Burnout is one of the best racing games of all time, combining the thrill of arcade racing, high speed action, and a twist on traditional racing game norms – you want to crash into other cars, instead of avoiding them – to deliver an experience that is truly unparalleled. Unfortunately, the franchise is also, at this point, more or less dead, and its creators have left EA and gone on to do other things.

What other things, you asked? Were you expecting them to craft a spiritual successor to Burnout, in the vein of spiritual successors that other creators like Keiji Inafune, Hiddeki Kamiya, and Koji Igarashi have done? Because if so, the joke’s on you. Their next game is a golf game.

It’s called Dangerous Golf, and it’s not a regular golf game, either- just like Burnout had a propensity to wreak havoc across the canvas of its gameplay, so, too, does Dangerous Golf retain its developers’ love for, well, destroying things.

“Welcome to the World of Dangerous Golf, an arcade style sports game with a very explosive twist,” says Three Fields. “Play through a variety of indoor courses – make a mess in the Kitchen, wreak havoc in a Palace, cause chaos in a Castle and set fire to a Gas Station.”

It launches on June 3 on Xbox One, PS4, and PC. You can check out the gameplay footage for this below- and if you are one of those guys who really wants a new Burnout, well, don’t be bummed- Three Fields’ next game will in fact be a spiritual successor to Burnout 3: Takedown.

• 1. Development
• 2. Story
• 3. Gameplay
• 4. Characters

Development

The founders of Three Fields Entertainment, Fiona Sperry and Alex Ward, were also the founders and lead developers at Criterion Games. While with that firm, the two were part of a team that did work on both the Burnout and Need for Speed franchises. Sperry has said she always knew the most popular modes in these games were the Crash modes and the mini-game Burnout Crash! The point of these modes was to go into certain areas and cause as much wanton destruction as possible.

Sperry and Ward left Criterion after the studio was purchased by Electronic Arts, and the company started moving away from the games these developers loved. When the two started their new company, they had the stated goal of making what they were calling a spiritual successor to the Burnout series, though with the new studio’s own personal touches. Despite that game being their long term goal, both developers knew they would likely make another game before they could make another addition to this racing series.

When the company announced Dangerous Golf in January of 2016, the company said the game was a kind of bridge that led towards their next version of Burnout. Three Fields has said they arrived on this title in part because they wanted to make a short and fun game that still had aspects of the crash mode they found so popular in their other series.

The idea of making this kind of an arcade like golf game apparently came after the development team sat down and watch a number of videos that had people hitting ridiculous trick shots with golf clubs. Three Fields says it realized that a miniature golf game that centered around trick shots as well as wanton destruction was the concept of the game they wanted to work on, while at the same time the team called the idea “ridiculous. “ The team says it was the same kind of stupid and ridiculous that was around the Burnout racing game. The concept was “stupid” and “ridiculous” for a golf game in the same manner that Burnout had been in regards to the racing genre.

The team has said that the game was also a kind of test case, as the massive amount of destruction was a way for them to see how current technologies could handle this kind of game. They put the title on the Unreal Engine 4 in order to have as realistic physics and graphics as possible.

Three Fields has said they started prototyping Dangerous Golf by setting the scene in the palace level. In this particular palace, the developers had put a ton of different pieces of fine china in order to see just how much breakage and destruction they could come up with. The developers said they took the idea of one of the levels from the movie Clerks, where the idea for a convenience store level also came from.

Dangerous Golf was originally slated for a May, 2016 release but the company pushed the date back a month. Now Dangerous Golf is slated for release on the PS4, Xbox One and PC in June of 2016.

Story

Dangerous Golf does not have an actual story surrounding the game. The concept is that of trying to cause as much destruction as possible while playing through a rather interesting miniature golf course. The game doesn’t have characters so much as it just has players that go through the course.

Gameplay

Dangerous Golf has more than 100 different miniature golf holes that are all placed in different areas that come equipped with a ton of destructible items. While getting the ball in the hole on the course is one of the goals, the other part of the game is knocking around as many of these items as possible. Players earn points by crashing through the different pieces of scenery and these destruction scores are included in the score that is earned by actually playing out the hole.

Among the holes that are included in the massive miniature golf course is a china shop, a kitchen, a bathroom, a gas station, and a regal palace. The game has a single player mode, as well as multiplayer game modes. The multiplayer functions allow for both online and offline games. When playing in the multiplayer mode, players take turns not only trying to cause destruction and get the ball in the hole, but also make a number of trick shots. Each of these tricks will give the player a higher score and some of the holes are more difficult than others.

The final piece of the game allows for players to turn their golf ball into something called a “SmashBreaker”. This means the ball turns into a miniature bomb that is capable of causing even more damage. The way to turn the golf ball into this SmashBreaker is if the player is able to score enough points on a number of given shots. In this regard, Dangerous Golf emulates NBA Jam. Some of the courses have obstacles that include multiple rooms as well as teleporters. Some of these more difficult rooms have objectives outside of hitting the hole that have score multipliers. In addition to the offline multiplayer, Dangerous Golf allows for a party mode that includes up to eight online players.

Characters

There aren’t actual characters in Dangerous Golf. The players never appear onscreen, but the game is played in a first person point of view with no named characters.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game

The PlayStation 4 has only just now started to hit its stride, but in this industry, one always looks forward tot he next big thing- that is the reason that Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all begin work on their next systems as soon as their current ones at the time are released, and why we always have some exciting new technology, like the Kinect and 3D, to look forward to.

This year looks particularly interesting for fans of the hobby- with the impending rise of consumer grade VR solutions, as well as the launch of Nintendo’s enigmatic NX console, which presumably kicks off the ninth generation of gaming, we have a lot of exciting developments to look forward to. But all of this is a known quantity to developers, who have presumably have had their hands on development kits for a while now. Instead, these developers seem to be looking even further out- such as to the PS4 and Xbox One successors.

Take, for instance, Paul Ross. Ross used to work with Criterion, the guys who made the incredibly popular Renderware engine back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era, and who also gave us the enduring Burnout franchise. He left Criterion a while back (when EA nerfed and downsized it beyond recognition), and currently works with his own studio, Three Fields Entertainment. Speaking about his upcoming game, Dangerous Golf, to EDGE, he managed to veer the conversation off to what he believes the next generation of consoles may be like.

“[So I am] sitting here thinking, ‘OK, what does a PlayStation 5 game look like? What does an Xbox Two game look like? And how can we start to build for that future now?'” Ross said. 

He continued: “Physics engines haven’t changed since I did the physics on [Dreamcast game] TrickStyle. They’re all about rigid bodies, solid objects. This is a real paradigm shift because it’s about simulating physics at a molecular level. It’s been a really hard problem to solve for quite a while.

“So what does a PS5 game look like? With PS4 we’ve seen some fidelity put into the worlds, but PS5’s going to be about more dynamic worlds, far more interactive worlds that are more believable in the way they behave.”

What does the next generation look like? We are due to get at least part of the answer to that question, once Nintendo unveils the Nintendo NX… whenever it is that they decide to unveil it, really. As for the PS4 and Xbox One, their successors are probably a while away- the two consoles are just two years old, and they have only just now begun to hit their stride. Still, contemplating future hardware is always fun, which is doubtless why Ross is doing it, too.