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[Nirolak]

To recap:

• After Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Alex Ward (Criterion studio head) decided he wanted Criterion to focus on a new IP, and a lot of the older leads (10+ years there) were interested as well.
• To facilitate this, EA moved the bulk of the studio over to Ghost Games (basically a rebranding of part of the studio, the staff was all still in the UK) to keep working on Need For Speed, while 17 staff remaining under the Criterion brand prototyping new IP ideas.
• About a year later, Alex Ward left with a variety of other Criterion staff to make his own studio funded by their own life savings. He wasn't entirely clear on his reasons, but he implied feeling that the decision making and market/sellability concern of publishers was overbearing and preventing them from making the types of games they really wanted to do, along with forcing them to spend a lot of time on marketing efforts and the like instead of just game development.
• Criterion's new IP was later canceled, but the studio was moved onto Battlefront (both 1 and 2) along with a new secret project under new leadership. The studio is currently back up to around 80-90 people.
• Three Fields Entertainment released their first game, Dangerous Golf, last year. It didn't seem to sell especially well, only being in the 4000-8000 range when I looked at SteamSpy few weeks after launch, and reviewed with a Metacritic of 56. It is much higher now, but it was in the Unreal Engine Humble Bundle at the $1 tier, which sold 50% more units than the game has on SteamSpy, so I'm assuming most of it is from that.
• Their second game was a VR title that they say sold about within their expectations, but noted that it obviously could not sell very much given the VR market is so small.
• As it stands today, they've bet the entirety of the company on their next game, Danger Zone, which is a Burnout: Crash Mode successor. They say it's somewhat limited in scope as it's been made in 4-6 months as that's all they can afford.
• They feel signing publishers is tricky and takes too long in the current market, which is why they've gone this direction, though they're open to being published if someone decides to come along and do so.
• They note that Three Fields is currently 6 employees, though shortly after they were first announced, they were 10 employees, so it seems they may have done some headcount cutting already. It's also possible people just left, not sure.
• Alex Ward has later noted he didn't mean everything was riding on this game, but that doesn't seem to fit with the nature and extent of his original statements about strict budgeting concerns? Maybe he wants to make a further clarification on this?

Danger Zone is a critical title for Three Fields, which relies on game sales to keep the lights on. It's fair to say Dangerous Golf and Lethal VR failed to set tills on fire, so the studio's future is dependent on Danger Zone being a relative success.

"Everything" is riding on this, Ward said. "We got together and pooled our life savings. We've put everything we have into starting a business out of pure passion and determination to succeed. We have no backing. There's no publishers bankrolling us or anything like that. We'd love it if there were. They're free to come and do so! We're just a small group of people just making games and putting them out and trying to do the best we can. Hopefully the game can find an audience."

"Three-to-four month development period is tops for us, in terms of what we can afford to do," he said. "We're self-funded. We used our own money to start the company. We're totally dependent on sales from the games we put out.

Of course, Burnout fans will wonder whether Three Fields plans on making a fully-fledged racing game. With EA seemingly uninterested in returning to the Burnout series, the hope for a spiritual successor remains.

Alas, Three Fields is not currently working on a racing game, Ward confirmed. It's not something Three Fields is currently in a position to make.

"No we're not," he said. "We started that a year ago. We did a couple of weeks. Obviously a fully-fledged racing game requires a lot more artwork, and that costs money. Making a big game, making an open-world game, it costs money and it's money we don't have. We'd need backing on that.

"Support for funded projects is incredibly tough and challenging right now. We can't rely on writing ideas for games and thinking somebody's going to come along and give us lots of money to make it. In that time, we could have just put the thing out.

"This could have been a way bigger game if we'd had funding, and we could have easily done another six months on it. But it's us doing it off our own back. We can afford to do about three or four months and a game of this scope."

Source: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...h-mode-spiritual-successor-called-danger-zone

 

[iMax]

https://twitter.com/CrashedAlex/status/857572332109541377 (larger thread at the link)

 

[Lurk]

 

[Kurdel]

I am rooting for them be ause I love physics shit.

But Lethal VR was dogshit and the golf game ran like shit on ps4.

 

[Dynomutt]

Isn't the game $13 bucks? Will buy to support them. Best of luck!

 

[Nirolak]

https://twitter.com/CrashedAlex/status/857572332109541377 (larger thread at the link)

Okay, but his statements and explanations in the interview don't seem to jive with that.

Why talk about all they can afford to do and major budget constraints if they don't actually exist?

 

[BreezyLimbo]

Okay, but his statements and explanations in the interview don't seem to jive with that.

Why talk about all they can afford to do and major budget constraints if they don't actually exist?

They want good pr and have suckers buy into the game to support a failing indie dev?

 

[Undrey]

I really hope this sells well and they somehow are able to make a spiritual successor to the GOAT Burnout Paradise.

 

[killroy87]

"Everything" is riding on this, Ward said. "We got together and pooled our life savings. We've put everything we have into starting a business out of pure passion and determination to succeed. We have no backing.

This just makes me sad. I wish them well, but no videogame is worth putting your (and potentially your family's) livelihood on the line like that.

 

[dskillzhtown]

This is kind of, wow -

"Everything" is riding on this, Ward said. "We got together and pooled our life savings. We've put everything we have into starting a business out of pure passion and determination to succeed. We have no backing. There's no publishers bankrolling us or anything like that. We'd love it if there were. They're free to come and do so! We're just a small group of people just making games and putting them out and trying to do the best we can. Hopefully the game can find an audience."

I mean, I am all for doing passion projects and doing what makes you happy and all that, but at a certain point you have to eat and live. Maybe he thinks that he can always go back to EA if this doesn't work out.

 

[Zukkoyaki]

I said it in the Danger Zone announcement thread but I'm shocked that SOMEONE hasn't signed them to a deal for a proper Burnout successor. Especially one of the smaller publishers that focus on indie projects like Team 17, Devolver or Adult Swim. Heck, even someone like Codemasters or THQ Nordic. A proper Burnout successor from the guy who founded Criterion in the current marketplace where arcade racing competition is slim seems like a decent bet to me. But obviously I'm not a publisher or businessman.

I wonder why they won't go to Kickstarter or Fig?

 

[Nyoro SF]

Perhaps I am misreading him, but is he saying that the game has to be big or an open-world to be a success in the racing genre?

 

[Complicated]

Seems like they don't have the stability in funding to put out anything worthwhile. They're just hoping their huge risk pays off when the first two have not. Why they wouldn't go to crowd funding to make a proper crash mode game or even a stripped down Burnout successor using their cache as the developers of Burnout is beyond me.

 

[Samus4145]

I had a ton of fun with Dangerous Golf, so I will be picking this up when it releases.

 

[flaxknuckles]

They should have made Danger Zone in the first place instead of that golf game.

 

[wwm0nkey]

They should have made Danger Zone in the first place instead of that golf game.

Well there is a chance that this game will preform a lot better with everything they learned from Dangerous Golf

 

[InsaneTiger]

I will buy to hope they succeed

 

[CamHostage]

I said it in the Danger Zone announcement thread but I'm shocked that SOMEONE hasn't signed them to a deal for a proper Burnout successor. Especially one of the smaller publishers that focus on indie projects like Team 17, Devolver or Adult Swim. Heck, even someone like Codemasters or THQ Nordic. A proper Burnout successor from the guy who founded Criterion in the current marketplace where arcade racing competition is slim seems like a decent bet to me.

A) Three Fields clearly don't have the staff to pull it off right now, and aren't really in a position to staff up 10X.

B) The racing genre is not healthy at this time, sadly.

C) A proper Burnout spiritual successor would be crazy-expensive...
=1) It needs a lot of cars. Not just the awesome-looking player cars, but all the different vehicles needed to make up realistic traffic.
=2) It needs a lot of technical work and modeling for all of that damage. (That said, if they made an toy-style racer with cars that don't break apart, I think it'd still work and they could live through that cut?)
=3) It needs pretty big racing tracks, literally miles of racing surface and the towns they go through, to handle the speed that these cars zoom through them at.
=4) It needs good tracks, because Burnout fans are used to really good Burnout tracks designed by some of the best racing game developers in the business, only some of whom are at Three Fields.

D) Three Fields has made two games, and neither one has done much more business than a little "From the makers of Burnout and Black comes..." goodwill. There's certainly not the blind, wholehearted support that some other famous developers have carried over when going indie (and even those developers have rarely risen back to old heights.)


...Don't be shocked. It's be great if conditions made it as no-duh a choice as you and I and Burnout fans wish it to be, but it's unfortunately a longer shot than hoped in this gaming era.

 

[Glass Shark]

.

 

[Zukkoyaki]

A) Three Fields clearly don't have the staff to pull it off right now, and aren't really in a position to staff up 10X.

B) The racing genre is not healthy at this time, sadly.

C) A proper Burnout spiritual successor would be crazy-expensive...
=1) It needs a lot of cars. Not just the awesome-looking player cars, but all the different vehicles needed to make up realistic traffic.
=2) It needs a lot of technical work and modeling for all of that damage. (That said, if they made an toy-style racer with cars that don't break apart, I think it'd still work and they could live through that cut?)
=3) It needs pretty big racing tracks, literally miles of racing surface and the towns they go through, to handle the speed that these cars zoom through them at.
=4) It needs good tracks, because Burnout fans are used to really good Burnout tracks designed by some of the best racing game developers in the business, only some of whom are at Three Fields.

D) Three Fields has made two games, and neither one has done much more business than a little "From the makers of Burnout and Black comes..." goodwill. There's certainly not the blind, wholehearted support that some other famous developers have carried over when going indie (and even those developers have rarely risen back to old heights.)


...Don't be shocked. It's be great if conditions made it as no-duh a choice as you and I and Burnout fans wish it to be, but it's unfortunately a longer shot than hoped in this gaming era.

Yeah I unfortunately agree with everything you say here.

Though I do think it's possible to do a legit racer with a small staff on a modest budget. Games like Redout, Fast Racing RMX and any number of cool racers on Steam like Grip have done a good job of demonstrating that. If Three Fields is ever given the opportunity do actually make something like Burnout, I personally wouldn't expect it to have the level of content and production value of an EA publisher/funded racer. But an indie-scale Burnout-style game would still be plenty satisfying.

 

[drotahorror]

So they've been working 6 months on this, which is basically just a crash mode.

Why not take it to kickstarter? Put some stretch goals up to bring some of the features from previous burnout games. If they made enough, they could stretch the project out for another year or two and make the game the best they could provided they got the funding.

 

[jond76]

If its so important then why didn't they reach out to Charla at id@xbox to get it on the platform? There's an audience there too.

 

[Kaako]

Going all in eh? I wish them the best of luck.

 

[Exis]

Bit of a shame if true, as while I adore Burnout I don't like crash mode

 

[sixteen-bit]

Well there is a chance that this game will preform a lot better with everything they learned from Dangerous Golf

Yeah but you have to measure that against all the public aversion generated from the phrase "from the creators of Dangerous Golf"

 

[wwm0nkey]

Yeah but you have to measure that against all the public aversion generated from the phrase "from the creators of Dangerous Golf"

On the plus side people have probably never heard of that, but when they hear Ex Burnout staff it might raise an eyebrow or two