Burnout Paradise: How to Make a Next-gen World

Criterion's Scott Harber on just how the art team built Paradise:

"Looking back on the production of Paradise City, I think our biggest challenge on the world team was that of discovering what "next-gen" actually means. From the outset, we knew what we wanted to achieve from a gameplay perspective. We have the large world where you can drive to anything you can see, we have more shortcuts and stunt routes than any other open world, and we run at 60 frames per second. But what does a "next-gen" world actually look like? More specifically, what does Paradise City look like? In the space of five Burnouts, the world team has modelled well over a dozen US cities. If Paradise City were just a high-resolution version of those, it would have been a failure. We started Burnout Paradise roughly two years ago, and one of our earliest tasks was to answer these very questions."