Blade Edge

So I’ve been hooked lately on Burnout: Paradise’s online game mode Freeburn, and the Challenges that they have for you to accomplish. With 1-7 other players you have to complete a task either individually (like each getting 500 yards of drift) or as a team (like jumping over each other using ramps). Individual challenges usually don’t pose much of a problem, but co-op ones sometimes do. That problem is communication.

I have a bluetooth headset that I use now to communicate to other players, but the vast majority of players don’t have VoIP and many of those also don’t understand or speak English. So the real challenge of the Challenges is getting people to understand how to do things correctly. Here are three case studies:

Case 1: Location

In this one Challenge, we all had to drive through a certain tunnel in the world, which was marked on the map. problem was that it was off the road, and the access point wasn’t obvious so a few new players didn’t know where to go. I wasn’t using my headset at the time so I started to do donuts at the entrance to the dirt road leading to the tunnel. This made my icon on the map spin around in place and after only a minute or so the other players noticed and converged on my location, where they found the dirt access road. Challenge complete!

Case 2: Technique

Another Challenge involved doing barrell rolls off a ramp. Barrell rolls are tough to get the hang of, and many people don’t do a lot of them during the normal game mode. So it’s a type of Challenge I always dread activating in a lobby full of players I don’t know, because I’m afraid some will quit out of frustration and end the Challenge and/or it will take like 15 minutes to complete. Still, I have to try. During one Challenge involving barrell rolls I noticed one player was constantly going off the wrong side of the split ramp and crashing every time. Again, I didn’t have my headset connected so what I tried instead was parking my car next to the ramp so on his next attempt the guy had to swerve onto the ramp on the proper side to avoid hitting me. It actually worked on the first try and he landed his barrell roll. Challenge complete!

Case 3: Assholes

It’s an online game, of course there are going to be douche players that you run into every now and again. This actually happened today when I logged on for a short play session. One guy kept coming into the game and just crashing into other people’s cars, which is a Takedown maneuver. It would have been okay except for the fact that he was largly ignoring us trying to complete Challenges and was just crashing into people. So I kicked him. Twice. He came back a third time and I forgot to kick him before activating the next Challenge. Rather than cancel and kick him and re-start though, I decided (foolishly) to give him one more shot. So we’re all doing our requisite 6 jumps at this particular location, except for this guy and one other person. I check the map although they seem to be meandering down towards us, they’re constantly crashing into each other along the way. Now, I don’t want to cancel the Challenge because everyone else is almost finished, so it’s time to get creative. He likes crashing? Fine. Take this!! After ramming into him to get his attention, I then lead him on a merry chase… which just happens to lead him over the required jumps. I had to do this a few times to get the 6 jumps, and he caught on after the third attempt, but everyone was mixing it up around there (maybe they all caught on to my strategy?) so eventually he found himself jumping after people another two times. Challenge complete! I should note that this time I did have a headset connected, but figured screaming “you fucking douche stop being an ass and help before I kick you again you prick!” wouldn’t give me the results I wanted.

Nowadays I’ve got the headset hooked up all the time, which makes things way easier for Challenges that require co-op and timing, like where you have to jump past each other in mid-air (“1, 2, 3, GO!”). Still, I like the fact that there’s more to Challenges than just obtaining a certain objective, but also figuring out how to work as a team with random people.