Paradise City is the track. The more time you spend crisscrossing it, hunting down rivals for their cars, taking jumps and smashing billboards and finding shortcut gates, the better you know the track and the more successful you will be in races. Other racing games do this too but they usually have a lot of track layouts with blind curves and tricky sections, so learning the track is a one-off thing that doesn’t help you on different races. Burnout makes every race a simple point-to-point so that your knowledge of the city is your greatest asset.
Like Cheesy says, driving longer distances between events will only be an issue at the very end of the game if you’re going for the optional 100% goal. I got my Burnout license with little trouble specifically because the end-game races aren’t longer than the previous ones. The AI is harder but not significantly so – Burnout wants you to dominate the city more than it wants you to outdrive your opponents.
I see. I’ve only played the demo, and I just wanted Bob’s thoughts on what seemed like a reasonable complaint from Matt Keil. What you’re saying makes me think it’s still pretty reasonable. From a design perspective, there’s nothing to be gained by becoming tedious once a certain amount of content is completed. That the “end game” provides enough content on the map to give the player options after a failure is awfully nice of the devs, I guess.
