Bikes, Nighttime Coming to Burnout Paradise in Early September

The codename Cagney update was only just released this Monday on Xbox 360 after a nearly month-long delay (PS3 owners got it back on July 10), and developer Criterion Games is already talking about the next significant update to Burnout Paradise. It’s been known for quite a while now that Criterion was looking at adding bikes to Paradise – an area that’s never been tread upon by the Burnout series previously. A new post on PlayStation.Blog reveals that we’re roughly a month away from the release of the Burnout Paradise Bikes Pack. Hopefully this time 360 owners won’t have to sit around twiddling their thumbs while the update makes its way through Microsoft’s certification process.

Previously known as the codename Davis pack, the next free update for Paradise will include more than just bikes — you’ll be able to explore Paradise City at night as the city goes a day-to-night cycle. (Animal Crossing vets know there’s no better time to cruise the streets than 3 A.M.) Nighttime seems like an ideal addition to go along with bikes; who really wants to deal with rush hour traffic when you’re trying to max out the speedometer on your FV1100 street bike or Japanese Firehawk racing bike, both of which will be available to you from the start.

There’s even more in store, with a new twist to Burning Route challenges when playing at night and 70 new, bike-specific challenges. This is truly a phenomenal example of excellent post-release support — one of the few comparisons I can draw is to a developer like Valve, which has release a fair amount of new content for Team Fortress 2 since it was released last year. This amount of free content is almost unheard of on consoles, though, which makes me wonder if this isn’t EA’s attempt at trying to match the long shelf life that many of Nintendo’s games see.