to EA. The development team had drafted several subtitles for Burnout 3 including Fuel Injection, Crash and Burn, Seek and Destroy, Takedown along with some more ridiculous suggestions like See You in Hell. Internally, they felt that Takedown was not an appealing choice, but the outcome of EA's focus testing proved otherwise. Despite a rocky start in their relationship with EA, Criterion admitted to benefiting from the publisher's experience throughout the course of Burnout 3s development. By July, development on the game was nearly complete with the remaining work confined to bug testing and polishing the experience. On 28 July, EA announced that they had acquired Criterion along with the Burnout intellectual property. McMillan stated that their strong expectations for Burnout 3 and ownership of the series were key reasons for buying Criterion. Design Ward noted that EA's snowboarding video game series SSX was an influence for Burnout 3s bolder and brasher nature. There was an emphasis on making the game more aggressive than previous instalments. Ward described Burnout 3 as a game about "fighting through traffic" rather than "racing through traffic". This approach to the game's design led to the introduction of Takedowns, a feature that rewarded the player with boost and points for knocking their opponents off the track. The Takedown mechanic became a focal point of Burnout 3s design and led to other innovations. At first, the team were not convinced by the idea of having the game's camera pan to show the crash of a taken out vehicle while the player was driving; however, once it was implemented, they agreed that the feature worked well. From there, they decided to show a player's crash as well, which gave rise to the aftertouch mechanic. The crash mode from Burnout 2 was expanded and redesigned to be more puzzle-based; aftertouch control, crashbreakers, and multiplayer support were added to the mode. They wanted to include ramps in crash events so that vehicles could fly into traffic, but the game's physics system was designed to push cars down on the track to prevent them from taking off during a race. This caused vehicles to descend immediately after driving off a ramp. To bypass this issue they "killed" the vehicle once it hit the ramp, leaving it a wreck that was unaffected by the driving physics. The game was developed on Criterion's proprietary game engine RenderWare. The graphics engine was improved