a few seconds off through execution.”
Burnout’s never been a terribly popular game for speedrunners, but the small community has gained traction recently with their run at Games Done Quick. The run there showcased the Big Surf Island add-on which is one of the many ways to speedrun it. They are hoping the remaster, which includes all DLC, will breathe a little more life into the game.
“I think the combination of my run and the remaster will get people thinking,” Espumbrajolt said. “They’ll realise how much they love the game and hopefully give speedrunning it a chance. Maybe they’ll even try to beat my times.”
Burnout Paradise Remastered is out now on PS4 and Xbox One.
