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Driver 3 Aims For Filmed Car Chase Nirvana

Posted by simoniker on from the rinse-and-repeat-several-million-times dept.

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.'"

2 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ramblings, perhaps by pcbob · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Driver Problems by Kyouryuu · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.