I've now fixed my signature. And I'm glad that, so far, everyone has agreed to the multiple career concept of mine, which will really help Reflections push the driving experience of the Driver franchise beyond that of any game.

Ahhh, and I see that your sig is in the same format as mine, my friend. My sig is really a spoof of TK's phrase.

Yes it does look much like yours, Driverman2006.

As for the approach of the next Driver, we need Reflections to follow a new approach, much like what's been mentioned often around the Driver forum and the 4F's of Great Game Design (Fun, Fairness, Feedback, and Feasibility) must be taken in to account for the game in order to get a job well done.

Oooo the 4 Fs. I never thought of that! I couldn't agree more!

I learned about it and several other things in the book that I'm currently reading called the "Official Guide To 3D Gamestudio", which is a way that most game developers start off on making their first games. As I learn how to look more at creating a video game, it will help me a lot on being one step closer for getting me ready making my way in to the Video Game Industry.

Oh that's cool, man! Good luck with that! Maybe I'll buy a copy of that book too.

Yes, you should buy it if you want to learn how to create computer or video games. I bought my copy of the book at Borders, so maybe you can get it there too. It must've cost me around $39.99.

Yep, I have a Borders in my town too, I'll see if they have it. You know, I have a cool idea for a "Driv3r Remix". I'll make a new thread about it if anybody's interested. Anybody like to know my "vision" of Driv3r Remix? It could save the Driver series before the next Driver game.

I'm curious.....

Well you can check it out now!

What kind of approach for the next Driver (360, PS3, Wii)?

DRIVER, INTENSE ACTION:

First, I want to be able to hop in a car or on a bike, and have the choice to go into a dash view. When I hit the gas, I want the vehicle to rumble to life, either with a smooth take off or an asphalt tearing burn out. The interior of the car will shake a bit, the meters will respond to the input, and the scenery will fly by as it travels from 0 to 60 in five seconds and under.

A cop will catch me speeding, and the pursuit will begin. If I choose to slow down and park, he'll step out and offer a speeding ticket, if I keep going, he'll call in for back up if needed, but no shooting at this point.

The difference this game needs to offer from any other chase game, is to amp up the level of intensity and the feeling that you're in the midst of a high speed, edge of your seat chase of your life. Whether they accomplish that with special effects like debris, smoke, sparks, blur effects, cracked windshields, sound effects, speed, heavy traffic weaving, plenty of jumps and tight turns, hopefully they'll capture it.

For the missions, I'd also like the choice to pick a career out of 10 plus driving/racing/riding careers.

Lets think about how the realism of the whole entire game and the amount of on-foot that will take place inside the game. These features, the character customization, and multiplayer are what need to be considered for the next Driver game. And, of course, what you mentioned in your last post, InsaneDriver06.

The realism must go deeper than ever. Cops should function as they would based on the laws of driving (depending on the location that you're in), so you will have to be more careful than ever when trying to avoid them and they will be more relentless (it's just like the word that matt_jon used) and harder to lose than ever before. Vehicles must function (the features of what a vehicle can do), handled (i.e. being washed at a car wash, fixed up with the right tools, given customizable parts for improving the looks or even the performance of it, damage is as realistic as possible, can get rusty or dirty, etc.), and be able to drive realistic on all kinds of different land, which can even affect the vehicle itself (driving in a puddle of water will splash water on to the vehicle, a puddle of mud will make the vehicle dirty), and the ability to drive realistic in the air (i.e. going as far up as possible, etc.), and on the water. The weather and time of day should change as realistic as it would in the real world (i.e. being cloudy, snowy, rainy, a clear sky, morning, noon, afternoon, and night time that all affect the looks and conditions of weather in the game). People must be seen walking about to either work, their home, or someplace else. Crime should go on in the city with law enforcement chasing criminals down. Bums walk the streets along with many other kinds of people (middle, poor, and rich). Cops ride different things (bikes, motorbikes, police cars, etc.), law is enforced (people are given tickets or arrested), eating and drinking (at restaurants, homes, etc.), reading, listening to music, people singing and playing instruments, people going shopping, and anything else that is seen in the real world. Everything should function as realistic as possible and just as in GTA IV, the animations should look different always, so it will not every look the same as it did in the previous free-roaming games. All kinds of vehicles are seen and even driveable in the game such as trains, helicopters, planes, boats, automobiles, ATVs, motorbikes, motorscooters, etc. You should be able to go in almost every part of the game, especially the interiors (gun shops, stores, restaurants, homes, apartments, etc.). It should definitely be the most realistic game in approach to a real city.

On-foot must allow you to have all kinds of weapons, abilities, interiors to explore, things to buy, and more. RPG elements should suit certain parts of the game well, especially for giving your character improvements in his/her own skills.

Multiplayer should be similar to that of GTA:SA, where you can play with others and do anything with them, except that it should possibly be online and that you can go as far of a distance from another player as what wasn't possible in GTA:SA. Certain missions can be done in co-op fashion such as being a law enforcer, fire fighter, ambulance driver, etc.

If all of these things can be done just as I had displayed in my post, I'm sure that we will get what we want from the next Driver game and have it be a memorable experience. Maybe it will even be honored by many gamers who weren't Driver fans and it will even gain awards based on its ratings. Lets hope that this will be the future of the Driver series.

All of those things would be great to see, but the thing that will impact the game the most is the driving action, and driving related careers, more than the general atmosphere, which is helpful to experiencing a sense you're there, but it doesn't necessarily make the game fun.

So instead of going to a restaurant to eat, you'd take your money and invest it in your vehicle. Instead of buying a new house, you'd buy a new vehicle, or a chance to enter a competition to start a new career.

Not saying eating or buying houses can't be fun in a game, but the focus should definitely always come back to driving/racing/riding tasks/careers, so Driver doesn't lose focus and become another GTA, where you might spend half the game buying sandwiches instead of cars.

Driving careers and all that it involves. Example: Highway Patrol: Offer a chance to go through drive throughs or donut shops to get back some health so you can continue your pursuit of dangerous drivers and other related missions.

Well, lets look at the 4F's of Great Game Design to determine what Driver will need. Fun, Fairness, Feedback, and Feasibiility are all according to the 4F's of Great Game Design, which will make a game look as best as it ever can be.

Fun is to entertain the player with its gameplay. It's just as it is said in my book: "Give players a fun, fresh, and original experience- one that is sure to encourage replaying and word-of-mouth advertisement. The main rule of thumb is to get people's attention. If you're game is offbeat, offers cathartic release, or is irreverent, it will get played. Make players excited about the options you give them in your game. We will look at these options later when you cover puzzles, but always remember that if your choices are unnecessary or stale, the game will lack the luster it needs. Always beware of tedium! Tedium (expecially Tedium with a capital T, caused by boring repetitive gameplay) is the Fun Killer. The whole purpose of a game, by its very definition, is fun."

Fairness is to avoid frustration. I'll make it as simple as possible. The difficulty of the whole game must not be something that most players have a chance of not being able to play through. Stuntman is a bad example of this as it keeps the difficulty so high that many players will likely get frustrated at many points within the game and usually the experts on driving in video games will come on top. The difficulty must be at a fair level, so if it is too high, that might just ruin the fun of a game. If, in Super Mario Kart, a designer could program those other racers to be so fast and so smart they'd beat you every single time, but where would the fun be in that?

Feedback is having the player know what he/she needs to do in order to play the game with ease. If a player does something wrong, he should be able to fix the problem somehow and know how to do it. The developer must also try to punish the player with what they do wrong and reward the player for doing something that is right. Otherwise, the player might continue doing what's wrong and getting something good out of it, which is not right at all. If you fall to your death, you would usually lose a life. That would be a punishment. Or if you lost at some point in a level, you would go back to your saved point and have to start from there. This is where feedback makes its way into the game. A player is eager to know that they do something right or wrong so they can adjust their play style and master the game.

Feasibility is about encouraging player immersion whenever you can. In this case, you must avoid inconsistencies and a little terror called "feature creep." Feature creep is when a game designer is too close to the project and begins adding "neat features" that really add nothing to the game or don't fit with the original game concept. An example would be that there is a Survival Horror game in which the player is introduced to a switch that, if he pulls, it drops a bunch of brightly colored soda pop machines out of the celing to squash all the mutants, the game has choked: this fun little feature has destroyed the original concept and the player's anticipations of the game being a serious horror game. A good rule of thumb is to develop and stick with a written game design document (i.e. a storyboard or a game flowchart), which is sort of like a blueprint for your game. Game design teams that stray overly far from their original game outlines find themselves wasting production time and encouraging feature creep. You must keep your games simple. Simplicity is a key factor in any good game design. It does not have to mean a few possibilities with simplicity (look at chess), but creating a really good, well-balanced, simple game system is a much harder task than creating a very complex one. Players are notourious for loading up a game and playing it; they hate to be bothered with reading the game manual or having to look up a walk-through guide online. If a player has to use a walk-through and every available cheat code to get through your game with his character alive, you have not done your job. If the player consistently feels lost and frustrated, you have failed to make a great game. As Atari veteran Mark Cerny puts it, "Keep the rules of the game simple. Ideally, first-time players should understand and enjoy the game without instructions."

While you keep things simple, you might want to consider keeping your game flexible because "the next generation is really about choice, and emergence, and continuous experience." It's not about individual levels." Ken Levin, in an interview about Irrational Games' upcoming game Bioshock, told people, "We want to make a game where a walk-through is useless. That's where games need to go.... I'd much rather play a game where I can say 'Oh, I had this experience,' and someone else can say, 'I did that part in a totally different way.' It's about thinking of different opportunities for every play style, and making it interesting for each of them."

When you go through creating a video game, you should follow the 4F's OGGD (Of Great Game Design) and listen closely to what they describe that your game needs. This is certainly what Reflections must do for its Driver franchise for now and on.

And yes, you're right, InsaneDriver06. It would be much better off if we were able to spend our money on the vehicles that we have and on what we would love to buy as being our new vehicles. This is a better direction, which can really help boost the driving experience further. With this in mind, we won't see a GTA game, it will be Driver's own way of rewarding you money to be the things that will enhance the driving experience further. And by not focusing on any of those other things for you to buy (i.e. houses, food, clothes, etc.), this will make a lot more room for you to have vehicles available in the game and for you to buy any of those vehicles, so it would be actually better for the game to have a lot more vehicles with the extra space for it than random stuff. It would be considered pointless to have something that is not even part of the original concept of Driver such as RPG and simulation elements because Driver is mainly about the driving. On-foot should mainly just deal with getting around in the game such as how to get somewhere (running, climbing, jumping, shimmy on a ledge, rolling, crouching, crawling, etc.) and how to get past someone (through weaponry, combat, stealth, etc.). As long as the Driver games are fair at difficulty (not getting the player way too frustrated), offer good ways of fun (nothing pointless), have no feature creeps and inconsistencies, and offer ways that the player will not need a walkthrough or even a manual beside them, the game will do splendid. I hope that Driver doesn't do any of the 4'FsOGGD the wrong way.

When I look at the GTA games, they do certain things that are pointless, but then again, the franchise has begun to be about the whole entire concept of what makes up non-linear gameplay and in immersing the player in a city that has lots of different things for you to do, so it does make sense to have RPG and simulation elements join in with the game. Sometimes, the elements do come in handy and are fun, but it is not always that way.

As for Driver, it can do more exploring and freedom as well as non-linearity with its vehicles and driving experience. The on-foot will be slightly smaller, but still will offer you a great deal of on-foot abilities and even having places to be explored (both interiors and exteriors of locations). The action part of the on-foot and of searching to find hidden things (dealing with the career that you are currently on) will also be the focus.

quote:

Originally posted by Assaultmachine1:

...It would be much better off if we were able to spend our money on the vehicles that we have and on what we would love to buy as being our new vehicles. This is a better direction, which can really help boost the driving experience further. With this in mind, we won't see a GTA game, it will be Driver's own way of rewarding you money to be the things that will enhance the driving experience further. And by not focusing on any of those other things for you to buy (i.e. houses, food, clothes, etc.), this will make a lot more room for you to have vehicles available in the game and for you to buy any of those vehicles, so it would be actually better for the game to have a lot more vehicles with the extra space for it than random stuff. It would be considered pointless to have something that is not even part of the original concept of Driver such as RPG and simulation elements because Driver is mainly about the driving. On-foot should mainly just deal with getting around in the game such as how to get somewhere (running, climbing, jumping, shimmy on a ledge, rolling, crouching, crawling, etc.) and how to get past someone (through weaponry, combat, stealth, etc.). As long as the Driver games are fair at difficulty (not getting the player way too frustrated), offer good ways of fun (nothing pointless), have no feature creeps and inconsistencies, and offer ways that the player will not need a walkthrough or even a manual beside them, the game will do splendid. I hope that Driver doesn't do any of the 4'FsOGGD the wrong way.

When I look at the GTA games, they do certain things that are pointless, but then again, the franchise has begun to be about the whole entire concept of what makes up non-linear gameplay and in immersing the player in a city that has lots of different things for you to do, so it does make sense to have RPG and simulation elements join in with the game. Sometimes, the elements do come in handy and are fun, but it is not always that way.

As for Driver, it can do more exploring and freedom as well as non-linearity with its vehicles and driving experience. The on-foot will be slightly smaller, but still will offer you a great deal of on-foot abilities and even having places to be explored (both interiors and exteriors of locations). The action part of the on-foot and of searching to find hidden things (dealing with the career that you are currently on) will also be the focus.

Well said.

Yes and just to let you know, InsaneDriver06, I would highly recommend for you to understand the 4F's of Great Game Design because they are definitely what a game needs to have in order for it to be successful. It is right there in that very post of mine, so you should read it if you really wish to make your way in to the Video Game Industry, but you don't have to if you don't want to.

quote:

Originally posted by Assaultmachine1:
Yes and just to let you know, InsaneDriver06, I would highly recommend for you to understand the 4F's of Great Game Design because they are definitely what a game needs to have in order for it to be successful. It is right there in that very post of mine, so you should read it if you really wish to make your way in to the Video Game Industry, but you don't have to if you don't want to.

Yeah, I read the 4 F's. Very interesting. I like plenty of modes and gameplay options in the games I play, which I think falls under feasibility, as long as they relate to the game's overall concept, they should be left in the game IMO.