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After 11 years, Burnout Paradise servers will close this August

Criterion's open-world racer will finally close its doors in August, but the remastered version won't be affected

Burnout Paradise

After 11 years, the servers for one of the arcade racing genre’s most iconic titles are set to close. In a tweet last night (embedded further down this article), developer Criterion announced that the servers for the original version Burnout Paradise would close later this summer.

Criterion’s tweet reads that “after over 11.5 years of service, the servers for the original 2008 game will be closing on August 1, 2019.” Servers across Xbox 360, PS3, and PC versions will all be shut down, meaning you won’t be able to play online, but offline play will, of course, still be available.

It’s not a particularly surprising move from Criterion, particularly given the existence of an updated version of the game. Burnout Paradise Remastered released in August last year, more than ten years after the publication of the original game. The developer makes it clear that servers for the remaster will not be affected by the closure of the older servers, and I imagine it’s keen to encourage original players to make their way over to the newer version.

Nevertheless, some fans have expressed sadness that they’ll be losing access to content limited to the original game’s online content.

Four cars can only be unlocked or used online, although reading about them on a Reddit thread discussing the server closure does make me wonder if they’re anything more than status symbols.

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Personally, I wasn’t overly impressed with Paradise – I was always more of a fan of the more chaotic Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge. The open-world approach might have offered an opportunity to explore Paradise city, but I found that it just served as a distraction from shoving sports cars into the central reservation.