Driver 3 Aims For Filmed Car Chase Nirvana

Thanks to UGO.com for their interview with Martin Edmondson about Atari's Driver 3, the PlayStation 2 driving sequel due in early 2004. He explains the point of the game: "Driver was always about the most realistic car chases possible on a computer or console and Driver 3 is very much true to that... So you can set up your car chases and then have all the cameras positioned as you choose... it should look like a car chase movie, and that's the whole point behind Driver." But the developers of the previous Driver titles and Stuntman shy away from certain comparisons: "The thing is, we're not trying to do Vice City. Driver actually started the whole city, car-chase environment, so it'd be a big mistake to say, 'Let's do [all the GTA features], instead.'"

Comments

Re:Ramblings, perhaps

[pcbob]

Did you read the article? It says they have >150 miles of major roads + who knows how many aleys and such. So you can select "take a ride", get cops on your tail, and have a huge chase. I think regular misions can be big chases as well. And with 3 cities this is huge - it says in the article modeling eat up the most budget.

Movie cities?

[Baloo Ursidae]

I'm surprised with their picks of cities. Why? Well, if they're going to go for the whole car-chase movie feel, you'd think they would pick cities that have had a lot of action and car-chase movies in. They already covered Miami (Driver, and upcoming in Driver 3), San Fransisco (Driver), and New York (Driver 2), so that should have narrowed it down a bit. If I got to pick a city, these are what I would narrow it down from:

Portland, Oregon: Yeah, I'm biased, I was born at and grew up in the Elliot and West Slope neighborhoods. But it frequently is used for movie shoots. Antitrust was filmed and set in Portland and featured a car chase across town from someplace downtown eastside to a TV studio located where Raleigh Hills Elementary School is in real life (not sure what building they used for the movie, but it's nothing anywhere along Schools Ferry Road where the chase ended in the movie). More recently, The Hunted had a long chase all over downtown (with some movie magic to make geography more convienent), culminating in a fight on the roof of a TriMet MAX train (never mind that in real life, the train doesn't spend what seems like 30 miles on the Hawthorne Bridge (it goes about four blocks across the Steel Bridge and there haven't been tracks on the Hawthorne Bridge since Portland Traction went out of business decades ago), and that the overhead lines make standing on the roof of a moving train impossible).

Vancouver, British Columbia: The most generic American city on the planet. Most action movies you see set in American cities are filmed in Vancouver, anymore. Along Came a Spider was filmed in Vancouver, with some stock footage used between scenes to make it look more like Washington, DC. But watch the scenery: The street signs are uniquely Canadian, and you can spot more Vancouver, BC landmarks in the movie than Washington, DC landmarks. And Washington, DC doesn't have that many Douglas Fir trees. A couple decent car chases in that movie. It's also a favorite city to film Jackie Chan movies.

Realistic car chases - my arse

[DrSkwid]

Realistic car chases usually last about 3 minutes and for the most part are deadly boring and end unspectacularly.

Realistic to the computer game world seems to mean something totally unreal.

"That looks so realistic", people say about events they have never actually witnessed.

Re:Realistic car chases - my arse

[tiled_rainbows]

No way! The only car case I have actually witnessed with my own eyes (not on TV) was pretty darn spectacular. First about three cop cars go tearing thorugh the saturday high-street traffic on both sides of the road, then a helicopter turns up, and then this beat-up old eighties nissan (the bad guys) comes screeching through the traffic with one side all dented in and steam pouring out from under the bonnet, sees the cars ahead, bumps over the central divider, tries a U-ey, sees the other cars coming up, backs up, takes a turning, screeches off...

Two important points:

1. It was a lot slower than you see in films, because this was in London on a Saturday morning, i.e. a lot of traffic, whereas in films all the traffic seems to miraculously melt away as soon as the chase starts.

2. People in other cars / crossing the road were very eager to get out of the way of the bad guys, more so than getting out of the way of the police, probably because the police are marginally less likely to be cracked-up lunatics willing to indiscriminately spray bystanders with automatic gunfire*. Marginally.

Anyway, it was really cool, and it made me think that movie car chases would actually be *more* exciting if they were slower, but there was more traffic. But it was exciting. It really made my weekend. So I don't know what you're talking about.

*yeah, I know in England we don't have as much firepower per head of population as the US, but professional criminals these days are generally pretty heavily armed.

If the developer is that excited...

[Chartreuse_Zergling]

>>UGO: Could you talk a bit about one specific mission that sets Driver 3 apart from the other driving games out there?

>>ME: I guess so.

>>UGO: Do you want people to buy this game?

>>ME: I guess so.

...

>>ME: And then he goes to a place in Turkey called Instanbul...

>>UGO: Not Constantinople?!

Vice City was the first GTA, not.

[Dodger_]

"The thing is, we're not trying to do Vice City. Driver actually started the whole city, car-chase environment, so it'd be a big mistake to say, 'Let's do [all the GTA features], instead.'"

Hello! McFly! Driver wasn't first at anything. Carmageddon came before Driver and did whole city car-chase environments. Grand Theft Auto(the original) came before Driver and did WHOLE(wow those were big cities) city car-chase environments. And before these was Test Drive, which did city/city limits car-chase environments with the police chasing you. These games did exist before the Playstation 2 and Grand Theft Auto 3. I love how developers get selective memory when hyping up their new shovelware game.

Re:Vice City was the first GTA, not.

[Ceyan]

Are you people brain dead or something? Carmageddon and Test Drive (mentioned by one of the other people who replied) are NOT similar to Driver.

Carmageddon is more or less a destruction derby with goals in a city enviroment.

Test Drive is a typical open-ended course racing games in a city.

The original GTA is however, a valid point to consider. Although you seem to be forgetting the that the original GTA was 2D and Driver is 3D, which makes a big difference.

Driver is a storyline based mission-set game. It is NOT a racing game! You simply do the missions, by majority, in a car as opposed to on foot or something else...

Driver Problems

[Kyouryuu]

To me, Driver was always a great premise for a game. Throw the player into a gigantic city with realistic traffic intersections and conditions, and outrun the cops.

But that's typically where my enjoyment of the game ended. Why? So many special tricks and manuevers exist in Driver that are mandatory to your success.

I think that the ultimate car chase game would take the very basic controls of The Need for Speed III (steer, accelerate, brake, and handbrake), the modes of NFS3 (outrun, be the cops, etc), and stick it in a massive, non-linear city environment as opposed to a linear track. Give the player very basic controls and let them mix and match them to concoct their own tricks, rather than putting them through a long tutorial on different turning degrees, premade "macros," and other nonsense. I heard that the Game Boy Advance version had simplistic A + B controls and it got by just fine.

In short, Driver was often too complex for its own good (tying in to what Carmack said about modern games a few days ago). This is a driving game and, as such, the controls need to be as simplistic as possible. Let the physics engine handle the results.