Making a demo for a large-scale open world game is a major challenge. We wanted to put together a snapshot of Most Wanted’s blend of exploration, connected competition and explosive, over-the-top police chase action to give you a taste of what to expect from the main game.

The action takes place in a locked down version of the city – you get to play in Fairhaven’s Downtown and Four Bridges districts. These areas are loaded with billboards, jumps, speed cameras and hidden cars.

The game kicks you off in Aston Martin’s beautiful V12 Vantage. Race to the first location, and we’ll bust out the classic Porsche 911 Carrera S.

Explore the city further, and you’ll find a “Jack Spot” with Audi’s flagship R8 Spyder. Park and hit triangle to instantly switch. It’s as easy as that. In the main game, it’s the same deal but on a grand scale. There are over a hundred Jack Spots to locate and discover cars.

Add a friend to Autolog, and we’ll bust out the final car of the demo, the fan-favorite Ford Focus RS500. And you definitely want to do this. Not only because the RS500 is a truly pimp car, but because just like the full game, our demo is all about Autolog.

Most Wanted is all about Speed Points. Everything you do in the game earns them — from online multiplayer, to escaping the cops, to cruising the city looking for cars and records to beat. Earn more than your friends to reach the top of your Most Wanted List.

Here are five easy tips for you guys to make racking up the maximum 50,000 demo Speed Points a breeze.

• Most Wanted is an open world game. When racing, keep an eye on the mini map in the bottom left of the screen to avoid missing crucial turns.
• Look out for gas stations. Drive through these to clean, repair and respray your car. If you’re taking a beating during a race or cop pursuit, these can make all the difference between first and last place, or escape and arrest.
• Win the “Keys to the City” event to unlock the Burn Nitrous modification. Equip it and then fill your nitrous gauge by driving against the flow, hitting jumps or taking down your opponents.
• The end of the second event finishes at a gas station. Behind it, you’ll find the R8 Spyder. It’s all-wheel-drive with a strong rear-wheel bias. Its planted, manageable handling combines beautifully with the AWD to give a little extra off road performance. Perfect for shaking the cops or hitting those billboards with a dirt run-up.
• With the cops on your tail, get out of sight and hit L3 to switch off the engine. You’ll enter Cool Down and reduce your Wanted gauge fast.

It’s a pretty exciting time for PlayStation fans, and we’re really excited to be able to talk not just about the PS3 game, but also our first for PS Vita. If you don’t know anything about Most Wanted, here’s the deal. The original Most Wanted was our favorite Need for Speed game. We loved the epic cop chases, hot cars, and most of all that unbeatable sensation of fast, reckless driving while on the run from the law.

So after finishing Hot Pursuit, we set out to create a game that brought you all these great elements, but fresh for 2012 and with a little Criterion DNA running through it. That means it had to be about online, friends and competition, with a Most Wanted twist.

There’s a whole lot of game to talk about, but here are four things you really need to know.

1. It’s about causing trouble

You get to drive amazing cars like a maniac through a big open city, get in massive chases with the cops and ditch them in style. The whole game’s pretty much designed so you’ll want to break the law. Restricted area? Bust into it. Speed camera? Rip past it. Jump? Hit it. Parked car? Steal it. Cops? Not an issue.

2. The world’s always connected

In Hot Pursuit, we introduced Autolog. We started tracking everything you did and comparing it with your friends in leaderboards called Speedwalls. Autolog turned your newest and most hotly contested events into play recommendations and notified you and your friends to reheat the competition.

This time, Autolog lets you leave your mark across your friends’ games. It displays record speeds, pursuits and jump distances throughout the city. Cruise past any speed camera, Jack Spot or jump to view its Speedwall, and then take a run up, hit the gas and see if you can top it. Hit the biggest air off any billboard jump, and we’ll display your face on the billboard. Your friends will need to beat you to get rid of it.

Everything you do earns you Speed Points and eventually increases your Speed Level. Earn more Speed Points than your friends to become the Most Wanted.

3. You can drive pretty much every car from the start

This is hard to get your head around, but bear with us. Grinding through hours of gameplay to get the cars you really want to drive doesn’t actually make sense, when you think about it.

So, most of the cars in Most Wanted are just parked up in hundreds of Jack Spots throughout the city. If you find one, you can just switch to it. Obviously, there are still great unlocks waiting to reward the most skilled and dedicated players, but if you want to drive a 918 Spyder, Evo X, RS500, V12 Vantage and many, many more, you’ve just got to get out there and find them.

Each car has a series of events, designed to showcase its unique qualities. Master each car in your own time, and you’ll earn Speed Points and rank up. Score enough and you’ll earn the right to take on 10 of the hottest cars in the game – the Most Wanted Racers. Beat them all one-on-one to become Fairhaven’s Most Wanted. Swing the odds in your favor by modifying your car with such pursuit-busting delights as: Reinforced Chassis, Reinflating Tires, Impact Protection, Powershot Nitrous or Track Tires.

4. Our multiplayer is way more than just racing

It wouldn’t be Need for Speed without killer racing, so that’s the heart of our online, but we also wanted to mix it up a bit. It’s still tight, competitive and fast, but there are some twists.

Every Race starts with a Meet Up. Race there, jostle for position, watch for the start and boot it. Time your move right for a headstart. Get it wrong, and you’re a sitting duck. In Speed Tests, you get 90 seconds to set a high score. Hit the longest jump or drift, be fastest through a Speed Trap or set the fastest time between checkpoints. In Challenges you do stuff like hit 5,000 yards of drift, accumulate 2,000 yards of jump distance, access a rooftop or jump over each other. Anything goes!

PlayStation Vita

PS Vita represents a huge step for us. We’ve managed to crowbar the entire PS3 game onto the system, including almost all the races and events, the online play (albeit with four players rather than eight on PS3) and the massive open world. It’s all right there in the PS Vita version.

That’s pretty cool on its own, but everything you do on your PS Vita copy earns you Speed Points, inching you closer to that top spot on your friends Most Wanted list.

PlayStation Move Racing Wheel

And that’s not all! We love to play with new hardware, from Burnout Paradise’s Mugshots (using the original PS Eye) to the full online multiplayer in Burnout 3: Takedown (in the very early days of PSN). So we thought we’d see what we could do with the PlayStation Move Racing Wheel.

You can use it to control the car, obviously. When you’re happily ripping through town, it glows green, but attract the interest of the cops, and it flashes red and blue. Hide out in a CoolDown spot, and it’ll glow cool blue.

We’re out on October 30th. Hit this link to pre-order from EA, or head over to the PlayStation Store to pre-order your Day 1 Digital copy now.

We’ll see you online soon.

We released our first premium content for Burnout Paradise – the Party Pack !

Our Freeburn online play is a cool way to hang out with your online friends, but we wanted to give you a way to play PlayStation, when your friends comes to visit.  The game supports up to 8-players for pass-the-pad single-screen action.

You can find out more on the Criterion Games Network.  We’re now making use of PlayStation’s in-game browser to bring you all the latest news direct from the Burnout team.

Party is our first premium-quality content for Burnout Paradise.  It’s available now from the PlayStation Store for $9.99.  And if you can’t bear to stop playing Burnout, you can also pick it up from our own Burnout Store within the game.

If you’re new to Burnout, you can now get the whole game bundled with all our 2008 updates and the Party Pack on the PlayStation Store for $29.99.

You can hit this link to see the team playing a session in our latest video podcast – Crash TV.

And finally, we used the Criterion Network to bring Burnout players exclusive news of a new pack for 2009.

Slotting in soon after the Party pack, Legendary Cars, Toy Cars and Boost Specials, comes another premium pack – Cops and Robbers.  This one’s dedicated to bringing you the thrills and spills of cops and robbers car chases in Paradise City.

We’re keeping the gameplay under wraps for the moment, but in the meantime here are the first images in all their glory.

But, the 88 Special is just a one quarter of our forthcoming Legendary Cars pack. Now it’s time to show you the 3 remaining cars.

We’re keeping things pretty much under wraps on these vehicles for the moment. After all, we’ve got a ton of exciting content arriving at the beginning of Feb to tell you about first. But before we get into that, we couldn’t resist bringing you the first images of these spectacular vehicles.

Boostin’ makes me feel good!
First up the Manhattan Spirit. Not the fastest car in Paradise City, but this reimagining of Burnout Paradise’s Hunter Manhattan should keep the spirits at bay.

Fans of the original will know that this underused beauty is great for stunts. This customized special version is even better, but like all the Legendary Cars, this has a trick up its sleeve – hit L3 and boost to find out what it does.

This car does not exist
This is the Carson Nighthawk. Denied by the government and disowned by Carson, this ultra rare version of the Carson GT is the ultimate super pursuit vehicle!

The custom lighting array triggered by boost makes this the most distinctive-looking vehicle for night time events in the dangerous world of Paradise City.

One for the good ole boys
And finally, the Cavalry Bootlegger. Branded with the Mexican flag and tagged as a tribute to The Chicanator, one of our big-time Mexican Burnout fans, this is a classic modified Hunter Cavalry.

Hit a massive jump and press L3 to sound the incredible horn – it’s one of the defining moments in Paradise City.

Also available in orange.

2008’s been an awesome year. We shipped the award-winning Burnout Paradise – Spike TV and IGN PS3’s Driving Game of the Year. We dragged Burnout kicking and screaming onto the next generation and a new era of open world freedom, social play and MASSIVE scale support.

That support started with 3 new online game modes, new cars and designs, 70 new challenges, a live news page, custom soundtracks and stacks more – this was our FREE “Cagney” Pack.

We followed it with the biggest change to Burnout since Takedowns – motorcycles!

The FREE Bike Pack blazed onto the scene in September along with day-night gameplay, 70 more challenges and dynamic weather.

We delivered trophy support and became one of the first full games to appear on the PlayStation Store – you can head there now and buy it, if you haven’t already!

Next year, we’ll be back on PlayStation 3 with a truck-load of premium paid content. We hope you’ll join in the fun with the Legendary Cars, the Party Pack, our Boost Special Cars, Big Surf Island and of course the cute and cuddly Toy Cars!

It feels like the Paradise City Party’s in full swing now, and with the launch of The Ultimate Box, there’s never been a better time to get in on the action.

But above all else, this year’s been about you guys – Burnout and PlayStation fans all over the world! Our goal was to get to know you through 2008. We’ve built a blog, an awesome website and Crash TV – our video podcast. We’ve been Freeburning with you and reading your comments here on the PlayStation blog.

Thanks for joining us, thanks for all the incredible feedback and thanks for playing – it’s been a blast! See you in 2009.

BTW – we just uploaded our Christmas Show with a glimpse of the 88 Special – the first footage seen outside the studio. Hope you like it!

Today, we’re announcing the incredible new Carson Extreme Hotrod.

If you caught our recent announcements, you’ll know we’re bringing more content to Burnout Paradise through 2009. We’ve talked Party, Ultimate, Legendary Cars and Toys in recent weeks. Now we’re mixing things up with a little boost-based gameplay innovation with the Extreme Hotrod.

We’ll be back in the New Year with all the details on this powerhouse racer, but for now we’re keeping it under wraps.

We could tell you that it’s the fastest car in Paradise City – a stripped down, ultra low, overpowered straight line monster.

We could talk about its roots in American Rat Rod culture and it’s wildly exaggerated Hot Rod features, based on a ‘20s Roadster.

We could explain that we’ve rewired Burnout’s vehicle dynamics system, so it handles more intuitively and drifts more realistically than any other car.

We could reveal that it’s the first of a pack of 2 cars designed to re-imagine Burnout Boost. Which explains the blue exhaust flames.

We could do all that, but we don’t want to give away too much. For now, all you really need to know is that this car will give you the ride of your life and in early 2009 you will NEED to own it.

The Carson Extreme Hotrod. Light the touch paper and hang on for dear life.

We’ll be back with movies, screens, more info and interviews with the creators on this and the “other” boost car that will be available to buy as part of our Burnout Paradise Boost Specials Pack in 2009.

Just check back here on the blog, www.criteriongames.com or Crash TV for all the latest.

Next week. Big Surf. See you then.

We’re continuing to support Burnout Paradise through 2009. The fun starts with our Burnout Paradise Party Pack in Feb and will be followed by our awesome Burnout Paradise Legendary Cars Pack.

This year, we’ve introduced some of the most incredible vehicles yet seen in a Burnout game. Our FREE Cagney pack brought you the crazy Steel Oval Racer and the Hippie Wagon, and the FREE Bikes Pack introduced motorcycles to Paradise City for the first time ever.

In 2009, we’re taking Burnout vehicles to the next level with some truly unbelievable new vehicles. First up – The Jansen 88 Special.

This classic 1980’s styled silver sports car is based on the fan-favourite Jansen P12, but we’ve made a few interesting modifications.

Fill the gauge and hit boost to trigger burning flame trails from your back wheels. The 88 Special’s fast, manoeuvrable and great in the air.

In fact, if you want to take off, this is just the car for you. Hit L3 to switch to hover mode – the wheels retract and the car takes off and hovers through Paradise City at head height.

Seriously. It hovers.

This is the first of 4 cars that we’re making available as part of a wealth of new downloadable content for Burnout Paradise. They’re available to buy individually or discounted, if you pick up the whole set. In addition to the Jansen 88 Special, look out for the Cavalry Bootlegger, Manhattan Spirit and the GT Nighthawk!

We’ll bring you details and footage of these in a future post or on Crash TV (our video podcast), and we’ll be back next week with another killer announcement for next year’s awesome Burnout Paradise content.

And as always, we’re on hand for a while to answer your questions below!

So first up, we’re talking about the in-game browser for the PLAYSTATION 3. We always like to embrace the great hardware innovations for PlayStation. We’re using the browser to bring you closer to your friends and also to get you the latest news on what we’re working on – it’s like having criteriongames.com inside the game.

We’ll bring you all the latest on this PlayStation-exclusive feature over the coming weeks, but for now all you need to know is it’s called Burnout Paradise Network and it’ll be ready in Feb ’09.

Next up let’s talk Burnout Paradise Party Pack.

Burnout’s an awesome social game, but the action’s all online. With Party, we wanted to create something for when all the players are in one place – gathered around a single screen.
Fans of the classic Crash Mode from Burnout 2: Point of Impact will know that this is not the first time we’ve done something like this. And we hope the response to Party is as warm as it was for Crash mode.

So, if you like to get together and play games, it’s time to break out the drinks, party hats and balloons!

Now you can enjoy Burnout Paradise in a completely new way.

1. Get together with up to 7 friends and gather round your PLAYSTATION 3. Here you can see some of the Burnout team lining up for a little Halloween-themed fun. You can see the full session in our latest Crash TV video podcast – it’s The Halloween Special!

2. Start Burnout Paradise and get the Party Pack update from the Store

3. Pause to admire the excellent new Party Edition visuals and atmosphere! We’ve overhauled not just the presentation screens but also the in-game visuals, which are now brighter and more colourful in recognition of Burnout’s new party theme.

4. Select 8-player party and get ready for the action. If you’ve got the PlayStation Eye add your picture now.

5. It’s pass-the-pad, so you’ll only need one controller to play, no matter how many players are involved!

6. The game selects a player at random and drops them into Paradise with a simple, fun challenge to complete.

Land a barrel roll!

Survive racing oncoming traffic!

Race a circuit of the dirt track in the best possible time!

There are 3 types of challenge to take on – Stunt, Speed and Skill. Stunt involves jumps and tricks. Speed features quick time trials and timed challenges. Skill includes racing through oncoming traffic and drifting your car.

7. Pick up the winner and run around cheering / commiserate the loser

8. Give it another go! Don’t forget, there are extra trophies and achievements available within this pack, as well as a stack of other enhancements.

You’ll be able to purchase this awesome premium Burnout Paradise content from February 2009, but if you haven’t got Burnout Paradise already, there’s never been a better time to buy.

We announced today that we’re bringing all the 2008 innovations as well as Party to something we’re calling Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box. It’s a new packaged game that’ll be available in Feb 2009!

Look out for more soon – either here on the awesome PlayStation Blog, back home on the Criterion Games Web site and in our video podcast – Crash TV.

We’re finally able to announce that our latest free downloadable Burnout pack bikes will be out 18th September!!!

It’s tough to give specific dates on downloadable content, because we don’t know for certain until the last minute. But hey, we’re really excited about bringing bikes to Burnout, so we’re going to take a chance and tell you that we’re aiming for September 18 – that’s this coming Thursday!

If you missed our earlier posts, here’s what’s coming:

• Pick from 2 motorcycles featuring male or female characters and start on a whole new progression to earn your Bike License.
• 38 new against-the-clock race events – Burning Ride and Midnight Ride.
• A brand new in-game 24 hr day / night cycle that impacts traffic density and available events. (It’s fully customisable – you can make it day/night/change the clock speed – it’s up to you.)
• Dynamic weather brings an all-new look to Paradise City.
• And if that’s not enough, we’ve got 70 more Freeburn Challenges too.

Freeburn is Burnout’s uninterrupted drop-in / drop-out online play. It’s a cool collaborative experience, so it’s all about hanging out with your friends, messing around in vehicles while racing, pulling tricks and crashing in a massive open world city.

If 350 fun, co-operative challenges aren’t enough to keep you and your friends occupied, the Bike Pack throws a further 70 to the mix. These bike-exclusive challenges are split 50:50 between regular challenges and timed, against-the-clock challenges for those that enjoy a little more intensity.

We’ve got all the details on bikes at www.criteriongames.com and in our latest video podcast – Crash TV. You can see it now on iTunes.

Burnout Paradise is currently available for the Greatest Hits price of $29.99 on PLAYSTATION 3.

Next week, we’re back to talk trophies.

We’re working flat out to bring you yet another free content pack for Burnout Paradise – and this one’s the Bike Pack!

If you missed our recent posts, we’re trying something new with downloadable content this year. We want to completely change the game we brought you back in January with regular game changing updates. That means more than just a couple of cars and a new level.

For the first time in a Burnout game, we’re bringing you motorcycles. We’ve already talked about the 2 bikes available from Day 1 and some of the bike-specific gameplay that’s on the way, but there’s more to this pack than that. We’re introducing night time to the streets of Paradise City and with it, some unique gameplay.

When the pack arrives, just head for the nearest Junkyard and pick one of the bikes – either the Nakamura Firehawk V4 or the Nakamura FV1100.

Here’s a map showing Paradise City and all the different events you can try – Race, Road Rage, Marked Man, Burning Route and Stunt Run. For the full run-down on how these work, check out the video on our website.

Selecting one of the bikes triggers a whole load of new gameplay – 70 new challenges, 38 new against-the-clock races (Burning Rides) and new “Road Rules” record times for 64 streets – it’s like a whole new game to play through!

And if that’s not enough, once the sun sets at 8pm, the game changes.

The lights on the bike switch on, the traffic thins out creating an all new environment for high speed racing and we trigger some night-specific gameplay – half of the new Burning Rides take place at night and are called Midnight Rides.

Here’s how the clock works:

From 8pm to 8am it’s night. We figured you’d want to decide how fast this comes around, so we made the clock customizable. You can easily switch between day and night and try out the different gameplay whenever you like. You can also control the speed of change – anything from 24 minutes to real-time (24hrs), if you’re up for an epic session!

If you play an online game, we automatically switch all players to the host time, fast forwarding through day or night as necessary. I swear you never get tired of seeing it!

We’ll be back with more next week – our final post before Bikes go live!

And as always, if you want more details, head to our own website – www.criteriongames.com