Driver 3
- August 26, 2003 15:00 PM PST
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Atari finally brings Tanner?s grand underground exploits in auto theft to the PlayStation 2.
The Driver series is one of the PlayStation hits that?s been slowest to migrate to Sony?s new console, but its engines are beginning to rev as Reflections gears up for a spring release next year. Once again, you?ll go undercover as Tanner, infiltrating a gang of car thieves that?s shipping high-performance rides over to Europe by becoming their wheelman for a variety of action-packed driving missions. Your stomping grounds will be the cities of Miami, Istanbul, and Nice, which are rendered in exacting detail that includes 150 miles of roads and 30,000 buildings. So they?re big. ?We?ve focused on the physics, damage modeling, handling, and creating these huge environments,? says Martin Edmundson, director of Reflections, adding that the game uses the Stuntman physics engine but has a new rendering engine.Like in Driver 2, Tanner can still carjack other rides, but he also now carries a gun or two, and his battles on foot will be like his battles on the road: no subtlety required, just lots of generously dispersed lead or a liberally deployed leadfoot. ?We keep it sensible and rooted in reality,? Edmundson adds, ?but we took the knock-about smash-up feel of the driving and put that into the walking. So it?s not about stealth, you don?t track ammo?you just walk into a room and spray it with a machine gun.?
The game won?t support multiplayer or online action because all the environmental data is streamed from the disc, and it?s not possible to simultaneously grab two different environments from the disc for two players. You will be able to upload and share instant-replay clips via online, though.
Reflections also indicated that the missions will have a more open-ended feel, allowing you to take several approaches to solving objectives, rather than just one linear path. Edmundson describes a mission where your job is to steal an exotic car from a rival gang. They?ve dispatched a truck to pick up the car, so you can ambush the truck, take its drivers out, and head off to steal the car and drive it to safety. You could also wait until the truck is returning with its cargo and hijack it, or you could be a bit sneaky, get to the truck first via an alternate route, shoot its driver, and infiltrate as the truck driver while your unsuspecting rivals just load the car into your hijacked truck.
For those of you scarred by Stuntman?s staggering difficulty, the good news is that Edmundson is well aware of the issue, and Reflections is designing its next game to start out easier and ratchet up the challenge more smoothly and gradually. That?s music to the ears.
