- Sun Nov 11, 2012 8:55 am
#45214
Driver's story sounds daft: series hero Tanner gets a bonk on the head and ends up in a coma. The game takes place in his dream, and so explains the game's principle novelty: the ability to leave Tanner's body and possess that of any other driver in the city. Two things subsequently surprise you. Firstly, that this mechanic is much more than a gimmick but a brilliant, central design principle around which the rest of the game orbits, and secondly, that the narrative is much more than a lazy crutch for the game's departure from realistic racing, instead delivering the easy charm and gentle wit of a Sunday afternoon TV serial. We sat down with Martin Edmondson, Ubisoft Reflections founder, to talk about the narrative inspirations.
Meshing story with the rigid focus of the racing genre is no small task. How did you go about it?
Martin Edmondson: We've been blending in narratives since the beginning of the Driver series when we introduced Tanner. From what I remember we had a lot of issues in the first game where certain missions got removed and the story was difficult to follow. But we've had a lot of fun with this one thanks to the slightly different subject matter.
It has got an unusually high concept. Did the mechanics come before the story that explains them?
Martin Edmondson: Yes, absolutely. The idea was: Google Earth live. Everyone's been on Google Earth and has had fun finding their house or where they work, but of course that's a static photograph taken six months or a year ago. We wanted to be able to pull out and see the whole world running - all the cars driving round, all the people walking around and going on about their daily life - and you could be any car you want, you can be any person in that city. So we then set about designing a system that would be very reactive and fun, and part of the enjoyment and skill of playing would be the use of Shift [the possession mechanic]. But what we were absolutely clear we did not want to do was have Shift as some gimmicky function that was just overlaid for no reason at all, we wanted it to be built into not just the multiplayer but also the singleplayer story.
How did you find the tone for the story?
Martin Edmondson: There were two things when we approached it. The first was we did not want this to take itself too seriously. We didn't want to be pretentious with it, because when you describe what's actually happening it's a tricky sell. Quite often you look at blank faces when you explain the idea, but it's a different matter when people actually play the game. So the first thing we wanted to do was to lighten the tone. It also gave us an incredible amount of opportunity for humour. You can imagine Tanner shifting into a huge range of people in the city, and the passenger sitting next to him thinks it's the same person, so Tanner has to very quickly work out who he is, what situation he's in and find adequate responses. You find quite a lot of funny dialogue when he suddenly shifts into somebody and he doesn't know and gets a broadside comment from the person sitting next to him. There are hundreds of characters in the city that we had to record dialogue for - we have 80,000 lines in the game. It's a huge game from a narrative point of view. And the other thing was we wanted to lighten the tone generally anyway: Tanner and Driver had always been a bit dry and serious. It still has a dry and sarcastic sense of humour, though, not slapstick.
The game makes use of film and TV conventions. Were there particular programmes that you looked at for inspiration?
Martin Edmondson: The 'Previously on Driver' thing was something that we introduced in Driver 2. The inspiration I suppose would be any TV show; the whole thing is that Driver is not about videogame car chases, but TV and movie car chases. It's supposed to really evoke this feeling of the cop show or the cop movie, so the visual style, the kind of dialogue, and certainly little features like the recap all add to that.
The structure of the game is interesting: you use a lot of different means to inject narrative. Did you experiment a lot to get it right?
Martin Edmondson: No, I think we were pretty much on track right from the beginning. The only things that were up in the air were whether we made Tanner take on the body - the physical appearance - of the person he's shifting into, or appear as Tanner, and how do we show that to the player. Do we go really crazy by having Tanner shift into a woman and all of a sudden he's in the car and he's wearing a dress. That would change how the humour works and would change the lines, obviously. But in the end we went for the system that we went with to keep things a lot more simple. [As per Quantum Leap, Tanner appears and sounds like Tanner to the player, but other characters see him as the person he's shifted into].
There are a huge number of different characters, each with their own stories and many return in different ways throughout the game.
Martin Edmondson: That was a nice thing we were able to do. There's that kid who's decided to make a bit of money street racing and then finds out he's racing for [crime boss] Jericho; Tanner is not very pleased about that, obviously. Then he comes across that character later and you see the story change as Tanner has to help him out again and again. There are also people on the streets that you just come across again, and their situation has progressed slightly - for example, splitting up with a boyfriend. There are all sorts of things that are going on in the city.
Source
Driver's story sounds daft: series hero Tanner gets a bonk on the head and ends up in a coma. The game takes place in his dream, and so explains the game's principle novelty: the ability to leave Tanner's body and possess that of any other driver in the city. Two things subsequently surprise you. Firstly, that this mechanic is much more than a gimmick but a brilliant, central design principle around which the rest of the game orbits, and secondly, that the narrative is much more than a lazy crutch for the game's departure from realistic racing, instead delivering the easy charm and gentle wit of a Sunday afternoon TV serial. We sat down with Martin Edmondson, Ubisoft Reflections founder, to talk about the narrative inspirations.
Meshing story with the rigid focus of the racing genre is no small task. How did you go about it?
Martin Edmondson: We've been blending in narratives since the beginning of the Driver series when we introduced Tanner. From what I remember we had a lot of issues in the first game where certain missions got removed and the story was difficult to follow. But we've had a lot of fun with this one thanks to the slightly different subject matter.
It has got an unusually high concept. Did the mechanics come before the story that explains them?
Martin Edmondson: Yes, absolutely. The idea was: Google Earth live. Everyone's been on Google Earth and has had fun finding their house or where they work, but of course that's a static photograph taken six months or a year ago. We wanted to be able to pull out and see the whole world running - all the cars driving round, all the people walking around and going on about their daily life - and you could be any car you want, you can be any person in that city. So we then set about designing a system that would be very reactive and fun, and part of the enjoyment and skill of playing would be the use of Shift [the possession mechanic]. But what we were absolutely clear we did not want to do was have Shift as some gimmicky function that was just overlaid for no reason at all, we wanted it to be built into not just the multiplayer but also the singleplayer story.
How did you find the tone for the story?
Martin Edmondson: There were two things when we approached it. The first was we did not want this to take itself too seriously. We didn't want to be pretentious with it, because when you describe what's actually happening it's a tricky sell. Quite often you look at blank faces when you explain the idea, but it's a different matter when people actually play the game. So the first thing we wanted to do was to lighten the tone. It also gave us an incredible amount of opportunity for humour. You can imagine Tanner shifting into a huge range of people in the city, and the passenger sitting next to him thinks it's the same person, so Tanner has to very quickly work out who he is, what situation he's in and find adequate responses. You find quite a lot of funny dialogue when he suddenly shifts into somebody and he doesn't know and gets a broadside comment from the person sitting next to him. There are hundreds of characters in the city that we had to record dialogue for - we have 80,000 lines in the game. It's a huge game from a narrative point of view. And the other thing was we wanted to lighten the tone generally anyway: Tanner and Driver had always been a bit dry and serious. It still has a dry and sarcastic sense of humour, though, not slapstick.
The game makes use of film and TV conventions. Were there particular programmes that you looked at for inspiration?
Martin Edmondson: The 'Previously on Driver' thing was something that we introduced in Driver 2. The inspiration I suppose would be any TV show; the whole thing is that Driver is not about videogame car chases, but TV and movie car chases. It's supposed to really evoke this feeling of the cop show or the cop movie, so the visual style, the kind of dialogue, and certainly little features like the recap all add to that.
The structure of the game is interesting: you use a lot of different means to inject narrative. Did you experiment a lot to get it right?
Martin Edmondson: No, I think we were pretty much on track right from the beginning. The only things that were up in the air were whether we made Tanner take on the body - the physical appearance - of the person he's shifting into, or appear as Tanner, and how do we show that to the player. Do we go really crazy by having Tanner shift into a woman and all of a sudden he's in the car and he's wearing a dress. That would change how the humour works and would change the lines, obviously. But in the end we went for the system that we went with to keep things a lot more simple. [As per Quantum Leap, Tanner appears and sounds like Tanner to the player, but other characters see him as the person he's shifted into].
There are a huge number of different characters, each with their own stories and many return in different ways throughout the game.
Martin Edmondson: That was a nice thing we were able to do. There's that kid who's decided to make a bit of money street racing and then finds out he's racing for [crime boss] Jericho; Tanner is not very pleased about that, obviously. Then he comes across that character later and you see the story change as Tanner has to help him out again and again. There are also people on the streets that you just come across again, and their situation has progressed slightly - for example, splitting up with a boyfriend. There are all sorts of things that are going on in the city.
Source
Tanner is alive and he wants revenge.The story will continue in Moscow (the russians bought the stolen cars).
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