Burnout Paradise speedrun routing

[originally posted November 25th 2022 on cohost]

this game has been living rent-free in my head. I've literally had days where I woke up and immediately had ideas swirling around my head that I spent my whole way to class noting down in a google spreadsheet on my phone just to come home and immediately jump into the game to test shit. I'm absolutely obsessed with routing this game and I think I made a breakthrough today and I've not been this excited to speedrun a game in a long while. If this fuck game wasn't over 2 and a half hours long I'd be doing it right now

the jist of what makes routing this so interesting is that literally every single event in the game is accessible from the very beginning. That includes linear events that go from point A to point B, which you of course wanna chain together in the most efficient was, so that you pick the quickest events available and combine them so that the next event starts as close as possible to where the previous event ends. Then there's also non-linear events like stunts and road rages, that have a fixed starting point, but that you can use to lead to anywhere, so these can be used to get to events that are far away from other events that you would otherwise spend a lot of time driving to without doing anything else. So these events can be used to fill blank spaces in between other events. But also they get a higher score requirement each time you do them, so you only wanna do a limited amount, otherwise they get too long and inconsistent to actually be beneficial to use over a consistent, linear event

On top of that, the game is structured in licenses, the early licenses are very quick, but each consecutive one takes longer. Each time you finish a license, the event completions from the previous license resets and you can redo the same events again that you did previously. This means that for the early licenses, you wanna be extra sure you take only the absolute quickest events so that you can use them as many times as possible. But also, if you use non-linear events in an early license, if you wanna reuse it the next license, it's gonna be harder now due to a higher score requirement, so you're likely gonna have to reroute it, which will often result in you linking up different events with it and thus being forced to do a different order of events than in the previous license. Also with late game licenses requiring more events, you eventually run out of the obvious very fast events to use and are forced to make decisions on which longer events to include, perhaps if they're at a convenient location, or if you use events that are at an inconvenient location but are shorter

Beyond that you can use tricks to make your routing more efficient. For example, you can't quick travel in the game, but it has a "restart last event" option in the menu. Usually that is not very useful unless you make a mistake and have to redo an event, but if you're at the beginning of a new license and the event completions have just reset, you can use that function and redo the last event that just got cleared again, which means you skip having to drive to it cause you just warp back to its start automatically. So for using an event restart at the beginning of a license, it's beneficial to do it on an event that is short, but that is at an inconvenient location, so that you can one time skip driving to it to get the most out of it. You can also use the restart function to do a trick called restart warping. As I've said restarting warps you back to the start of an event, and if you then cancel the event, you are still at the location in the map, but no longer in the event. This means you can essentially warp back to the location of the previous event. However, starting an event and then cancelling it means you get an extra load screen and an event-intro cutscene, which wastes about 20ish seconds, so you don't wanna do it unless it's absolutely neccesary. It's most beneficial if you have several short events next to each other but that are at an inconvenient location that you don't get to very often, so that you only have the extended travel distance once to get to the first of the group, and then you can chain them together with restart warps

I've been running this game for a couple years and been working on some re-routes in the past but it feels like in recent weeks we're really kinda cracked the code and managed to break out of previous established event patterns that were maybe not optimal and really understood how to identify problems and how to solve them. There's so many creative options to chain events together and just with the sheer amount of variation you can do I feel like there's never gonna be a perfect route. But the improvements I just made and tested and came to the conclusion that they all work are SO GOOD and I can't wait to work on putting a good run together