There's still no official word on Burnout Paradise heading to PS4, but this is one rumoured game that just won't go away. More smoke has been discovered in the form of another retailer listing the title as 'Burnout Paradise HD', with a release date of 30th March. The price in this instance is £39.99 RRP.
Again, EA has said nothing about this, but it's hard to ignore the fact the game keeps cropping up all over the web. This is the third time as far as we know the remaster has appeared.
We can't help but wonder if an announcement is on the horizon. EA has yet to release a remastered title, and of all their games this would be a curious place to start, but with three occurrences within a few weeks of each other, it seems relatively likely.
What do you think? Is Burnout Paradise smashing its way onto PS4 in March? Jump through a billboard and into the comments below.
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Comments 15
EA appears to be doing a Burnout Paradise Remaster, huh? Be prepared for possible microtransactions on this one...
@Turismo4GT Maybe EA may have learnt that micro-transactions in their games have seriously hurt their sales. Instead of micro-transaction, maybe they will remaster games and sell them to get profits back on track as they can churn out a fair few with little development costs compared to 'new' games.
Paradise City is not just a game. It is a destination. Who among us does not miss meeting up with friends on big surf beech and doing a barrel roll, how much fun did you have in the airfield trying to jump through those darn hoops or the first time you got a takedown at the baseball stadium. NO ONE LIKES EA but IF they get the band back together and somehow in the future make a new burnout out just some new cars and an add-on city to the original game I will say EA are ok.
See you there I will be the guy in the all white police P12
.. it'd certainly be a slap in the face to the new NFS if they released it so soon after their failed jewel-in-the-crown racer...
@KingdomHeartsFan What about games like the Last of Us (remastered), Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection, Tomb Raider etc - all HD games on last gen but 'full' HD on this Gen. Skyrim and CoD4 also were HD games on last gen and both 'remasters' added more to the visuals. You also have games like the Ezio Collection, the Handsome collection (Borderlands), the Arkham collection, GoW3, Wipeout, etc - all offering 'full' HD on this gen.
The games you mention didn't exactly do much more than raise the resolution from SD 480p to 720p which is just over a 2x boost and coincidentally, 720p to 1080p is over a 2x boost too...
This means that whilst 720p and 1080p are still considered 'HD', the jump up in pixel count is similar to the jump up from SD to 720p. 1080 to full 4k is a 4x jump and despite the PS4 Pro not delivering native 4k very often, the jump up from PS4 is around the same 2x jump in the majority of games - whether that's 2x for 4k Chequerboard (2x1080p) or less for 1440p. CB 1800p is less than 1440p (2x900p).
Point is, all these remasters from SD to 720p HD, from 720p to 1080p and the jump up the Pro offers are all roughly a 2x boost to native pixel counts.
It may seem that SD to HD was a bigger jump than low HD to full HD but the increase in Pixel count is roughly the same...
@BAMozzy let's hope, but with their recent track record, I dunno if EA has 'learned' anything except new ways to take their consumer base to the cleaners.
@YummyHappyPills I agree and said something similar in my post above - although I wasn't including the Switch in that. Its far easier to take a ready made game, change a few visual settings, like the output resolution, port it to 'current' consoles and check its working, than make new games. Its also likely to be profitable and more profitable than spending 'millions' on a new game with a heavy focus on micro-transactions that don't sell well. You need an audience to sell Micro-transactions and if the game sells poorly, that audience is very small but you already have a bigger potential audience with a 'new' game - whether its remastered or all new.
EA could have 2 or 3 staff working on porting old games to current hardware and release a remaster every 3-4 months - depending on game, console and how much 'work' they put in (more than just increasing the resolution for example). They could generate a lot more income per game than a poorly selling new game for little effort.
Maybe even use the 'remasters' to find out what gamers really want, what titles or genres to bring back and focus on with their 'new' games and enable them to drop micro-transactions or at the very least reduce their impact and change their philosophy.
I don't think people minded too much if some games sold specific cosmetic only items - not random chance to get items but actually sold the items for a couple of £'s - especially if a game had a lot of in-game cosmetics to earn. I have never bought a 'loot' crate with real money, but I have bought the odd weapon camo's (pointless buying outfits in a First Person game in my opinion but some do). Point is though, they could return to this format for Micro-transactions at the most and make up their profits by selling remasters - giving people 'games' they can actually play and enjoy. It would likely see their 'big new' games sell more copies as well as bring more money in from sales of those remasters - its a win-win situation for both EA (and other publishers of course if they followed this) and gamers as EA would see profit and gamers see games and not put off by 'pay to win' or heavy emphasis on loot box/micro-transaction content.
@Turismo4GT At the end of the Day, EA must be hurting. Their 2 big hopes for the holiday season flopped amid a lot of controversy surrounding their loot box implementation. Gamers shouted and even got political parties involved in debating the legalities of these.
SW:BF2 has sold around 1.5m (not inc any digital sales) and considering it was supposed to be much bigger, much better and more what the fans of the franchise hoped the first game would offer. A full campaign with individual classes for its MP with more vehicles, heroes etc. At its core, the gameplay is definitely superior to the first, and, although the campaign is 'weak', its still better than its predecessor. If it hadn't had that controversy and loot box implementation, it had all the makings of being a big hit for EA.
Its clear that EA have a 'terrible' reputation going in to 2018. Games like Anthem which received a LOT of interest at E3, are now seeing a big drop in interest as EA cannot be trusted to make that a 'Loot Box' driven game. Destiny 2 has big criticism over its 'Eververse' micro-transactions and the fact that even basic 'cosmetic' items - like ships and shaders - are behind a paywall that, in fairness can be earned through play and relatively easily in a week to get at least 9.
EA has to do something to appease the gaming community but as a business, also need to make profits. If they do release 'new' games with loot boxes, its just going to drum up more criticism and controversy. If they don't add micro-transactions, then maybe their reputation could still hurt sales and affect profits so the next best thing is to release remasters of fan favourites to offset losses due to micro-transactions - whether losses due to being included and the game under-selling or losses from potential sales of these. Its also a way to regain favour with gamers by giving them more games and especially 'loved' games like Burnout Paradise.
Maybe hey will be criticised for bringing out too many 'remasters' not enough 'new' games but at the end of the day, these will still sell and still give gamers more choice and actual 'games' for their money too...
So conflicted with this, i love the Burnout franchise and want to support it as much as possible... But i don't want to give EA any money! :/
@viciousarcanum Then wait till you can pick up a used copy.
After ruining need for speed perhaps EA are testing the waters to see if they can bring back burnout to ruin it aswel. Il buy burnout paradise as it was a great game from criterion but i wouldnt be surprised if they pulled some dlc shinanigans like Modern Warfare did. Maybe still sell the bikes as dlc again. Also full price for a remaster? I know thats probably a stand in price but even ea know they have to lower it right?
@KingdomHeartsFan Of course I do. However you cannot argue that games like CoD4, Skyrim, Tomb Raider etc also went above just a resolution boost. Faster load times can be down to the hardware - circumstantial rather than 'improved' by the devs. As for controlling better, I would say games like the Last of Us, Nathan Drake and Tomb Raider are improved in that area too as they now play at 60fps.
Some games were built in widescreen so it may just be a case of changing the parameters from 4:3 to 16:9 - That's all Ninja Gaiden on Backwards compatibility on Xbox does - as well as the increase to 1080p that provided. Games like Halo already had higher quality textures too so it it took was a tweak on the 'visual' settings to use higher quality but these are not considered remasters despite doing as much, if not more than some other games.
Remaster though can be anything from porting the game across and changing the output resolution to basically remaking a lot of the game - cutscenes, textures, audio, animations etc. Look at CoD4 and see how much of an improvement that had. Skyrim had a lot of work done too - maybe not as much but it still added better water, better lighting, god rays etc.
You can't exactly get 'better' than widescreen - not for TV use because virtually all TV's are Widescreen - no work there to do - whether its a massive overhaul or just a resolution boost. Most games had 'trophy' support so no need to add or do work here either - Nathan Drake collection though has some extras. Audio on last gen is great so no need to necessarily improve this area. Essentially most of the things you point out that were added are built in to the original last gen games so its not exactly as if 'remastering' of those aspects are needed or necessary.
The main things that will and/or could be improved to bring games forward are resolution/visuals and potentially frame rates and/or HDR. I know they could remake textures and maybe port into 'newer' or bolt on extra features to older engines to improve lighting, shadows, reflections etc, maybe even increase the polygon count too.
Most last gen games though have a lot of the visual settings that PC gamers have - only on console, they are 'hidden' as the devs optimise the game to a 'set' specification. PC's being much more varied in spec means that visual setting menu is for them to optimise the game to their specific settings.
Chances are, that a lot of the games are built to 1080 standard as a minimum but then on console, set to output at a certain level. Remastering can be as simple as porting the code to work on current hardware opening up the visual settings and adjusting those - set the output to 1080p, raise the shadow, resolution, ambient occlusion, anisotropic filtering etc etc to max or even 'ultra' settings. They already are widescreen with 5.1 surround sound (maybe with PS5 or the XB1, they could upgrade to Atmos), maybe add in HDR etc. No need to remake the textures because now they are set to a higher standard and better anisotropic filtering improves then to. Better anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion giving the image more depth and along with the increase pixel count, sharper lines with no jaggies or shimmer. No need to add in trophy support as it already add that.
There comes a point when a remaster stops being a 'remaster' and becomes a remake. Remastered 'audio' or 'film' doesn't always have to re-record the instruments or remake parts of the film - it can be just a tweak of the gamma and cleaning up any marks on the film as its converted to digital files. Cleaning up some 'background' dirt on the audio files and tweaking the balance ever so slightly to give more presence in certain areas.
With games, a remaster is anything from tweaking a few visual settings for the modern era, to rebuilding and/or adding new elements to the game that were missing or not able to be delivered on the older version. Any more than that, and it becomes a remake. FFvii certainly is a remake but its also very different from games like Crash and SotC which are also 'remakes' Those last 2 were remade to the template of the original - like the XB360 version of Conkers Bad Fur Day - although that did have a few changes too.
The point is that some devs may go above and beyond other devs but that doesn't mean they are not remasters. In some cases, it maybe that the original was built and running at 'max' visual settings so they can't do more than just increase the output resolution - they can't add more particles, shadow maps and quality etc not with that engine or without doing something that affects it 'negatively' or changes the game too much. Its still a remaster because its been improved over its original - albeit less so than a game like CoD4.
I agree its a grey area as you could argue games like AC4 or CoD:Ghosts by definition are remasters for the PS4/XB1 era having released prior on the PS3/XB1 and the only real difference was resolution. They though were not re-releases either - partly because they were delayed releases because of the delay between their release date and the next gen console releasing and partly because they had been 'improved' too. Re-release insinuates that its the same but just released again at a later date. Games may play exactly the same but they are not re-releases either because they have been ported to a new console and had some work done. If PS4 had BC, then a re-release would be a game that releases in exactly the same way and for the original console too - nothing changed whatsoever. Remaster implies that some clean-up or improvements have been made over the original release and 'remake' implies that the whole game has been rebuilt from scratch - whether that follows the exact same template as the original or not. I do agree that some remasters do very little to improve the original compared to others but they are still remasters.
@Useyourname that's not supporting the franchise.
Even though this may not be the best Burnout (that would be, without question, Burnout Revenge) I will still happily buy this.
After years of tepid racing games with online-only requirements, micro-transactions, over-emphasis on customization and unwanted (or needed) story modes, the console racing world needs to get back to basics, back to Burnout and back to the absolute sheer joy of racing.
@viciousarcanum Well excuse me very much for chiming in, but if you want to support the franchise, but don't want EA to have your money, there's not much else you can do, right? Can't have both, that's for sure.
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