Driver Madness

Should've done it.

June 1999...Driver was just barely released! And they were already developing Stuntman and Driver 2...nice. It's a shame Driver 2 never made it to PS2.

Shame it never made it... I got a tear down my face... a single tear... a tear for driver 2. :'(

Unreleased PS2 game... Damn you PS1. :c

"It would have been nice to have doors flying off the parked cars in the garage but we simply didn't have the technology available to build the cars from kits of separate pieces like doors and fenders. With the PlayStation 2, we're expecting to be able to achieve a lot more"

It's sad, with the power of PS2 most of the issues of Driver 2 like frame rate and draw distance could be solved. Despite of releasing the game in November (when the PS2 came out in Europe) they could redone the game in a new engine but that probably wasn't worth because they spend 1 and half year working on it with Driver 1 engine. They took PS1 almost to the limit.

If it would make to PS2 i imagine it like a primitive Stuntman.

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max.thunder wrote:

"It would have been nice to have doors flying off the parked cars in the garage but we simply didn't have the technology available to build the cars from kits of separate pieces like doors and fenders. With the PlayStation 2, we're expecting to be able to achieve a lot more"

It's sad, with the power of PS2 most of the issues of Driver 2 like frame rate and draw distance could be solved. Despite of releasing the game in November (when the PS2 came out in Europe) they could redone the game in a new engine but that probably wasn't worth because they spend 1 and half year working on it with Driver 1 engine. They took PS1 almost to the limit.

If it would make to PS2 i imagine it like a primitive Stuntman.

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And I cried again .. reading that.. thanks Max Thunder, It's so sad.. I'm crying, not a joke. :/

Well i have to say one thing, I love the graphics and PS1 classic-ness of Driver 2.

If reflections just wasnt that lazy, well helping other studios and doing crap for 3ds and so on nobody cares (except Wii), they would have better ported it to PC, Wii, Xbox, Android, IPhone as almost all the other famous games as with R*s did. Shame.

I hope that someday we will see a remaster of Driver trilogy. Like Ubisoft did with Splinter Cell. With recently more fanbase of Driver SF this would be worth since some gamers want to know the past of game series but enjoy it aswell on new consoles.

If anyone wants to read the full magazine article you can read it HERE

Great find, I heard or read somewhere that that was why Driver 2 ended up being so glitchy, rushed! etc. A good chance to make it a fantastic sequel. Don't get me wrong it's a great game and all but knowing that it could have been better kinda ruins it. But not too much

If only they would've gotten a green light for a PC release. Driver 1 looked already much breathaking on PC, with transparent water etc. I'm sure they could've eliminated a lot of framerate issues and such with a PC release as well, also included some additional stuff. Would've been great.

I really don't think Driver 2 was intended for PS2. That'd just be a case of bad listening. They already list all the things that make Driver 2 special (curved roads! Who is gonna be surprised with that on a PS2?), and no PS2-esque features that were removed.

Helegad, if Reflections was given an extra year or 2 by Infogrames (before they changed their name to Atari...those bastards), it probably would've been on the PS2. Infogrames gave the team exactly 1 year to work on Driver 2...how the hell is that enough time to make a game with 4 cities and ~30 cars? It's not. So they were forced to stay on the PS1 and didn't have nearly enough time to develop for the PS2.

Considering the proprietary architecture of the PS and PS2 would be fairly similar, I doubt porting an engine and increasing polygon counts would have made a huge difference to project time (eg. two years instead of one). That said, everything in the article intended for PS2 Driver 2 appeared in PS Driver 2. I have a preview magazine with a similar article (Official Australian PlayStation Magazine), it goes on and on about curved roads and the rest of the pre-release hype included in the above article. Pictures are included in the preview I have. I'm just saying that no matter what that article says, I doubt Driver 2 was ever intended for PS2. Driv3r was always planned to be "next-gen" though.

Prolly if it had these 'two more years', the result would've been Stuntman's engine and style. It's pretty much the same story as The Getaway, it was originally going to be released for PS1, but you can see the huge difference when it took few more years and made it to the PS2.

BETTER COP AI...
And they sadly fucked up that.

The Frame rate issues would of been gone i loved playing 2 player with my bro, but it was sometimes very bad

This is one of the most depressing if not the most depressing video game development story of all time. No wonder Tanner never smiled for 11 years straight (Smiled upon the release of DSF) There's a slight possibility that some stuff that was in Stuntman was stuff originally made in 1999 for Driver 2, and the files sat for a while then a few developers decided to use them. Same goes with Driver 3. Some of the stuff from Stuntman made it into Driver 3 with heavy modifications. Including the removed but once existent beta Stuntman wheels on the Nice Lamborghini.

I'm also pretty sure curved roads were mentioned because it WAS only 1999 at the time.

Uh, no way. Assets were made just for Stuntman (although they reused a lot of them in Driv3r and DPL). Although some cutscene models from Driver 2 appeared in Stuntman cutscenes.
The wheels off the Stuntman Diablo did appear on the D3 Countach early in development, yes.

That's why I brought it up. The PS1-PS2/Xbox era were connected, but the heaviest connections were throughout the PS2/Xbox era. Previously in the PS3/Xbox360 era, no connections whatsoever at all (DSF). Also to further learn about Driver 2's and 3's past, we need to look through both games and Stuntman. We should really look into extracting Stuntman content after we clear out Driver 2. The BMW looking sedan in Nice (also known as the survival vehicle) was a heavily modified version of a Stuntman car or re-created version.