 The concept of "Burnout Paradise" came from director Alex Ward's experience playing open world games, specifically "Crackdown", "Test Drive Unlimited" and "".Ward found that with a title like "Mercenaries" that the game's world provided more entertainment than the developers likely planned and gave him a sense of freedom in playing around with inconsequential elements of the game.He wanted to take this idea into "Burnout Paradise"; "My philosophy was that if me and you both played it for three hours, we’d both do different things."