Criterion Games shared its interest in returning to the Burnout universe after last year's Need for Speed: Most Wanted. As hard to believe—or maybe easy tobelieve—as it sounds, it's been more than five years since a Burnout game was released, the last being Burnout Paradise. Well, it's definitely got a beast in the works, and it's coming sooner than anticipated.
Several employees of Criterion Games have added job information for what has been described as an "Unannounced project". Its Lead Cinematic Artist, Pete Panton, even has an expected release date of 2013 added.
We know that Criterion immediately began working on a game following Most Wanted, but it's been tight-lipped on what it is. At first I thought it'd take its current-gen trophies and immediately begin focusing on next-gen. I mean, why wouldn't you want to raise your potential with new hardware? However, that seems unlikely when you look at the timeline.
If its next game releases this year it'll likely come out during the late Fall. However, if it really does release in 2013 then it'll have had an even shorter development cycle (quite shorter, in-fact) than was present between any of this generation's releases from the studio. Being able to pull off a record time and working on advancing the engine to utilize next-gen hardware is next to impossible without doubling the size of your studio. In addition, the PS4 already has a racing title for launch with DriveClub.
As much as it'd be nice to have a title primed for next-gen launch, it probably sounded more enticing to make one last push to take advantage of the huge pool of consumers who now own either a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. Releasing to 140 million confirmed customers sounds a lot better than zero, after all.
