Criterion Games: why Burnout Paradise needs HDD for full online play

Burnout Paradise is enjoying its place on top spot in the UK’s best selling games for two weeks now, but some Xbox 360 gamers may not have been all that happy to find out that the game needs a Hard Drive for full online play. Criterion Games apologized for this inconvenience earlier, and now they have released an online statement of why the game needs a hard drive. Check out their explanation in the full article.

Burnout Paradise (also on PlayStation 3) has been a hit since its first week out and has been enjoying its place on top spot on the UK charts for two weeks now. However, some Xbox 360 owners may not have been all that happy to find that the game requires a hard drive for full online play.

Last week, Criterion Games apologized for this inconvenience, explaining that the console’s memory card was not large enough to store the temporary data needed when playing online.

They’ve recently released an online statement, further explaining the situation saying that they wanted the game to run “seamless[ly] between offline and online play” and this wasn’t possible without a large enough hard drive:

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.

They also explained that they explored all possible solutions to the memory problem without requiring the game to have a hard drive for full online play. They even opened up a dialogue with Microsoft, but there was no other solution other than a hard drive requisite.

For Criterion Games’ full online statement, follow the via link below.

Via Criterion Games