Burnout Paradise was originally envisioned as a series of islands all connected to Paradise City through bridges (or potentially boats!), but something changed after the game was released that shifted Criterion's focus on DLC. Criterion figured Stunt Run and Ranked Racing would be the online modes everyone would be playing, but instead, players flocked to the Free Burn Challenges, so the developers shifted gears accordingly, scrapping the idea of multiple islands filled with different game types, including one marked up like an F1 course. Drat.

The other scrapped plans are even more interesting. They envisioned boats racing from island to island, planes and helicopters flying overhead, and cars versus motorcycles ala Road Rash. They considered a network of underground racing areas, and time portals that would temporarily warp you to the Old West. But by far the most out-of-this-world idea was Burnout on the moon.

Again, completely true. Someone on the team said that 'players want the moon on a stick when it comes to DLC' We thought that was funny and thought we'd do it. The actual surface of the real Moon was modeled and it was drive-able. Lunar Challenges would have been totally unexpected - as would have been zero gravity Takedowns and Challenges.

The idea was that we would have built a rocket pad on Big Surf. If you reached a certain Rank, or completed a number of specific challenges, you could drive there, press a button and the rocket would launch. Destination - Moon! (Now that would have beaten downloadable car liveries any day!)

Agreed! Check out the link below for more on Criterion's overly ambitious DLC plans, and imagine what might have been.

"Take A Look At What You Could Have Won..." [Criterion Games via inc gamers]

Alex Ward, head of Burnout developers Criterion, has said "Suda-51 came here for the day a few weeks ago. He's a hardcore Burnout fan. I checked the servers - over 700hrs play."

700 hours? Hey, Suda: get back to work!

[CrashAlex @ Twitter, via VG247]

Tiny versions of the cars based on Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Knight Rider are unlocked by completing various tasks in the new Big Surf Island content. It's all stuff Burnout junkies would be doing anyway. You're going to want to hit all 15 Mega Jumps, 45 Billboards, 75 Smashes, and complete all 24 Road Rules, so you might as well be rewarded, right?

Hit up the link below to see exactly which feat nets you which car.

Unlock Legendary cars (for free!) in Burnout Paradise: Big Surf Island [Joystiq]

As the head of EA, John Riccitiello can talk games better than most CEOs, and he can talk finances better than most gamers. Given the myriad tactics EA has been employing to sell its games and keep its games from being stolen lately, I had to talk to him last week at E3 for an update about the economics of playing.

I started with the most dramatic price-change EA may have ever made on a video game, the drop of real-time-card-battle game Battleforge from full-priced PC game when it launched in April of this year down to free in late May, supported by for-pay microtransactions. I asked him how that was working out. "Revenue's up," Riccitiello said, before gathering himself for a more thorough answer.

"I feel like you're sort of asking me how the party's going, but the party starts at nine and it's 10 to nine," he said. "I don't have enough good data to give you a great answer. I would say that, as a packaged goods product competing with high-end PC games, it's a highly-polished experience that provides really good core-gamer-satisfying experience. As an intellectual property, it has an exceptionally narrow audience of people willing to pay $49 for that. … It was a product that, if this was a model shop, it's the group that builds ships in a bottle. It's a really small audience, and we found them. Not that many of them. As a free to play game, it's got 25x the production values of anything out there that's comparable."

EA's hope is that games like Battleforge, which got solid reviews can thrive with the support of microtransactions, gamer-purchases for items and add-ons. Riccitiello said that EA's free-plus-microtransaction games, which also include the Korean version of FIFA, have shown the ability to generate more money per user than they'd get from those users had they been full-priced games. Of course, not every user buys items in those free games. But those who do, spend lots.

Free-to-play games present an economic model for games that Riccitiello said EA can't miss, despite its challenges: "There's probably no harder platform to build and deploy for than free-to-play," he said, noting that there's far less structure for that market than there is for the full-priced console gaming. "You don't know what device [gamers are] going to play on and how they're going to want to participate. If you don't refresh the community, the pricing, the assets on a daily basis, they're going to get bored. It's a complicated process, but it's good. ... I think ultimately we can't get in the way of what the consumer wants, because the consumer wants different business models."

On the other side of things, EA has shifted from the pricing experiment of offering downloadable content for the early 2008 racing game Burnout Paradise from free to for-money. The game was launched in a January and, in April, July and Septemberhad, had free DLC consisting of new multiplayer modes and the ability to race motorcycles, among other things. The game's next major update, released 13 months after the game's launch, was the first one that EA charged for: a new Party Mode re-mix of the game,. Subsequent DLC packs, including a new island which was priced just this week, have been for pay.

Riccitiello says EA learned that that roll-out plan for Burnout's DLC was not ideal. Knowing what the company knows now, he said, "that heavy-duty downloadable content would have been available shortly after launch and would have bridged the original purchase of the game to downloadable content, some free, some pay from the outset. We essentially didn't do that. We went dark on the consumer and then came back, which is probably not the smartest way of keeping the community together. Going back to that party, we sort of turned the lights off and threw them out and then we started the punch bowl. Some of them came back. And then more of them came back and then a lot of them came back. People who pirated the game came back. I think this is an area where we're all really learning."

And speaking of pirates, no matter what EA charges for a game, there will be people who want to make EA's games free-to-play on their own terms. That's the nice way of saying what happened to The Sims 3 recently. "We got pirated three weeks before the game launched," Riccitiello said. "And we were really quite nervous about it. We had a lot of telemetry about what the pirates were doing because the launcher was in the version of the disc [that got out.]… There's a lot of Chinese and Polish among those consumers. We know what they're doing. And we finally concluded that we were very happy that almost a million people downloaded the Fight Night demo in the first couple of days we put it out. And in a weird sort of way, the behavior we're starting to see based on sell-through and registration [with the Sims 3] is that we really might have just put out a really good demo."

Riccitiello laughed at his own remark, because he doesn't quite mean it seriously. I pointed out that he might not want to hold his breath waiting for all those Sims 3 pirates to convert to paying customers. "I don't think they will, based on their geography," he said. The point he was making, he said, is that EA's concern over being pirated gave way to a new, more constructive thought: "We were like, 'I think they've demoed the game.' That's probably good. We probably should have posted it on our website."

What the Sims 3 pirates got — what all consumers of The Sims 3, in fact, are getting — is a game disc that doesn't include all the game's features. Only activating the game online gives players access to the game's second town and most of the community features vital to the franchise's vibrant community of content creators and sharers. That stuff, Riccitiello said, is the kind of approach he's happier to take than to load a game up with Digital Rights Management restrictions, as EA had done with Spore. "To quote [Valve founder] Gabe Newell badly, DRM won't work unless you add value."

What this all adds up to, according to Riccitiello, is an EA that is changing its fundamental nature and the manner with which its products connect to consumers. "I often described EA as a packaged goods company," he said. "In Fiscal 10 [EA's financial year, ending March 2010], we're still a packaged goods company that connects to a lot of online services and features. But it's still a packaged good at its core. I think while we'll have big packaged goods sales in Fiscal 11 and 12 — they'll be larger in this year and continue to grow — we're going to feel more like an online services company, with a disc as an enabler of service."

That, he said, is exactly what EA executed with The Sims 3. Get the game and watch it expand. In Riccitiello's terms — well actually one he got from his daughter, he said, — the game, once launched should feel connected and "alive."

That's where all this should lead, however we all pay for it.

It's not cheap, but it should be worth it, adding a much-needed infusion of new drivable real estate to Burnout Paradise, with a handful of new cars to boot. How much will it set you back? We're looking at 1,000 Microsoft points on the Xbox 360, which translates to $12.99 on the PlayStation 3. For those of you in foreign lands, that's €12.99 or £9.99.

Certainly seems like a fair price to me, though your mileage may of course vary. Too much, or just enough? The comments section is all yours.

Big Surf Island - Pricing Confirmed [Criterion Games]

Tipsters who spotted the price page before it was removed said the game will cost $12.99 (€12.99 in Europe, £9.99 UK) on PlayStation Network and list for 1000 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live. Couldn't confirm that this morning, but it sounds reasonable.

The achievements page was dated yesterday, so perhaps it wasn't a mistake. But it added 10 new Trophies, three silver and seven bronze, bringing the total in Burnout Paradise on the PS3 to 98. They are:

Drive through 20 Island Smash Gates
Smash 15 Island Billboards
Land 5 Island Mega-Jumps
Jump through Deese's Donut
4.5 seconds of Crash TV Air Time
Complete a 750 yard drift inside the Inspiral Car Park
Complete your first Island Tour
Find all Island Events
Complete all 10 Island Freeburn Challenges
Smash all 45 Island Billboards

Criterion Games brags that the 98 trophies in Burnout Paradise is 32 more than the next closest game on the PS3. For the Xbox 360, Big Surf Island adds five achievements worth 110 Gamerscore, bringing those totals to 60 achievements, 1,250 total Gamerscore. The new achievements are:

Smash n' Grab - Drive through 20 Island Smash Gates
Surf Boards - Smash 15 Island Billboards
Island Explorer - Find all 15 Island Events
Crash TV Air Time - Get at least 4.5 seconds Air Time from the Ski Jump
People Person - Complete all 10 Island Freeburn Challenges. These can be completed by 2 - 8 players

Big Surf Island: Trophies and Achievements [Criterion, thanks DCJoeDog, Jeremy, anonymous and others]

After a year of driving around Paradise City, the prospect of new places to play is immensely inviting. The 45 new billboards and 75 new Smashes shouldn't take too long to complete, but the insane jumps and new areas to explore should keep players occupied long after they've earned their Island license.

Hearkening back to Burnout titles of old, the Cops and Robbers add-on pits two teams of players against each other, both vying for control of a load of stolen gold bars. The goal is to obtain the bars and return them to your team's base by any means necessary, which in Burnout generally means lots and lots of crashing. To help make the crashing more interesting, Criterion also provides 35 new police vehicles; re-skinned and slightly remodeled versions of 33 of the game's already existing rides.

Is the Cops and Robbers pack worth your $10 or 800 Microsoft points, or is Criterion getting away with highway robbery?

Loved
The Paradise City Gold Rush: Cops and Robbers pits two teams against each other as they vie for control of a large pile of gold bricks. The goal is to get the booty to your team's headquarters and score a point while the opposing team attempts to take you out and grab the loot for themselves. The whole affair plays out like a sporting event, complete with the requisite trash-talk. With the gold carrier slowed by the weight of precious metals, teamwork is essential to winning the day. All in all, an excellent addition to Burnout Paradise's online game modes.

The International House Of Cop Cars: Cops and Robbers introduces more than 30 police vehicles to Burnout Paradise's constantly growing stable of vehicles. While each new car is a modified version of an existing vehicle, the modifications are much more than simple re-skinning. Each car gets a unique police car makeover, with custom graphics and light placement that makes sense based on each model. Criterion went as far as to give the cars different sirens based on their real-life inspiration's country of origin. With fans readily paying $8 for the four vehicles in the Legendary Cars pack, $10 for 33 modified vehicles seems like a no-brainer.

Hated
A Distinct Lack Of Variety: The entertainment value of the Cops and Robbers game mode starts to fade quickly after your first few rounds, once you realize that there just aren't enough variables to the formula. The gold spawns in the same handful of spaces, and the bases for the two teams are always the same. Sure, Burnout Paradise has plenty of ways to get to the same place, but in the end you're still getting to the same place. It's one of the limitations of a game play mode that calls out for more maps being added to a game that only really has one.

Of course you aren't meant to spend your time online in Burnout Paradise only playing the Cops and Robbers mode, so the lack of variety isn't as much of a problem as it could be. I liken online in Burnout Paradise to a group of kids playing on the playground, and Cops and Robbers is just another game those kids can play when they aren't just running around aimlessly, bumping into things and falling over.

With a new way to play and 33 new police cars to play with, Burnout Paradise's Cops and Robbers pack is the right amount of new content for the right price. I'd say it was a steal, but even I have more self-respect than that.

Burnout Paradise Cops and Robbers was developed by Criterion Games. Released on April 30th for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Retails for $9.99 or 800 Microsoft points. Played multiple rounds across multiple online sessions.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The Burnout Paradise Cops & Robbers pack introduces a ton of new police-themed makeovers for your favorite Paradise City rides, along with a brand-new online mode that pits criminals and the authorities against each other in a tug-of-war with a load of stolen gold. How much is all of this going to run? $9.99 or 800 Microsoft points, with Europe paying €9.99 and the UK forking over £7.99.

Seems like a reasonable price to me, though I tend to prefer simply driving around and crashing into things randomly to any sort of organized play. So who plans on picking up the pack?

While I probably could have done without the random dressing up, the team at Criterion look like they're having a great deal of fun playing around with the new Cops & Robbers content for Burnout Paradise, and isn't that what it's all about? I think more gameplay trailers need to include actual people playing the game, rather than just cold, unfeeling footage.

So what do you folks think? Purchase or pass?

The next batch of paid downloadable content for Burnout Paradise drops on April 30th, with the Cops and Robbers pack adding an all-new freeburn mode to the game. Cops will chase robbers through the streets of Paradise City, with nearly all of the cars in the game receiving a special police makeover. Some are pretty standard, while a few, as seen in the video below, take on a distinctly international flavor.

No word on price yet, so just start hording your Microsoft points and PlayStation 3 real money points now so you're ready for the April 30th release.

Too bad none of the cop cars seem to be real ones. Though, they're still pretty cool looking.

This is a teaser trailer for the new Cops and Robbers mode, the latest in a long string of attempts by Criterion Games to slowly turn Burnout Paradise into a completely different game from the one we originally purchased. Not too much to tell so far; we assume there will be cops, robbers, and more than likely some sort of chase mechanic.

The only other thing we can determine from this teaser is that the Paradise City police department is ridiculously over funded.

Two cars make up the Boost Specials Collection. The first, pictured here, is the Carson Extreme Hotrod, which Criterion calls the fastest car in Paradise City. It features a new vehicle dynamics system, granting it more intuitive handling and better drifting than any car in the game.

The second was supposed to remain a secret, but a Microsoft error that listed the downloadable content earlier than intended revealed that it is the Hawker Mech 400, a car that can be modified to drive the way you want it to drive.

The Boost Specials Collection hits Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network this Thursday, March 9th, as revealed by producer Matt Webster's Twitter. If the leaked data holds as true as it did for the Toy Cars Collection, it should ring up at 400 Microsoft Points, or roughly $5.

Nine little racers make their way to the PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Marketplace this Thursday, adding a whole new, much smaller dimension to Burnout Paradise gameplay. With the entire game built around normal scale vehicles, it should be interesting to see what kind of trouble we can get into once we get behind the wheel of these tiny toy versions.

Criterion hasn't listed a price, though the Microsoft screw-up last month indicated that the cars would be 160 Microsoft points a piece, with a tiny model of the Firehawk motorcycle slightly more expensive at 240, and the whole bundle running 1,000.

Criterion will release official pricing details and the full car list on Thursday morning.
Burnout Paradise Toy Pack Dated [Criterion Blog]

Both packs appeared and then disappeared early this morning, not allowing gamers to purchase them but definitely allowing us to read about them, listing the as of yet undisclosed vehicles in two of Criterion's upcoming downloadable content add-ons for the popular racer. Only five vehicles have been shown in the Toy Car collection, with eight total listed this morning on Xbox Live, along with the secret second car in the Boost Specials pack of high performance cars.

Joining the previously announced Carson Extreme Hotrod in the Boost Specials pack will be the Hawker Mech 400, an extremely tunable car that can be adjusted to drive the way you like.

The full line up of Toy Cars consists of seven cars and one tiny motorcycle, which should be an absolute blast to play. Here's the list:

Hunter Takedown
Carson GT Concept
Hunter Citizen
Carson Inferno Van
Jansen P12
Krieger WTR
Hunter Manhattan
Nakamura Firehawk

While prices for the vehicles in both packs is most likely subject to change, each Toy Car was listed at 160 Microsoft Points except for the Firehawk, which carried a 240 point price and the entire collection listed at 1,000. The Boost Specials pack listed at 400.

We've contacted Criterion for comment on this rather large mistake on someone's part. In the meantime, start saving up your downloadable game currency of choice...things are going to be getting expensive.

Update: Several readers have emailed us to let us know that they actually were able to download the packs before they were pulled, with the downloaded vehicles working just fine for them. Hopefully this means the additional packs will see a full release soon for those of us who just weren't fast enough.

If you weren't sure about picking up the Burnout Paradise Legendary Cars when they hit the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Marketplace tomorrow, these videos should be all the convincing you need. I particularly love the music they created for each vehicle, which pays homage to the television show or movie they originate from. I'll most likely wind up loading MP3's from the various soundtracks onto my 360, just to make the experience a bit more authentic.

So how much will you have to pay in order to tool around Paradise City in a reasonable facsimile of K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard's General Lee, the Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters, or the Delorean from Back to the Future? Well that depends on how you're willing to pay, partner. Three of the cars will be available come Thursday for 160 Microsoft points or $1.99 a piece, while one is a bit pricier at $3.99 or 320 Microsoft points. Can you guess which one costs the most?

It's the one we've been drooling over the longest, of course. The 88 Special, which channels Doc Brown's ride from the classic Back to the Future movie series clocks in at double the normal price, possibly due to its unique hovering action. It's two cars in one!

those who can't decide can also pick up all four Legendary Cars for the low price of 600 Microsoft points, or $7.99 real money points, which is a savings of $2, give or take. Me? Going to have to opt for the who shebang. As a child of the 80's, there is too much nostalgia here for me to pick just one.

Legendary Cars Collection [Criterion Blog]

So does the possibility of driving KITT from Knight Rider the Carson Nighthawk, the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard the Cavalry Bootlegger, the ECTO-1 from Ghostbusters the Manhattan Spirit, and Doc Brown's DeLorean from Back to the Future the 88 Special.

All four nods to classic film cars in the "Legendary Cars" pack will cost you money as of February 19th. That's some amount of money, as far as we know.

Thanks for the heads up, Sergio!