Paradise in Other Games

As the more perceptive of my seven or so readers can see, I recently started playing Burnout Paradise again. I went and bought a copy the day the new Big Surf Island DLC came out. Interestingly enough, it had been damn near exactly a year since I last played Burnout Paradise when I popped it back into my 360. As I’m sure most gamers are aware, Burnout Paradise has seen an unprecedented level of support since release from its developer, Criterion Games. Since I stopped playing last summer they have added day and night cycles, weather effects, motorcycles, a cops and robbers mode, an entire new island, and some other stuff I’m sure I forgot about. Even better, most of it has been for free! Gamers everywhere have rallied behind this new model of support, but I wonder just how viable it really is? It works great for this style of game, but how will it fair if applied to a linear narrative or even any game with a narrative?

The reason Burnout Paradise can be modified so easily is there is absolutely no story. You drive cars around what is essentially a giant playground and have a blast doing it. The game gives you a plethora of things to do, and whenever Criterion comes up with something new, they throw it up on the marketplace. Most games however, aren’t like that. Prince of Persia, for example, stirred up all sorts of drama by deciding to add content to an already finished product. That game had an ending with a sort of hazy choice to be made. If you were among the minority that opted to end the game prematurely then the addition of DLC to add onto the story was essentially a slap in the face. Seeing as how most games single player campaigns fit into a narrative like this, with or without choices, adding content ends up feeling tacked on or just more of the same. New content for Burnout on the other hand not only adds new areas, but alters the old areas injecting a fresh twist on an old game. The only way to do that with a game like Prince of Persia would be to add new gameplay elements that require you to replay the storyline.

Still, there are a ton of games that could easily adopt Criterion's support system. GTA4 has in a way, with its DLC bringing storylines unrelated to the main game. A game that could have did a lot of really cool things with extra content, but I feel only scratched the surface was Crackdown. Crackdown is very similar to Burnout Paradise if you can overlook the very glaring fact that in one you are a super soldier and in the other you are a… car. The philosophy behind each game is essentially the same. You are given a huge world, tools to do cool things in those worlds and various objectives to complete. Once you were finished with Crackdown, co-op and all, you could have easily been left wanting more. I certainly was and I put a pretty ridiculous amount of time into that game. Realtime Worlds did release a small DLC pack with new weapons and cars, and a few other throwaways, but if they kept supporting Crackdown like Burnout, I could see myself still coming back to it two years later.

The reason I find Criterion’s continued support for Burnout Paradise so exciting is because up until now console DLC has felt more like a rip off than a justified addition. It’s only been getting worse as we get farther and farther into this cycles lifespan as well, map packs are getting smaller and more expensive and content is being released within weeks and sometimes days of a games release. There are some cons to this system such as developers having to dedicate resources to their older games that could potentially go to newer titles, but when so many new games feel like more of an expansion pack than an actual sequel it makes you wonder why they didn’t just keep patching the original. It won't work for all games, but when it does I think you could turn an awesome game into something really special.