“We’re not right here to speak about the previous”, says VP & GM of Battlefield Studios Europe Rebecka Coutaz, on the event of Criterion’s thirtieth anniversary. Behind her on the wall is the studio’s new brand, which reads “Criterion: a Battlefield Studio”. The message is fairly clear, then.
For the previous decade, the Guildford-based studio that made its identify in the racing area has been a collaborative accomplice on EA’s Battlefield collection, first lending its experience to 2016’s Battlefield 1 and later to Battlefields 5, 2042, and 6. After I ask whether or not the Burnout and Want For Velocity developer’s newly established scope may embody tasks aside from Battlefield, Coutaz is obvious: “we’re solely targeted on Battlefield.”
It appears an odd technique to mark the event of the studio’s third decade of operation, particularly contemplating the press had been invited to have a good time. There are references to the studio’s historical past all through the day – photographs of vehicles zooming by in a kind of ‘best hits’ montage video which opens the day; a stop-off on the studio tour to race in a NFS arcade machine; passing point out of prior titles that made the studio’s identify. But most of this anniversary occasion is spent highlighting the processes and ethos by which a fantastically gifted group of audio, animation, and technical builders now collaborates on Battlefield 6.
EA might not be speaking about the studio’s previous on this milestone anniversary, but it’s a previous price remembering. Criterion Video games’ historical past started in Guildford, England in January 1996 when it was shaped by Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry as a subdivision of Criterion Software program. Owned by mother or father firm Canon, Criterion’s function wasn’t simply to launch video games but to construct the instruments and applied sciences that permit folks make them. In 1993 it had launched the earliest model of Renderware, a 3D API and graphics engine, and with the formation of this new video games studio, the thought was to launch software program that confirmed what Renderware might do.
There’s a transparent sense of that in Criterion’s earliest releases. 1996’s Scorched Planet, a Descent-like vehicular shooter happening throughout spectacular rolling landscapes, and 1997’s Speedboat Assault and Sub Tradition, each aquatic vehicular titles, put the high quality of their 3D visuals in the highlight greater than every other ingredient. There was a zippiness and circulation to them which felt groundbreaking and harking back to the buttery-smooth arcade machines of the time.
1998’s bike racing launch Redline Racer and 1999’s Trickstyle as soon as once more had the visuals and the sensation of velocity to show heads, if not the depth to coax critics away from the likes of WipEout or F-Zero X. What they did have, in case you seemed out for it, was a definite sense of humour.
Redline Racer contained an easter egg bike known as Sub Tradition, referencing the studio’s earlier recreation, and a rideable pleasant dinosaur known as Barnaby, amongst different leftfield modes of transportation. Trickstyle, in the meantime, had a ‘TRAVOLTA’ cheat code which unlocked particular strikes. Irreverent touches like these would change into an indicator of the studio.
“ We’re unashamedly British,” says senior producer Danny Isaac, who started with Criterion on 2019’s Want For Velocity Warmth and whose record of credit at EA runs again to 1994. “As a studio, we have to have enjoyable constructing it. We have got to have our personal id and I’ve at all times beloved that British humorousness, that dry humor that comes via in what we do. Even when we now have robust days, folks nonetheless preserve their humorousness as we undergo it.”
Whereas Criterion’s early output demonstrates an organization discovering its toes, the Renderware engine was quick changing into a significant piece of the wider video games business. Licensed over 200 instances to titles developed past Criterion’s partitions, it was utilized by a broad vary of video games from Rayman 2 to Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX. Rockstar would use it to construct Grand Theft Auto 3 in 2001, Vice Metropolis in 2002 and San Andreas in 2004.
When EA acquired Criterion in 2004, there was even dialogue as as to if FIFA ought to migrate to Renderware, Isaac tells me.
By the time of that acquisition, Criterion had firmly established itself as a significant participant in racing recreation improvement because of a trio of masterful, explosive, bodywork-shattering arcade racing titles: the Burnout video games. Burnout used Renderware to make racing really feel not simply quick, but harmful. Impactful. In its personal means, subversive. Working opposite to Gran Turismo’s stately simulation and Want For Velocity’s consequence-free point-to-points, Criterion’s 2001 launch dared you to drive as near oncoming autos and obstacles as doable with a view to construct up your enhance meter.
It’s an idea that prevails right now, in video games from Forza Horizon 6 to Want For Velocity Unbound, Criterion’s most up-to-date (and sure remaining) racing launch. It’s change into such a elementary a part of the style’s cloth that even explaining it feels a bit foolish, like describing the means your controller’s set off controls a automobile’s throttle.
Crashes in Burnout are spectacular. They wreck your unlicensed automobile in a hail of shattered glass and mangled bodywork, and you then’re despatched again in your means with a figurative pat on the backside to go and make extra mischief.
Studio cofounder and recreation director Alex Ward mentioned the 1976 French brief movie C’était un rendez-vous and 1998’s Ronin impressed Burnout’s distinctive character. The two.3 million gamers who bashed their means via it might or might not have seen these references, but they actually discovered the finish product agreeable. Burnout modified Criterion. This was not a Renderware studio, but a real rival to Want For Velocity’s place on the arcade racing throne.
In the midst of Criterion’s run of Burnout releases got here 2006’s Black, a raucous FPS which endeavored to “do for shooters what Burnout did for racing games”, mentioned Alex Ward at the time. It took a equally cinematic strategy to the hall gunfight as the studio had taken in direction of highways filled with site visitors. Shattered glass and bullet casings spewing forth always, the display screen shaking as if struggling to include all the motion. Nice sound design.
Black and Burnout embody the rules that Courtaz sees as elementary to the studio’s id in 2026. “ The depth, the cinematic view, the on the spot reward second that our gamers love on Battlefield, these are actually the strengths of Criterion… and it goes all the means again to Black.
“Sure, it was once vehicles and fewer weapons. However it’s the general participant expertise that we’re sharing with the similar depth.”
It’s true {that a} throughline is obvious from these PS2 releases to current, in the sound design, the heightened, John Woo film gameplay sequencing and technical proficiency required to make so many components sing in concord. Whether or not “depth” is a sufficiently sharply drawn id in fashionable triple-A improvement, significantly of a studio with this a lot racing heritage, is a distinct matter.
What got here subsequent for the Guildford studio, as the Burnout franchise rolled on, was the arrival of Want For Velocity at its doorways. EA’s different racing collection had been driving excessive for a decade, nailed on for a Christmas primary chart place like a actuality competitors winner’s debut single. But after so many annual releases, the blueprint was beginning to look worn out by 2010.
Criterion took a scalpel to the collection and trimmed away the elements that not served it. The straight-to-DVD undercover cop dramas, endearing although they had been, had been out. Of their place was a naked minimal of narrative setup which shifted the focus fully again on the racing.
Criterion deployed what it had discovered over the final decade and used it to remodel the battle between racers and the police, one thing that had been a mainstay in NFS for years but hadn’t at all times been lavished with a lot mechanical depth. 2010’s Sizzling Pursuit was a marked enchancment in that regard which married adrenaline-pumping, high-speed chases with genuinely tactical vehicular fight. Its EMPs, jammers and spike strips gave you way more to consider than the finest line via the subsequent nook.
The momentum saved rolling with 2012’s Want For Velocity: Most Needed, dragging the franchise away from the reside motion plotlines, underfloor neons and crunk soundtracks that had been starting to age like uncooked milk and into extra streamlined, playful, mechanically wealthy territory.
From 2013, Criterion’s tasks grew to become extra collaborative. Its subsequent NFS releases had been joint efforts with Ghost Video games, and by 2016 it was racking up ‘further work’ credit on the Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefield franchises.
That winding path leads, by way of two extra fantastic NFS releases in 2019 and 2022, to Criterion’s present position as – learn together with the brand – a Battlefield studio.
It takes lots of people to make video games with the depth and scale of Battlefield. More and more, over the final 20 years, that’s meant a number of studios engaged on tasks collectively. And in the adapt-or-die market situations of the post-lockdown video games business, Criterion has confirmed itself extraordinarily achieved at collaboration in addition to bombastic racing video games.
“ The inventive imaginative and prescient is basically the coronary heart,” Coutaz tells me. “It needs to be very clear to the groups, regardless of if they’re based mostly in LA, Montreal, Manchester, Guildford, what sort of recreation we’re making.” In her position as vp and normal supervisor of Battlefield Studios Europe, Coutaz is “ a governor of the id of every studio.
“ Every studio will make their finest job, and they’ll thrive after I can permit them to use their id to the a part of the recreation that they’re engaged on.”
Ping off a headshot in Battlefield 6 or fireplace an artillery spherical into tender earth and you may see – and listen to – how good Criterion’s builders are at sound design right now, as they at all times had been. Squint exhausting sufficient and you may see how Battlefield 6’s explosions and falling rumble hint again to Black’s Matrix-like gunfights and Burnout’s wonderful collisions.
The query is the extent to which the studio is free to determine the place to deploy its distinctive experience, id, humour, and legacy and whether or not its outlined id as a part of Battlefield Studios really utilises its heritage. Whether or not the people that make up Criterion, a studio with 30 years of racing recreation heritage, are comfortable to work on a sole shooter franchise for the foreseeable future.
That’s the a part of the story that I couldn’t fairly be a part of up throughout Criterion’s birthday celebrations. Not how the studio got here to change into a key collaborator in Battlefield, but how that collaboration has apparently narrowed its scope a lot that racing video games aren’t thought-about a part of Criterion’s prerogative.
Phil Iwaniuk is a veteran {hardware} smasher and recreation botherer who has written for the likes of PC Format, Official PlayStation Journal, PCGamesN, The Guardian, Eurogamer, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and IGN. He received an award as soon as, but he would not prefer to go on about it.