Driver 3 Interview with Managing Director Martin Edmonson
- March 18, 2004 23:00 PM PST
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Edmonson talks about Tanner's background, and the Ridley Scott Associates movie short.
GamePro: To start off tell us what has changed since the January event where you demonstrated Driv3r.Martin: What we've been spending most of our time on is finishing the scripting of the missions, tweaking the AI, etc. Most of the work that's going on right now is optimization, so that we can push the number of vehicles driving around. Most of the missions are in now, but the AI of the bad guys might not be right and certain responses might not be correct. Since January we haven't added many major features.
GP: Some more of the story has been revealed, we know that Tanner is an FBI agent, one of the good guys, how does that play out across the entirety of the game?
M: He is a cop, but he's working under-cover, so he's very much on the line between good and bad. He's something of a James Bond character I suppose in that he's licensed to pretty much do whatever he has to get the job done. He can't get his cover blown, which is why he gets into trouble with the every day cops on the street. His job is to infiltrate this gang and gain their trust - and once he does they employ him to do some jobs for them. He's then walking the line between being a cop and being this driver for hire who's stealing cars and getting involved in chases. And ultimately, of course, his aim is to bring down this gang but to do that he has to end up doing missions for them.
GP: From a technical perspective, the 3 different cities offer a lot more than what we saw in Driver 1 or 2. Can you expand upon some of the technical improvements the Playstation 2 and Xbox have allowed you to do?
M: The differences in the cities are enormous. We have a huge amount more detail; if you just look at a single building in the first Driver it was just a box with a texture on the side. In Driv3r the buildings have air conditioning vents hanging off them, awnings, ropes, telephone wires, etc. that all cast shadows down the building; it's a huge modeling job. The single biggest cost in production of Driv3r was probably the construction of these buildings and cities; the PS2 and Xbox allow us to have this level of detail. The size, in terms of the area, wasn't really affected by the machines because the areas in Driver 1 and 2 were pretty big, not as big as in Driv3r, but it's more the detail that's there within the cities and that's just from the raw graphical performance of the machines.
GP: A lot of the focus on games of this nature, obviously since Grand Theft Auto came out, has been "Hey, let's get out of the car." Since Driv3r allows you to get out of the car, what kind of impact on the gameplay will it have? Are we going to see something as extensive, in terms of what Tanner can do, as in the GTA games, or is it going to be more focused on when he's out of the car?
M: His range of abilities has expanded. You could get out of the car in Driver 2, but what you could do was extremely limited. It's really because you can't have the character locked in the car the whole time in a driving mission based game, you need to somehow link missions together, you need to give it a plausible feeling, it needs to feel like a real city so you have top have this out of car activity. What we've always been clear about with the Driver games is that we want to focus very much on the driving sections, and the time that you spend is far greater in the driving sections than walking around, something to the order of 80% to 20%. So most of our focus and effort goes towards the driving sections, there's no hand-to-hand combat for example, it's fairly simplistic when he's on foot.
GP: Looking at the number of vehicles in the game, how difficult was it to balance for 70 or so different vehicles across 3 different cities?
M: It's not so much difficult as time consuming because you've got 70 different vehicles and they're wildly different, they're not just cars. There are vans, trucks, forklift trucks, a crane, etc. With the physics engine that we have, it's such a flexible system, we can control everything about how a vehicle drives, but it does take a long time. Also the tuning involves making sure that you're not set in a situation where you're chasing someone with a car that's too fast or too slow that makes it too easy or too hard. Those things do take time and a lot of messing around with strength, mass values, and speeds of the vehicles to get it right.
GP: Why did you decide on the 3 cities of Miami, Nice, and Istanbul, and how did you decide what sections to put together in order to make an enjoyable game? For example, in Miami, South Beach is normally very far from downtown, in Driv3r they're right next to each other, what kind of process went into balancing accuracy and game play?
M: Balancing the accuracy and game play was just a bit of common sense really. The reason why we chose Nice, Miami, and Istanbul? Miami was an easy one, because Driver 1 was set in Miami and it was Tanner's home so we wanted to come back to Miami and do it with new technology. Miami is a great city in the U.S. as well cause it's unlike any other city in the U.S. It has a great combination of building styles, modern white on white glass structures next to the run down slums, beaches, palm trees, water it's just got everything. The initial inspiration for Nice was the car chase in ?gRonin?h, and we wanted something with some relief to it, Miami is very flat, driving up to the mountains in France is incredible. Istanbul was a bit of a wild choice, we toyed with a few places, and in the end we came down to Istanbul because it was such an exotic place that not many people had been to, the other two many people had visited, this was something a bit new. It's an incredible looking city with the combination of amazing temples and mosques sitting next to the most ramshackle and run down shacks, and at the same time it introduces a completely different driving style yet again. You've got some hills, but mainly there are these very small back-alley rat runs and it makes for a very different driving style.
We looked to balance the design of them, we took areas that were as different as we could within the city and compressed them together a little bit. In the South Beach example you just gave it's probably a 15 minute drive over Macarthur causeway to downtown in real life, but there's nothing fun at all about sitting on a computer game freeway for fifteen minutes, so what you do is take the key areas that people will enjoy driving around and just compress them together, so instead of a fifteen minute drive it will be a 45 or 60 second drive. It still looks right and has the right feel, with the bridges and the causeway still there.
GP: You mentioned Ronin being an inspiration for the Nice levels. Obviously film is a big part of the Driver series; you've had the film director mode since the original, but what other car chase movies or sequences inspired the team?
M: The original inspirations for the games were Bullitt, the Driver, The French connection, to a certain extent Dukes Of Hazard, Starsky and Hutch, it's all the classic 70's car chases. I'd probably say that Ronin had the only modern car chase that inspired us at all.
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