Interviews// Driver: San Francisco's Martin Edmondson

There's been a lot of buzz about Driver: San Francisco lately. And why not? It's looking like a true return to form for the open-world racing series that redefined a genre back in 1999.

In 2011, Reflections and original series creator Martin Edmondson has another feature that innovates in the space - Shift, an ability for players to zap from car to car via a bird's eye viewpoint of the entire world map.

You may recall my extensive multiplayer preview of the game (if not, you can read it here) a while back, and Marcus' take on the single-player experience. Now comes the chat with Martin about the series' history and the prospects of using Shift in the future.


SPOnG: You’ve worked on the Driver series since the very beginning. What was your approach with San Francisco?

Martin Edmondson: Right from the beginning we approached this from the point of view of two core aims. The first one was to bring back the feeling of Driver. Driver’s quite a unique game - the way it deals with Hollywood style car chases in a real city environment. The handling of the cars, the big tail-out slides from the 70s muscle cars, soft suspension, too much power for the chassis, spinning wheels, burning rubber... not like a game-y kind of car chase, but a Hollywood car chase.

That’s always what we’ve been after. So first thing was to try and get that feeling back, so fans of the original can sit down with a controller and just feel that Driver is back. And that also involved bringing the characters back from the first game. The city of San Francisco is known for being the most famous car chase city of all time, so we set the game there. The film director mode makes a return as well, to allow you to build your own car chase movies. So, bringing all that back was one side of it.

The other side was to bring something new and innovative to the series. Everything we’ve ever done has been pretty innovative, I think. Even all the way back to the Shadow of the Beast games on the Amiga, Stuntman, Destruction Derby or even Driver itself. There’s always some level of innovation in there and we wanted to continue that. That’s where Shift came from, which is the ability for the player to move between multiple cars instantaneously, rapidly, with no loading and no delays, even from one side of the city to the other.


SPOnG: As the creator of the series, did you feel that it fell a bit by the wayside? I believe you weren’t involved with the last Driver game that was released...

Martin Edmondson: No, I wasn’t. Yeah, it struggled at certain times. Driv3r is the one that people talk about because we extended the out-of-car features. In Driver 2 we had the ability to swap cars - and in fact Driver 2 was the first game to ever do that - but we tried to push it further in Driv3r. The thing is, we didn’t invest the amount of time that we needed to get that really finished and polished.

And of course, Grand Theft Auto 3 was out there and Rockstar did a great job on it. Driv3r just suffered, simply put. I was actually pretty pleased with the driving sections, and I think the car handling and crashes were spot-on and the cities looked great... but generally it definitely struggled.


SPOnG: I spoke to producer Marie-Jo Leroux and designer Jean-Sebastien Decant recently, and they mentioned you’re a bit of an auto fanatic and have masses of cars. What’s your favourite?

Martin Edmondson: I wouldn’t say I have masses of cars (laughs). I have had masses of cars in the past though, I got a bit silly collecting cars at one stage. I’m much more sensible now that I’m older. My daily drive is a Mercedes SL63. Big block V8, no turbo, no super-charger... almost like an American muscle car really.


SPOnG: There’s a lot in Driver San Francisco that feels familiar, but the Shift feature within the story feels like you’re gunning for a Life on Mars kind of setup. Was that show an influence at all?

Martin Edmondson: Yeah, that’s a good analogy for the single-player story. It’s Tanner dealing with a situation that at first seems real, but then he quickly realises everything is not what it seems. Things that are going on in his investigation are at this stage in his head and he’s trying to unravel all of this.


SPOnG: With the multiplayer mode, a lot of it seems like it could get very chaotic. I was told earlier that the game will have six-player online play for public matches and eight-player functionality for private matches. What was the reason behind that, was it too chaotic?

Martin Edmondson: What we had to do was actively control how many maximum players there are in each mode. And this is just through hundreds and hundreds of hours of testing. For some of these features, there’s a sweet spot, and if you go beyond it everything descends into chaos and playing the game is just not fun anymore.

But in a private match if you’re with your mates and you really want that chaos, then why should we deny you that? That’s why we allow eight players in that situation. Some of the game modes are perfect with four players, bit chaotic with six, total mayhem with eight. We try and limit those on a per-game basis to keep things enjoyable.


SPOnG: Being able to Shift out of one car, move to the opposite side of the world map and land into another car without any slowdown or loading - that is some technical accomplishment. How were you able to achieve that?

Martin Edmondson: First of all, the game’s had a long development schedule. It’s taken four and a half years. We also had to build all the core rendering tech and the physics engine ourselves - it’s all proprietary tech created at Reflections. We didn’t take any core components off the shelf at all.

So that takes time, but it was also the only way to do it, especially if we wanted to hit 60 frames per second. In a city like San Francisco, where you can get to the top of Russian Hill or Nob Hill, looking right across the bay, it’s important to get that detail in. And we draw the world right to the edge. We don’t fog stuff. If you are four or five miles away from the TransAmerican Tower, you can see it as if you were really there. It’s definitely been the biggest technical achievement in the studio’s history, for sure.