Criterion Explains Why HDD Required for Paradise Online Play

If you’re one of the unfortunate gamers that owns an Xbox 360 without a hard drive and expected to play online, only to be disappointed when you realized that the HDD is required, I feel for you. Developer Criterion feels bad, too, which is why they’ve offered up a statement to explain just why they made the decision to require an HDD for the full online experience. Chances are the answer won’t satisfy you, but at least you’ll know why.

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.

The statement mentions that downloadable content is an important aspect to the game and points out the online features that are available to Xbox 360 Core owners, but they probably know as well as we all do that it just isn’t enough.

Microsoft’s choice to sell a hard drive-less system was bound to catch up with them at some point, and while this isn’t the first game to require an HDD (see: Final Fantasy XI), it’s likely only the beginning of a barrage of games that will require or at least make extensive usage of the HDD. In other words, this isn’t the last time Core owners will be outraged over being restricted in what game features they can access.