Here you can find Developer Chats, Interviews, and other goodies about the game!
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By max.thunder
#45646
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By Christian Nutt [Mar 26, 2004]

The creative director of Reflections, the developer of Driv3r, gives us a good look at how the company approaches development of an incipient mega-hit.

Recently we were invited to England to take a look at the progress on Driv3r and have a tour of Reflections, the Newcastle studio where it's being developed. We also had an opportunity to sit down for a nice, informative chat with Martin Edmondson, the company's creative director, about Driv3r and more.

GameSpy: I noticed that you guys seem particularly concerned with the cinematic aspects of the game -- giving it the feel of a real Hollywood car chase. Is that one of the most important aspects of making a game for you?

Martin Edmondson: It's the most important aspect of Driver, yeah, for us, because the game's about Hollywood and TV car chases and trying to get that level of realism and interest -- you know, if someone's really into watching car chases on TV, I want them to get the same interactive experience on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. So that goes as far as the feel of the cars, the way that they handle, the powerslides, the suspension, the damage, the level of damage, the realism of the collisions and so on.

GameSpy: Tying into that is getting the real actors, like Michael Madsen and Michelle Rodriguez. Has that been very exciting for you?

Martin Edmondson: Yeah, it's interesting from a gameplay point of view -- although having those actors doesn't directly affect gameplay, what it does is absorb you more in the cutscenes, which therefore absorbs you more in the story, and therefore the missions become more meaningful. It's interesting in some ways because you can imagine how five, ten years ago that trying to get actors at their level to lend their voice to a video game you'd just have completely no hope. Well, it would be one of those conversations that would go along the lines of "a million dollars, or forget it" kind of thing.

It just shows how things have changed, that this is such a big industry now and it seems that there's a real, other, alternative avenue for their talents. In the case of Michelle Rodriguez she was telling us that she had the original Driver on PlayStation 1 when she was younger. And Michael Madsen, although he doesn't play games he has five kids and a PlayStation and Xbox at home and he wanted to play the part of Tanner so his kids would think he was cool.

GameSpy: Do you find that having a publisher like Atari with a lot of resources helps you make the kind of games you want to make?

Martin Edmondson: Well, we certainly couldn't continue as an independent with the level of investment that we currently have with Driver. It has to be a large company, so that's a huge weight off your head. When I used to own the thing the budgets were not this kind of thing. It's still considerable money coming out of your back pocket every day, but now the sums of money are absolutely enormous. It takes a company the size of Atari to be able to spend that kind of money on development.

GameSpy: You're developing this game in England, published by a French company, and you're talking to American press. Do you find catering to all of your difference audiences or markets is difficult in any way?

Martin Edmondson: Well, Atari's kind of an American company now, isn't it, because when they purchased GT Interactive in the U.S., now most of their operations are out of the U.S. I guess the problem isn't so much dealing with what is a French publisher but making sure your game is catering to the tastes of everybody -- because most gamers, say sports titles for example, they're either European or they're U.S.

Certain styles of game, another example I can think of are games like Twisted Metal, strange cars with big rocket launchers on the roof of them and so on, go down very well in the U.S. but in Europe they just hate them. Getting that kind of a balance, trying to get something that's going to be across the board is quite tricky. I suppose the fact that we're dealing with TV car chases, which everybody is universally familiar with, is a big help there. You're copying movies, and if you're copying movies you're copying something everybody has seen.

GameSpy: I noticed that when you were giving the presentation you referred back to Driver much more so than Driver 2. Do you feel that Driver is sort of the direction you wanted to take Driv3r?

Martin Edmondson: In spirit, yeah. I mean, Driver 1 was very, very simplistic. There's nothing much really simplistic about Driv3r. It's more that Driver 2 was more of a struggle, really, because Driver 1 was already pushing the PlayStation hardware, as it was, pretty hard. Driver 2 expanded the game in so many different ways and it really was hard work for the PlayStation 1 to do it, and some of the knockabout fun and playability of Driver 1 was lost in Driver 2. Although we had other complex elements in Driver 2 like you could get out of the car and run around, which on the PS1 at the time was completely unheard of, and various other things to do with the story and the cutscenes and music. But basically in terms of sit down and play, I think I'd rather play Driver 1 than I would play Driver 2, so that's what we're trying to do with Driv3r -- get back the spirit of the original, and the feel, and the fun.

GameSpy: Stuntman was successful but I think that it had mixed reactions among gamers.

Martin Edmondson: I think it had polarized reactions, really.

GameSpy: Yes. That's a better way of putting it.

Martin Edmondson: It was either the best game we'd ever written or the worst game we'd ever written. Or the worst game they'd ever played in their life.

GameSpy: I've heard both. How do you feel about that, and has that taught you anything about development moving forward?

Martin Edmondson: We learned quite a lot. From a technical point of view, Stuntman was very much a learning process for the PlayStation 2, a very valuable learning process. We could never have done Driv3r without Stuntman. I suppose it depends on which way you look at it. With hindsight, there is no doubt that Stuntman was too hard. I don't think we have any doubts about that. We kind of ran out of time to tune it, and the thing that it did was that it polarized people... you were either a fan of the way it was designed; it was on a rail, absolutely hitting you, bombarding you with these sensations all the time, and effects. To bombard you that intensively with things, you can't have people going all over the place, otherwise things go a bit wishy-washy, and that's the reason we did it.

People who like games like Driver and so on, free-roaming kind of games, are probably going to hate that, how rigid it was. But a lot of people liked the challenge of it, the high-octane, in-your-face experience. But it really was polarized, and I can see why. I think what we learned from it was to just try and be more careful with the difficulty of the game, because we get very close to it, we sit with it every day, and we think something is so easy and you give it to somebody who's never played it before and they think it's way too hard.

And there's a reluctance there, to say "no, it's not too hard, it's easy." And where really we should take on board more external opinions on whether something's difficult or not -- tune things how we want, and then do that. But that's something we have learned from that. But having said all of that, there's something far more satisfying about having a game where half the people say it's the most amazing game they've ever played and half the people say they absolutely hate it, that it's a pile of absolute trash. I'd far rather have that then having everybody say "well, it's OK."

GameSpy: You definitely as a company, even before Driver, with Destruction Derby, concentrated on games that involve cars in one way or another. Do you guys have a real passion for it? Is it what you find most interesting as a developer?

Martin Edmondson: I suppose so. You remember, this is a company of 120 people so you won't get everybody passionate about cars. But cars are a pretty popular subject with people, and the other thing is that aside from the enthusiasm is the amount of built up knowledge within the company. Starting with Destruction Derby, which is the first car game we did -- a long, long time ago on the PlayStation 1 -- all that knowledge has built up and that feel, tuning, the way cars look when they crash ... this is all stuff which you build up over the years and I don't think we would ever throw that away. From a commercial point of view you wouldn't do it, because after everything we've built up if we went to a publisher and said we'd like to do an RPG game, there would be quite a few questions to answer before we could proceed with it, whereas if we say we want to do a new car game it's a much easier proposition.

GameSpy: Have you ever considered doing a straight racing game? Your car games have a lot of different twists to them.

Martin Edmondson: Yeah, I've considered them. I just think that it would perhaps be a little bit dull for us, given that although we do car games and there are a lot of car games around, we do tend to do things a little bit different to everyone else, and the idea of going off and making a F1 game or an Indy Car game or whatever... I think it would be difficult to get as enthusiastic about that as it would when we do the kinds of things where we have total freedom. If you do a sports racing game there's all sorts of things that are imposed on you that are out of your control that are to do with the license of the sport, whether or not you can smash the cars up, the level of damage, just the whole thing is limited by the rules of the sport that you're trying to copy. Unless you're trying to do something like Project Gotham, which is a racing game with a completely different slant on it which is another thing altogether, but it is still just a racing game, a fairly track based game. I've always been a fan of doing things that are quite wildly different without going off into the realms of fantasy, because if you go too far then, at least to me, some of the interest goes. If you start going into space-age cyber racing games, they just don't hold much interest for me.

GameSpy: As I said, you tend to make car games with a twist to them... Destruction Derby, or Stuntman, or Driver. Have you thought of any new twists that you'd like to apply, maybe new ideas that you're moving towards for your next game?

Martin Edmondson: Well as a rule we don't talk about the next projects that we're working on when we haven't finished the current one, and in all honesty our brains don't actually go and think about them, not in terms of specifics. We would like to continue ... if you look at the history of our games from Destruction Derby, there's a constant quest for realism and pushing the boundaries of the machine, to give us as much realism as possible and that's something that can go on forever. My ultimate aim would be to have a Driver game or Stuntman game that was visually indistinguishable from watching video camera footage of the same thing taken from a real car, on two TVs. Of course it's never going to be real because it's not stereoscopic and three-dimensional so you don't have all of that peripheral vision, but if you were looking at television footage of our game running, that after a couple of pints of beer and a little bit of a squint eye, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

GameSpy: It seems that you're really concerned with getting the physics of the actual cars and the way they move, a very intense model in terms of the suspensions and stuff. Has that been as much of a concern for you as the actual gameplay, laying down that foundation?

Martin Edmondson: It is. And perhaps it is too much, sometimes, because we do really focus on it. But to me it's really vitally important area. If you get the physics all wrong or the feeling of the cars isn't right ... half of the fun of Driver is not even playing the missions, it's blasting around and smashing into things. The reason why that's fun is just simply because the look and the feel of those collisions is so realistic -- not realistic when compared to real life, but compared to your perception of them from TV and movies.

GameSpy: Driv3r is coming out kind of late in this generation, in the sense that there have a lot of games that have done something a little similar that have come before -- of course there are the two GTA games that have been wildly successful, or even Midtown Madness 3. Do you find that coming out so far into the generation gives you a lot of challenges to work through, or a lot of competition?

Martin Edmondson: Well, I guess so. Because Driver kind of invented that genre, so there was no competiton. So, yeah there's considerable competition in this area. Having said that, I do think that Driver occupies its own area within that general area, of driving/action/free-roaming city games, whatever you want to call it, in being the only game that tries to be a simulation of car chases. Games like Vice City, Getaway and True Crime, they each have an area that they're focused on strongly and have weak areas they haven't focused on, and what Driver does is focus on something that none of those games are focused on, which is the whole Hollywood car chase angle.

GameSpy: Have you worked with any film directors to try and capture that feel more, or is it just through observation?

Martin Edmondson: It's really through observation. Camera angles are easy to pick up and you can learn how directors use cameras in a car chase. The difficult thing is making those cars look and perform like they do on a TV car chase and that's entirely down to the physics and then obviously the tuning of the cars once the physics is in there. Without the basis, the strong physics basis, you could never achieve it -- you could never have something that looks like it. If you imagine picking one of them, Getaway or True Crime or whatever, if you did have those cameras in that position it wouldn't look like a movie car chase because of the way that the cars react. They have their cars handling a certain way for playability reasons, for technical reasons in some cases. What we've done is forget about that; we concentrate on, we want that car as it comes around that bend to look exactly like Steve McQueen's Mustang does in Bullitt when it comes around that same bend. That's been our focus.

GameSpy: Now that you're moving towards a more cinematic style with the cutscenes as well, do you feel it gels together what you've been going for with the Driver series?

Martin Edmondson: The whole thing is inspired by film and TV, so it does all fit together much better, and that's one of the main reasons we've used cutscenes that were rendered and not game engine. To give us the flexibility, to give us the strength -- you get so much more emotional involvement in a story, in a cutscene, if it's more realistic. The problem is that even with PS2 and Xbox, in-game cutscenes can never match rendered cutscenes in terms of the realism of them and the effects and so on, and how carefully you can edit them to music. Because you've got total control. You've got the music track you can edit and you've got the render, and you have complete control over everything in the render as well. It's a lot more time consuming, it takes a lot longer, it's a lot more expensive to do it that way, but you don't interact with cutscenes anyway so there's no real point to using the game engine.

GameSpy: Now that you've been working on this game and it's nearing completion, are you satisfied with the progress you've made with Driv3r?

Martin Edmondson: We're very satisfied with what we've achieved with it, the technical aspects of it, the way the physics works, the shadowing and lighting and so on -- especially on the PS2, I think it's particularly nice because it's not the kind of thing you see that often on the PS2. You can see those kind of lighting techniques and so on, on a PC game or an Xbox game, but it's just quite a rare thing on the PS2 so we're quite pleased with it. As far as the progress I would say we're only disappointed with the rate of progress. It would be so nice to have these things out in a year, two years max, but if you're doing that kind of thing it doesn't work that way. If you want a game out quickly you have to chop back all the specs of your game to such an extent that you're not really doing anything that's wildly different, in terms of technicalities anyway, to what everybody else is doing.

GameSpy: Looking forward, are you excited about going to E3, and hearing the announcements out of E3?

Martin Edmondson: Yeah, I'm looking forward to E3. I'm partly looking forward to E3 because the game will then be in submission, I think, and we should be nearly finished with it. And yeah, there's a few things I want to ... for the past six months we've kind of stayed out of it and we haven't paid attention to what's going on with other people's games because we've been completely snowed under, but there are some things I definitely want to see there. I know it's a corny one but I'm quite looking forward to seeing how Half-Life is coming along.

GameSpy: Well, yeah, everyone says it... but it's true.

Martin Edmondson: Well that's the thing, isn't it? It's a corny answer, but everybody means it.

GameSpy: Do you look at other genres for inspiration even though you concentrate on one style of game?

Martin Edmondson: I guess so. We did, well the only real area that we did with Driv3r is when you get out of the car and you're playing the game in a first person view, because we were adamant that we wanted a first person view control style. Because other games where you run around cities have been heavily criticized in the area of targeting and shooting. We're not finished with this yet, we still have more tuning to do -- but the only way you can be truly be free shooting is to have first person control. It's no good [to have the other type of control] and try to expect to free shoot and to enjoy putting bullets up walls. So that's the decision that we've made, and since we've never done a game like that then obviously you start playing all sorts of them -- every one under the sun, first person shooters. And first person style shooters with third person view like Max Payne as well. Just play with them and see which one works best.

GameSpy: Are you looking forward to working on the next generation of technology, or are you still just so focused on the current generation?

Martin Edmondson: Well, I'm definitely looking forward to it. That's one of the things that always drives the enthusiasm within the company and me personally as well, is the new technology, just wondering what we might be able to do with it and how close we might be able to get to ultimately realistic simulations and car games. And that's what drives the enthusiasm for continuing in this industry, basically, is that it changes so fast.

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By Coyote
#45649
I remember, this is from the official Driv3r guide :) That guide was great, lots of interesting stuff. Not only the bonus DVD with all the trailers, but also the pictures… I never saw a red Ford GT in Miami for example!
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By Fireboyd78
#45661
Coyote wrote:...I never saw a red Ford GT in Miami for example!
I've never heard of or seen this red Ford GT...pics? Lol
Crazy Copper Frenzy

https://youtu.be/xAE3QsULyB4

https://youtu.be/AxdGf3F0yIg

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