Today Criterion Games have published a statement to the Burnout community mentioning why this is necessary. You can read the statement below or visit the link at the bottom to go to Criterion Games.
In the interests of clarity we wanted to let you all know why Burnout Paradise requires a HDD for full online play on 360.
When we envisioned Burnout Paradise we set out to create an amazing open world experience in Paradise City, one that ran at a blistering 60Hz, that featured incredible vehicle deformation and importantly, one that was seamless between offline and online play. We also wanted to create a game that could be extended with additional downloadable content. We've made no secret of this fact and we see it as a great way to respond to how players experience Burnout Paradise by offering new content in the future.
It's important for us that all online players could show off new content when they go online and unfortunately it wasn't going to be possible to do this by supporting the lowest common storage denominator, the 64Mb Memory Unit, either in size or data read speeds. Crucially we also didn't want to split the playing community between those that have updated data and those that don't. We saw this as vital in maintaining simplicity to all online users; different players having different content packages wouldn't be able to play online with each other.
We opened a dialogue with Microsoft to attempt to discover a possible solution and all possible technical options were investigated to retain the seamless freedom of Burnout without requiring the HDD. Unfortunately a solution was not available and we decided together that it would be in the best interests of the Burnout community if we require the HDD for full online play.
We're disappointed that we are unable to offer Core users the complete Burnout Paradise online experience. However, Core users do get to access the online Road Rule gameplay where they can compete to see who has the best time or the best showtime score amongst their friends on each of the games 64 roads. Additionally they get access to the extended leaderboard content for this feature where they can view the Top 10 players amongst their friends on each road and see which car their friends used to set their fastest time or highest Showtime score. This is a great feature that allows players to compete against each other irrespective of whether they are actually online at the same time.
We hope that this answers all your questions, The Burnout Team
When we envisioned Burnout Paradise we set out to create an amazing open world experience in Paradise City, one that ran at a blistering 60Hz, that featured incredible vehicle deformation and importantly, one that was seamless between offline and online play. We also wanted to create a game that could be extended with additional downloadable content. We've made no secret of this fact and we see it as a great way to respond to how players experience Burnout Paradise by offering new content in the future.
It's important for us that all online players could show off new content when they go online and unfortunately it wasn't going to be possible to do this by supporting the lowest common storage denominator, the 64Mb Memory Unit, either in size or data read speeds. Crucially we also didn't want to split the playing community between those that have updated data and those that don't. We saw this as vital in maintaining simplicity to all online users; different players having different content packages wouldn't be able to play online with each other.
We opened a dialogue with Microsoft to attempt to discover a possible solution and all possible technical options were investigated to retain the seamless freedom of Burnout without requiring the HDD. Unfortunately a solution was not available and we decided together that it would be in the best interests of the Burnout community if we require the HDD for full online play.
We're disappointed that we are unable to offer Core users the complete Burnout Paradise online experience. However, Core users do get to access the online Road Rule gameplay where they can compete to see who has the best time or the best showtime score amongst their friends on each of the games 64 roads. Additionally they get access to the extended leaderboard content for this feature where they can view the Top 10 players amongst their friends on each road and see which car their friends used to set their fastest time or highest Showtime score. This is a great feature that allows players to compete against each other irrespective of whether they are actually online at the same time.
We hope that this answers all your questions, The Burnout Team
Link
Criterion Games Statement
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