After the results of the Game Critics Awards were announced earlier this week, we reached out to several winners for their reactions and some updates about their games in progress. The winner of Best Racing Game was Burnout Paradise from Electronic Arts' Criterion Studios. We emailed some questions to Alex Ward, creative director of Criterion: Here's what he sent back, along with the exclusive screenshot shown above:

What was your reaction to winning Best Racing Game?

As ever, I speak on behalf on the development team and I can report that they are very pleased to win this award and very proud of the work we've done so far. It certainly hasn't been easy and we went into this E3 not quite knowing what to expect. There were some great titles nominated too, so let's not forget them.

How much of a challenge was it to set a racing game in an open world with increased destructibility and still maintain the Criterion standard of 60 frames per second?

It was enough of a challenge for us as a development team to throw away (or 'bin off' as we say) ALL of our old technology. That was absolutely everything we had. And that tech was FAST, world-class fast and I think everyone knew that.

Paradise has changed everything we've done and challenged us in every way possible. It's the first open world game we know of that runs at sixty [frames per second.] As I said to [Ziff-Davis editorial director] John Davison after the SCEA conference, to achieve this result in time for E3 was like us putting a man on Mars. Everyone else was shooting for the moon. Now there's nothing wrong with the moon, but everyone wants to move to Mars!

As I repeated a lot to people at E3, each Burnout game was a reflection of who we were at that time. And times change, and so do we. Just because we did something before doesn't mean we'll do it the same way again. Each Burnout game stands alone, both in technology and game direction.

With this new game we have to stream about five times as much world than ever before. This required us to totally rethink how we should approach building this world and changed our entire toolchain. I cannot tell you the shockwaves this sent through our team and our company. To just put ANYTHING onscreen meant going right back to square one. Right back. So we didn't want to just try and work smarter, we had to be smarter AND faster. And that's the real trick. We've set out to make a totally new gaming experience, not just an all-new Burnout experience.

In Paradise City, the player can now go anywhere, look in any direction, at any time. This means that we cannot precompute anything or chop anything out to maintain framerate--we don't control or restrict what the player does anymore. This is YOUR Burnout YOUR way. So has it been a challenge? Absolutely, but I'm incredibly proud to work alongside some of the best damn programmers in the world. And they LOVE a challenge.

How close is the game to completion, and what major aspects of the game's development remain?