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Driv3r Ships 2.5 Million, Reviews Not So Sunny
Thanks to Yahoo! for reprinting a press release revealing Atari has shipped 2.5 million copies of long-awaited PS2/Xbox title Driv3r, with Atari CEO Bruno Bonnell reassuring: "The global Driver fan base is as robust and passionate as ever, as indicated by retail reaction in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, and other key territories." However, some of the initial reviews are decidedly mixed, in a similar vein to Atari's big 2003 title Enter The Matrix, with GameSpot lamenting of the third Driver title: "Driver 3 is full of the sorts of glitches and problems that final retail products shouldn't have", and IGN complaining that the game "...plays like a bigger, prettier version of Driver 2 with band-aids, but no real solutions to the problems that riddled it." Most of all, Eurogamer were previously skeptical about a late preview version, and are even more scathing regarding what they see as a "class-A disaster" final product. Fair, or not so fair?
From the reviews I've read, it really looks like they spent a serious amount of time building the cities to be almost photo realistic, but they failed to finish off populating them.
I guess their financial backers finally got sick of waiting and pushed out an unfinished product. Hopefully driver 4 can reuse the city models and textures - leaving a lot more time to add actual gameplay.
Did you read the parts of the review that described the horrible lack of control, the way things pop up suddenly in your path with no warning and the general slow, unplayable framerate because of the 'much prettier'? You know, all the things you seem to love about the first two being nearly non-existant in this game?
If not, I suggest you re-RTFR.
No you're wrong. What happened was that the people making Driv3r tried too hard to make the game more like Vice City and THEY FAILED. So instead of the game just being pure blissful insane driving physics, they keep meking you get out of the car and run around and shoot at people. I don't want to shoot at people! I want to drive a lot!
I rented the game hoping that it would be awesome in the same way that you want it to be but it's just not finished. There are brutal graphic glitches, strange collision detection, abysmal pop-up and they keep making you get out of the stupid car and run around and shoot at people with these awful controls.
I wish, I wish, I wish Driv3r had been about driving. I wish, I wish, I wish that you were right about the reviews.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
I was just thinking the other day about how nice it is that whenever the gaming industry really, really hypes a new game, it usually turns out to be good, unlike the movie industry, where almost every movie with an enormous marketing budget turns out to be crap. Usually when Nintendo really, really hypes a game, it turns out to be a good game, and it it usually gets a lot of notice in gaming magazines specifically because it's such a great game. The same thing happens when Blizzard, Konami, Capcom, Microsoft, or several other large game companies hype a game. Their lesser-known titles like Capcom's Maximo or Megaman Battle Network can be a little spotty, but when they really hype a game, it's because they've chosen the best of their new games.
The only two exceptions I could name where gamers were really, truly burned by a heavily marketed game (in recent memory) were Atari's Enter the Matrix and Eidos' Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. And now, thanks to Atari, we have yet another game that had a tons of marketing dollars, tons of press coverage, tons of sales, and tons of suck. A few more games like these and we'll end up with a much more cynical view of the industry, with most gamers regarding new big budget games the same way most people I know viewed the trailer for The Day After Tomorrow: "Wow, that looks really cool. I bet it's going to suck."
My main problem with the game is the shooting. They go to all the effort of calling the game driver and I spent most of my time yesterday shooting at various guys all over the place with the crappy weapons system. You can only cycle one way through the weapons which means you can miss the gun you want and then have to spend a few seconds cycling through to find it again while you get shot at and I didn't even get around to getting out of the first map yesterday so I fear the huge amounts of weapons I could have later. Whenever the little cross hair goes red you can hit the guys your shooting at. I know it makes my life easier but I should not be able to stand at a large distance and snipe people with an uzi and kill the guys off in four shots from the clip of 34 shots or something like that. This is annoying. Also on the whole gun point why on earth do the guns have to disappear with the corpses. If there are four guys shooting at you in a wide space by the time its safe to do a quick run around and get some guns then a couple of the guns have faded into oblivion. This is really annoying especially if it happens directly in front of you.
Then there is swimming, I like it that I can fall in water and not die but seriously why is it quite so slow. I can swim around at a snails pace for about two minuets and get only short distances and then in ten seconds the health bar drops and he dies. I mean why couldn't they have sped him up a bit in the water and made the time you can be in the water shorter, it would make life less boring. And on the graphics area if your swimming towards some steps you jump straight from horizontal to vertical in a split second, this looks sloppy.
Jumping also sucks something bad. How come I can jump onto the back of a boat and walk off of the boat but I cant jump onto the front? I can jump onto the back walk up the tiny bit on the side which looks to thin for the guy to walk on but some how he can, possibly a tight rope walker, and then walk onto the front which I cant jump straight onto. Since the front of the boats is higher than the sides and the back is lower than the places you get off it is easier to get higher than the jetty or whatever your going to then jump off. This was badly done. Also when he jumps he looks like a twerp, don't ask why he just does, and then he has the nasty tendency of getting stuck and sliding about on objects which is really annoying. Then if you have decided to jump onto something you have to remember he can only jump about six inches into the air so don't expect to be going anywhere soon.
And my ultimate annoyance is that in areas where you are getting shot at a lot there is loads of health boxes, but they don't seem to be scattered around the map or anything so you can wreck a car your in and get in another but if you wreck that one and you get in another your probably going to die on your first low speed collision with say thin air. You spend twenty minuets shooting your way out of some island and then you jump off the bridge, get a new car and some gently bumps you from behind and it tells you that you just died, this sucks because I had to do it again at which point I did it but it was still annoying.
And finally why are some objects so dam solid. Large bushes and very small trees seem to have an uncanny ability to withstand being rammed by an eighteen wheeler but you try walk through other types of bushes and you can just wander through them. Garden hedges don't mind if you pass through them, actually they look identical just after a car went straight through them which is kind of dumb, they should at-least have been flattened. Lamp posts are also annoying. I still have it drilled into my head that I can pass through lampposts and take some damage and slow my vehicle down a bit which I picked up in GTA but now I still get surprised when any vehicle comes to a total utter stop when you hit them. I liked being able to knock other lampposts and traffic lights, it was fun.
One thing Atari does do well, which obviously does not include making great epic games, is teasing the press. Quite frankly, the press has no balls, and Atari's Enter the Matrix proved it once. EGM, for example, dedicated half of its magazine and cover to the game the month before it came out, with cautious but glowing language. Driver 3 proves the balllessness of the press once again. Driv3r isn't nearly the comedown that ETM was, but for a massively marketed game that's getting 5/10s and 60%s, it's as if these people had played an entirely different game before it came out.
EGM's, for example, doesn't say specifically, "this is a great game," but it comes as close as it can. Driver 3, EGM claims, is "high-revving hardly-a-GTA-clone that's peeling rubber to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox." The language used is as excited as it woul be in a 8 or 9/10 review. Yet, they're not even looking at the full game. I wouldn't doubt if a majority of the preview came from a designer just talking about great the game is, and the previewer transcribing it.
1up, the online media conglomerate for several print magazines, goes further. "Judging by the time we've spent so far with the near-final . . . it avoids the pitfalls that all the other GTA wannabes fell into. From a technical standpoint, DRIV3R is already something special."
CVG is as generous and used as many exclamation points as the editor probably allowed. "We haven't even had a chance to talk about how the top-notch storyline is shaping up, the amazing Hollywood voice cast, how cool the first-person viewpoint is and the way you can complete missions by going in with your guns blazin' or your wheels squealin'."
Gamepro, in a hands on preview, said the game "was looking very nice," "collision detection is already solid," and the "variety is sure to please anyone." Likewise, Gampro promises that "Driv3r is already shaping up into what looks like an incredibly fun title."
Of the quick survey I did of DRIV3R's previews, IGN's was sadly the most realistic. They list a few of its problems, but then reassure, "We know it'll be fixed." The rest of the preview sounds like a giddy school girl. Likewise, Gamespot admits that the graphics are rough, but "Driver 3 definitely looks promising." Then, like IGN, they seem to apologize for that nugget of truth with an entire paragraph on how great Driver 3 will be. It's as if they just insulted the game designers' mothers.
What's happening here is a symbiotic relationship between the press and the publishers. Like movies, music, or comic books, in most cases a game makes a majority of its sales during the first 2-4 weeks of its shelflife. There are exceptions, including GTA3, but the largest portion of games aren't GTA3s, but DRIV3Rs. With regards to print magazines, that renders the reviews almost useless. The people that buy after the first month probably don't read game magazines and sites nearly as much as those who do buy in the first month. Secondly, first day buyers often don't even have online reviews, let alone the print reviews which come out a full month or two after the game's release. That means that buyers are relying on previews almost exclusively.
And I think the publishers know it. What's going on here is simple, as demonstrated by the extremely apologetic and defensive Gamespot and IGN reviewers, is that if the previewers were honest, they'd lose their "exclusives" and