Driver 3 Aims For Filmed Car Chase Nirvana

Thanks to UGO.com for their interview with Martin Edmondson about Atari's Driver 3, the PlayStation 2 driving sequel due in early 2004. He explains the point of the game: "Driver was always about the most realistic car chases possible on a computer or console and Driver 3 is very much true to that... So you can set up your car chases and then have all the cameras positioned as you choose... it should look like a car chase movie, and that's the whole point behind Driver." But the developers of the previous Driver titles and Stuntman shy away from certain comparisons: "The thing is, we're not trying to do Vice City. Driver actually started the whole city, car-chase environment, so it'd be a big mistake to say, 'Let's do [all the GTA features], instead.'"

Re:Vice City was the first GTA, not.

[Ceyan]

Are you people brain dead or something? Carmageddon and Test Drive (mentioned by one of the other people who replied) are NOT similar to Driver.

Carmageddon is more or less a destruction derby with goals in a city enviroment.

Test Drive is a typical open-ended course racing games in a city.

The original GTA is however, a valid point to consider. Although you seem to be forgetting the that the original GTA was 2D and Driver is 3D, which makes a big difference.

Driver is a storyline based mission-set game. It is NOT a racing game! You simply do the missions, by majority, in a car as opposed to on foot or something else...

Driver Problems

[Kyouryuu]

To me, Driver was always a great premise for a game. Throw the player into a gigantic city with realistic traffic intersections and conditions, and outrun the cops.

But that's typically where my enjoyment of the game ended. Why? So many special tricks and manuevers exist in Driver that are mandatory to your success.

I think that the ultimate car chase game would take the very basic controls of The Need for Speed III (steer, accelerate, brake, and handbrake), the modes of NFS3 (outrun, be the cops, etc), and stick it in a massive, non-linear city environment as opposed to a linear track. Give the player very basic controls and let them mix and match them to concoct their own tricks, rather than putting them through a long tutorial on different turning degrees, premade "macros," and other nonsense. I heard that the Game Boy Advance version had simplistic A + B controls and it got by just fine.

In short, Driver was often too complex for its own good (tying in to what Carmack said about modern games a few days ago). This is a driving game and, as such, the controls need to be as simplistic as possible. Let the physics engine handle the results.