Electronic Arts has pulled the plug on the multi-vehicle, action-sports racing title that Criterion Games was working on. It didn’t have a name but you could ride jet-skis, 4x4s, planes, bikes and dune buggies. The game apparently wasn’t shaping up to be the AAA kind of experience that Electronic Arts was hoping for.
Gamespot received a response from an Electronic Arts’ representative who confirmed that the hybrid racing title that looked like a cross between Garry’s Mod and Big Red Racing, was no longer in production, stating…
“While they’ve moved on from the previous project they’ve spoken about and aren’t pursuing it, they are continuing to build new ideas and experiment with new IP for EA, in addition to continuing to collaborate with other EA studios,”
According to the article Criterion is still finishing up Star Wars: Battlefront VR at the moment, but they’ll likely get back to working on something original after they wrap up doing the lapdog work for DICE.
As far as their action-sports title is concerned… I can’t say there’s a lot of love-loss for the game. From what little we were shown the game didn’t seem to have much of a direction other than being a sandbox-style racer. They show snippets of the prototype in the video below.
It was basically going to be a combination of Burnout meets MX vs ATV meets Just Cause. Players would be able to hop into, off of and onto any of the vehicles nearby, meaning you could start flying in a helicopter, proceed to glide in a wingsuit and then hop down onto an ATV.
In theory it seemed kind of cool but it just didn’t seem to have much of a direction. It would have been an awesome feature in a game like GTA… but then again it’s also one of the core features of Just Cause 3, so it’s still not much of a loss.
Sadly, if you were still hoping for a follow-up Burnout game that finally takes the concepts of Burnout: Revenge and then evolves and excels them without any of the online-only, multiplayer-focused nonsense of Burnout Paradise, you’re fresh out of luck. Hopefully, maybe we can get a proper action-racer from Criterion after they finish up Star Wars: Battlefront VR, which is due to drop later this year for the PlayStation VR.
