Paradise lost! Burnout Paradise shutting down servers in August

Look, pal, for eleven years you've been promising to take me down to Paradise City, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Eleven long years of delayed plans and broken promises. Well, you better make good on it soon, because Criterion Games have announced that they will shut down the original Burnout Paradise's multiplayer servers in August. The open-world car 'em up will still be playable in singleplayer, and the recent Burnout Paradise Remastered won't be affected by this, but you promised to take me down to Paradise City, not Paradise City Remastered. Oh won't you please take me home?

Burnout Paradise debuted on consoles in January 2008 then launched on PC in February 2009. The servers for all those will shut down on August 1st, 2019. That's a fair run, far longer than EA have kept many games online. Hell, at times they've kept games online for less than two years. Eleven years isn't as good as letting people run their own server, but it's longer than I'd expected when I got Burnout all those years ago.

"Thanks to the lingering hardcore few for staying with us," Criterion said in last night's announcement on Facebook. "You've got 106 days (or so) to finish all those barrel-roll challenges!"

This is only for the original Burnout Paradise, not last year's fancied-up Burnout Paradise Remastered. That's still fine and online for the foreseeable future. If you want to keep on Burning on, hey, our John's Burnout Paradise Remastered review says it's Burnout Paradise but fancied-up, and that's no bad thing. Remastered also bought the PC debut of the 'Surf Island' expansion that EA only ever released on console because reasons.