Curves matter less than traffic, I don't want to scratch my Red shiny Car.
driving at high speed through the traffic of C'était a rendez-vous is the spark that inspired a necessary aesthetic change, the enemy is the environment. It is no longer valid just to be fast, you have to have mischief. the first The Need for speed included traffic and police who fined you for speeding, but the aesthetics of the outlaw in a sports car was somewhat poor since nothing with enough force encouraged me to drive against traffic. Burnout rewards risk with its boost bar, a turbo that is only refilled by performing risky maneuvers, and here everything happens at the same time, it is a mashup of several driving games. You participate in races you have a route to follow, but its design does not resemble a competition track, and if it does, the suffocating presence of traffic reconfigures your route by force while offering a feeling of flexibility, passing at full speed between two cars that drive in parallel, get from behind a truck to an avenue in the opposite direction in a matter of seconds while overtaking a rival who crashes into a van, reach an alley where there are no cars but you must skid to avoid colliding with the corners ... god, the intensity.
this game has the effect The Fast and the Furious (the fourth); We stopped focusing on cars, and concentrated on creating action with those cars.
the bad thing: it's scarce. The superflexibility of the vehicles needs calibration, the slightest friction of the car with the traffic causes a beastly crash that placed us in a ranking of shame, and this would be great, I like it as a concept, but the chassis and the reward oscillate too much, it is very binary at times, and it's a shame, because ironically accidents are the best of Burnout
__________________
Win your opponents by being faster on a closed track;
the aesthetics of the competition. That's what most racing games were inspired by. It makes sense, after all, video games have intrinsic sports qualities, the aesthetics of motorsport fits well with simulation or arcade, but curiously and probably due to technical limitations, much attention was never paid to the aesthetics of sponsor motorsport , pits (maybe?), the chassis, suspension, tires, fuel and telemetry until the arrival of games like Gran Turismo
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think that the main attraction of videogames from the mid-90s to the late 2000s was to wrap the player through a more complex 3d space, the production was higher and more curious. Gaming began to be cinematic, but most games still did not have cinematographic language as such, rather they were inspired by the aesthetics of cinema in a more precise way (perhaps sick), or at least that is the feeling I have taking a look at the racing genre in particular.

I really think this series might be the perfect example of "if it isn't broke don't fix it".

I mean they hammered out the formula perfectly with this game. All the essential aspects of the later Burnout entries are present here: high-octane street racing with a focus on crashes and an extremely impressive damage engine. Whereas games like Forza, Gran Turismo, and Need for Speed aren't able to license fancy cars like Ferrari and Porsche and then show them absolutely demolished once you crash, Burnout goes their own route crafting their own unique cars and loading in a damage engine that honestly rivals more popular racing franchises that have survived to today.

If you ever wonder why games like BeamNG.drive are so popular nowadays, look no further than the game that started it all.