If you didn’t already notice, on the back off the Burnout Paradise game case you’ll see that you can’t play online if you don’t have a hard drive. Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with some and Criterion has felt a need to comment on criticism they’ve received from this as it wasn’t made a bigger deal of.

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.

We opened a dialogue with Microsoft to attempt to discover a possible solution and all possible technical options were investigated to retain the seamless freedom of Burnout without requiring the HDD. Unfortunately a solution was not available and we decided together that it would be in the best interests of the Burnout community if we require the HDD for full online play.

Is this an issue for you?

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-William “thewilleffect” Bell-