Why Wreckreation’s creators think Burnout fans will “feel right at home”

For fans of arcade racers, the long wait for Wreckreation has been agonising. First announced in 2021 as a direct sequel to Dangerous Driving 2, it represents the longest gap between releases for the Three Fields Entertainment studio founded by arcade racing veterans Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry.

If those names sound familiar, Ward and Sperry created the original Burnout titles at Criterion Games. Whereas Burnout blossomed into a big-budget series published by EA, only ten people are working on Wreckreation at Three Fields, alongside publisher THQ Nordic. The team believes this scaled-back approach is beneficial in an industry saturated with Triple-A titles.

“We’re a deliberately small team. All of us have worked in much bigger teams before. We found that once you take away asset creation, the core group building the heart of the game was always quite small,” Three Fields Entertainment’s CEO Fiona Sperry tells Traxion. “There’s something exciting and inspiring about working in that kind of tight-knit team.

“Everyone here fully understands every aspect of the game,” Sperry continues. “That has big advantages: the asset creation never runs ahead of the game design, and there’s far less wasted time because no one is sitting around waiting for someone else’s work to be finished.”

Compared to the studio’s previous projects, Wreckreation has been in development considerably longer. With no news on the game for extended periods, fans were growing concerned about the project’s progress.

However, Sperry points out that “the total ‘man-months’” spent on the project isn’t that different from something like Burnout 3 or Revenge,” adding that “it’s just been spread over several years instead of a large team working flat-out for one year.

“Even with great tools like Unreal Engine, things still take time. We’ve been fortunate to have a very supportive publisher in THQ Nordic who allowed us the time we needed.”

Wreckreation is Burnout Paradise meets Trackmania

Wreckreation is the small studio’s most ambitious game yet. If the circuit-based Dangerous Driving was a spiritual successor to Burnout 3: Takedown, Wreckreation is the unofficial sequel to Burnout Paradise fans have been pining for.

Set in a vast open world, Burnout fans will be instantly familiar with its breakneck speed and brutal crashes. In an added twist, a track creator, known as ‘Live Mix,’ lets players create Trackmania-style stunt circuits with friends, placing track segments and outlandish hazards in real-time.

There’s a sense that Three Fields has been leading up to this since the studio was founded over ten years ago. Its early projects, Dangerous Golf and the Danger Zone games, served as spiritual successors to Burnout’s Crash mode. Released in 2019, Dangerous Driving built on its predecessors, introducing racing against traffic and Burnout-style takedowns.

Since it was first announced as Dangerous Driving 2, Wreckreation’s scope has changed. “We originally set out to make a sequel to Dangerous Driving,” Sperry explains.

“But when the pandemic hit, we quickly discovered that the best way for us to connect as a team while working from home was by playing our own game online rather than just sitting on a conference call.

“That led us to ask: ‘What do we really want to do online?’”

Meeting other players, exploring the open world and creating your own chaotic fun has given Burnout Paradise an enduring appeal, whether it’s discovering hidden jumps or completing casual ‘FreeBurn’ challenges.

Its seamless multiplayer was pioneering at the time. This playful party spirit and sense of discovery will continue in Wreckreation.

“We’ve long been interested in the way play happens in the real world,” says Sperry. “Our guiding idea [with Burnout Paradise] was ‘not playing the game is the game’ – simply hanging out together online was key.

“Play in the real world is rarely as formal or structured as it is in most video games. Kids get together and decide what to play based on who they’re with, where they are, and what’s around them,” she continues.

“Back in May 2020, while we were playing together online, we realised we wanted to recreate that kind of free-form play to give ourselves some tools and see what would happen. It started with asking questions like: ‘Can you jump off this ramp through that hoop while I’m placing it live?’ Could it be that immediate?

“That’s where Live Mix came from. Ultimately, it’s what led us to move away from making a straightforward sequel and toward something much more open-ended and free-form.”

Wreckreation was initially announced for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One alongside the current-generation consoles and PC. But as the game’s scope expanded, pouring resources into the last-generation platforms was no longer feasible.

“Once we realised the opportunities for exciting new types of gameplay with what we’d built, we knew development would take longer. It made sense to focus our efforts entirely on current-generation hardware,” says Sperry.

“We’ve always had a particular style of game we love to make”

Wreckreation represents a culmination of Sperry and Ward’s work at Criterion and Three Fields, combined with their unbridled passion for arcade racing. As such, longtime Burnout fans will spot plenty of references to the beloved arcade racing series.

“We’ve always had a particular style of game we love to make,” Sperry says. “We’re fond of a good pun. We like weaving friendly competition throughout the experience, and we enjoy giving players fun ways to hang out online and be a bit silly together.

“We hope fans of arcade driving games and especially those who enjoyed our previous titles will feel right at home. They’ll notice that we’re still inspired by many of the same things we’ve explored for years, but we’ve taken them much further and deeper here.

“There’s plenty to reward players who spend time in this world, whether solo or with friends.”

Wreckreation releases on 28th October for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, both digitally and physically.