360 Core Owners Stung by Burnout Online

Criterion explains why, for the good of the game, it had to be done.

The company line at Microsoft has been that having a hard drive or not would not make a material difference in your basic enjoyment of Xbox 360 games, a stance that justified the tiered structure of the Core and Premium Xbox 360 packages. But as those Xbox 360 Core owners who bought EA's latest Burnout game are finding out, there's still plenty of room in that approach for disappointment.

Xbox 360 owners who don't have a hard drive are not able to experience the full Burnout Paradise online mode - one of the most lauded features of the new game, as you can see in our full Burnout Paradise review. The reason for this, as developer Criterion explained this week, is one of consistency.

Criterion decided that it would like all players to be on an even footing in online play, meaning that everyone should have the most up-to-date version of the game when playing against one another online.

"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 64 Mb Memory Unit, either in size or data read speeds," reads a statement from the development team.

"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."

After discussions with Microsoft, Criterion decided that the best thing to do would be to limit Core owners to a few online components. The company said it was "disappointed" to have to offer less to some of its customers.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo