Driver: San Francisco

The classic chase game returns to its roots, with its original creative lead taking the reins. This time, however, the tale carries a twist.

Martin Edmondson is a name you should probably know. Despite his absence from the forefront of game development in recent years, Edmondson's creative influence still permeates the industry decades after he first started crafting games. Developers such as Rockstar, Black Box, and Criterion note Edmondson's taste for and execution of 1970s-style car chases as an influence for their seminal works. After a lengthy hiatus, he's back in the driving seat at Reflections, the studio he formed in 1984 (now part of Ubisoft), and his first work is a return to the franchise that really put him on the map: Driver. The new title, set in San Francisco, blends familiar themes from the 11-year-old franchise with some fresh ideas that may prove to influence the genre as much now as his early works did at the dawn of the PlayStation generation.

My real passion has always been games. On a day-to-day basis, this is what I really want to be doing." -Martin Edmondson, creative director, Ubisoft Reflections

Back in the early days of the original PlayStation, Edmondson's team experimented with a different approach to driving games. Up until this point, the majority of 3D racers drew their inspiration from the classics of the time, notably Test Drive, Ridge Racer, and Need for Speed. In Destruction Derby, Reflections' 1995 release for Sony's fledgling console, he introduced the idea of realistically destructible vehicles and physics-based handling: ideas that had been rarely mastered for, and never properly integrated into, arcade-style driving games. The game was so successful that it spawned three sequels before Edmondson and his team decided to spin the lessons they'd learned into something more ambitious.
In 1999 the studio released the original Driver, an open-world car-chase game influenced by '70s cop shows like Starsky and Hutch and movies like Bullitt. Like Destruction Derby before it, the game proved to be incredibly successful and began a franchise that went on to sell more than 14 million copies.
Controversy rocked Reflections and then-publisher Atari in 2004 when the third game in the series, clumsily dubbed Driv3r, was rushed to market due to financial concerns and consequently flopped, both critically and commercially. Edmondson left the company as a result and later sued the publisher due to "constructive unfair dismissal as a result of Reflections alleged repudiatory breach of a contract of employment that necessitated [his] resignation."
After the messy breakup, Edmondson's brother, Gareth, took over the reins at the studio, which went on to produce the woefully underfunded and poorly received retro-themed 2006 release Driver: Parallel Lines. By the end of that same year, Atari was experiencing deep financial troubles and sold Reflections, along with all associated intellectual property, to Ubisoft for $24 million. The studio, renamed Ubisoft Reflections, quickly released a PSP variant of Parallel Lines dubbed Driver 76 before disappearing from public view.
Meanwhile, Edmondson was taking a break from game development. "After the company was sold, I just wanted to go and do a bunch of completely different things," he says during an interview at an Ubisoft press event a month before the game's official unveiling at E3. "I went to spend some time working with a company working on LCD screen technology, and I did some mobile-phone licensing stuff. But my real passion has always been games. On a day-to-day basis, this is what I really want to be doing."

[Tanner] cheated death, and as time progresses, he's increasingly aware that this has affected him psychologically." -Martin Edmondson

During his hiatus, he never stopped thinking about the potential for the franchise he created, and when the opportunity arose to rejoin the studio as part of Ubisoft, he jumped at it. "The franchise had drifted away from what it was originally designed to be, and by Driv3r, it was really quite different," Edmondson says. "To be honest, we never got to properly finish that game, so it seemed like we'd left the universe that we created in a bad way. With the new game, we have a chance to bring the whole thing back to its roots, focus on realistic, Hollywood-style car chases, and return to the characters that we set up all those years ago."
As in the previous games, players step into the shoes of Tanner-a gritty cop with a penchant for power slides-in his efforts to take down his nemesis, Jericho. When we last saw the characters, Jericho had shot Tanner and left him for dead, leading many players to believe that the character had come to an untimely and unexpected demise at Driv3r's end. Driver: San Francisco picks up three months after these events; initially, Tanner seeks revenge for what happened to him while investigating Jericho's criminal network in San Francisco.
At first glance, the new game is a fitting update to a previous formula. Its large and expansive play area is accurately modeled after the city of San Francisco, as well as outlying areas in Oakland and Marin County, and it includes "hundreds" of licensed cars that span the mundane to the exotic. Cars slide around the way we remember in previous Drivers, and the whole thing looks suitably high definition and runs at a silky-smooth 60 frames per second.
Where things get really different is in the underlying gameplay structure and the conceit that Edmondson and his team have constructed to facilitate it. "At the beginning of the game, you're reminded that Tanner has had a near-death experience," he explains. "He cheated death, and as time progresses, he's increasingly aware that this has affected him psychologically." As he explains this, Edmondson hits a button on the PlayStation 3 controller, which zooms the action up and away from the car that he'd been driving to show a broader view of the city. "As you can see, we have lots of traffic moving around, and everything you see here is controlled by A.I. All of these cars have drivers in them that are going about their business." Then, as he moves a targeting reticule over a car that's passing by, the action zooms into that car and hands over complete control of it to the player. "This is a feature we call 'Shift,'" Edmondson beams triumphantly. "You can target any car in the game and zap into it like that. When you get in it, you have complete control, and when you leave it, the A.I. takes over again and goes about its business."
It's an impressive effect, one that's reminiscent of the whoosh of the player-swapping function in Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, but its justification in Driver: San Francisco is both fascinating and provocative. "So, in the fiction of the game, Tanner thinks that he's able to initiate an out-of-body experience," Edmondson explains. "It's a resource-managed effect, but the character believes that the more daring he is out on the roads, the more he's able to channel this ability. What the character doesn't know, but the player does, is that the entire game and its story is happening in Tanner's head. He's not really there. He's still in a coma, recovering from being shot by Jericho, and he's simply playing out this revenge fantasy that you are now controlling."

It's an incredibly complicated undertaking, but we think it's a unique approach to this kind of game." -Martin Edmondson

What this elaborate ruse allows for is a complete break from traditional gameplay structures and a complete new way of constructing a narrative. "Every car in the game has someone driving it, and many of the people that you encounter by zapping yourself into them have some kind of objective that can or needs to be accomplished. This is how we communicate all of our missions in the game," Edmondson enthuses, as he zaps Tanner into the consciousness of a cop by way of illustration.
"What you can see here is that we're now controlling a cop who's in the middle of a chase. It's an important objective for us to complete, and we need to find some way of stopping that car." With this, he swerves the cop-painted Dodge Charger into a wall and smashes it up. As it crumples, he zooms out, shifts into a different cop car, and immediately resumes chasing the bad guy, while the previous cop's A.I. maneuvers itself to re-enter the fray.
"We can hop from car to car, but we can also look ahead and see if we can block the road rather than simply chase him." With this, he shifts to a conveniently placed 18-wheeler driving in the opposite direction and uses the big rig to block the road before shifting back into one of the police cruisers. "We have all kinds of dynamic elements like that," he beams. "The final game will include big rigs, tow trucks, and even car transporters that you can shift into to set up unique gameplay possibilities." While the demo on show in May was very early in the game's development, the potential for both single-player and multiplayer gameplay is clearly evident.
It's a remarkably ambitious approach to the structure of an open-world game, especially to the mission management within it. While justified by a metastory with more than a hint of Life on Mars-style sci-fi, the core takeaway at this early point is that the new gameplay ideas are the primary concern, with the story line crafted to explain the gameplay without feeling the need to remain overly realistic. "It's an incredibly complicated undertaking," Edmondson explains, "but we think it's a unique approach to this kind of game." He's certainly right about that.