Next Driver | Forums

[PeaceMaker_101]

I am not thinking too much. I just don't like Shift or any of the weird cars flying all over the scenery etc. I like DSF when I get lost into the driving, but every time I need to use Shift, I want to walk outside or the story pulls out that unbelievable junk I dislike the game. Driver1&2 on the other hand were great from start to end, Driv3r was mostly good too.

Fast-paced is not the same as good IMO. And I could go on about how flawed DPL was despite being around 80/20, as well as that quality has little to do with sales these days. People buy shooters and yearly sports updates.

I don't see what's so bad about including a feature like shift in a Driver game. If Reflections can offer it in a way that involves using many more types of vehicles (besides just cars alone) and also use it with the on foot gameplay (like for possessing pedestrians), then I see a lot more use that it has left.

This time around, it seems like Rockstar is running out of steam by only making future GTA games that are about realism, whereas Driver is all about the fun, as is Just Cause 2 (and hopefully that will remain in JC3). I see Ubisoft really fleshing out the Driver franchise in ways people could never imaginable possible, if all goes well. We can finally see a very promising open world contender against GTA (though with a less realistic and much different take on the crime setting).

On foot needs to come back (with guns obviously), shift was good at first, but its really just a gimmick. They should however leave shift in as an unlockable, it would probably be stuck to local shift, no zooming out, which is fine with me.

I don't see how going from car chase to gunfight and back again slows down the pace. Sure, it wasn't done all that well in D3 and DPL, but it can happen. To me shifting around slows down the game, looking for a decent sports car forever until I just go back to the garage, which is really boring.

If they're gonna keep shift, then add these (at least for free roam):
* Spawn Car option
* Garage-On-The-Go: expanding on 'spawn car', you could change colors, upgrades, whatevers available
* Stack cars for crashing
* Ability to stop(and start) cars so they don't always drive off
* Place ramps in the city, especially if its a flat town. Also those "speed pads" seen in arcade racers, they'll shoot you in whichever direction they point, even if its sideways
* Change the time and weather during shift mode (for time, a clock would appear and you can wind it back and forth with an analog stick)

With these, shift would stay alive for another game and be more useful. If we could have all of that AND walking/shooting I'd be as happy as a little girl

Why make shift optional, when it's worked to Reflections favor? That would be tossing out another feature that has lots of potential--something that we really haven't seen much of since film director mode's introduction in D1. It's been a long, long time since we saw Reflections take on a whole new brilliant idea. Heck, maybe we can see more driving missions like the ones found in Stuntman (a really underrated title) as part of the next Driver game.

[Ubi-Mush]

Hi guys, another Driver hasn't been announced yet, but should one be I'll be sure to direct them to this thread.

[ManoelM]

I have a great idea how to make the next Driver game even more interesting! I've posted this already on another forum and I'll post it here now.

Do you remember in San Andreas, the mission where you had to fly to liberty city? After this mission, everyone wanted to go there in SA. Why? Because it was rare and mysterious, and that's what drives the people nuts (like the Dodge Monaco police car which you can't drive in DSF hehe). Just search on Youtube and see how many results there are for Liberty City in San Andreas. If I recall correctly, there was even a chase planned in the district of Portland.

Anyway, I am also one of the oldschool players like Spooky101_974 who was there from the start. And I was thinking of Chicago aswell for the next game. Even if it's flat, you would still have those amazing bridges and you can always add ramp-like objects around the city. And another thing which would be really cool to add, would be movie challenges again. This time with real licenses from each movie!

But now imagine the game is playing in Chicago, and you want to do the Bullit challenge. Well, obviously it would be stupid if the Bullit challenge played in Chicago. So I was thinking, maybe Reflections could make a very small part of San Francisco, where this Challenge takes place. I tell you, this would drive people nuts. Because they'll try to get out of the "available zone" and try to explore the city and how big it is, but they will not be able to hahaha! This is just fantastic. It's like the city says "Hey, look at me, I am rare, mysterious and beautiful. You can't explore me in free roam or anywhere else. So come and explore me NOW." and you know you can't! :P Fantastic, just fantastic. It's a slap in the face to all the players, and I love it!

And so they could make small parts of various cities for different movie Challenges, hell not only cities but also countrysides, deserts etc for like The Dukes of Hazzard or Vanishing Point. Wouldn't that be great?

Such a shame the Edmondson brothers are gone. I hope it will still go well!

[J_Frumpleberg]

Why shift when you can get out of a car and run around causing havoc? Why make shift optional when we can just scrap it completely for on foot mode?

Shift would have been better if cars crashed in a realistic way. I'm not just talking about the deformation here, which was lacking due to licensed cars, but I'm also talking about how the cars behave in an accident. They put training wheels on for all the people who complained that it was too hard, you flip your car all the time or come to a complete stop and lose the mission. In DSF when you hit someone, it barely slows you down, and you don't lose control of the car, you keep going straight. Trucks and bigger vehicles are completely useless because crashing into cars is somehow boring now. With the addition of shift, cars should crumple like aluminum foil and flip to no end, because you can just hop into another car. I think they should do this anyway, but shift gives them more reason too

[PeaceMaker_101]

I have a great idea how to make the next Driver game even more interesting! I've posted this already on another forum and I'll post it here now.

Do you remember in San Andreas, the mission where you had to fly to liberty city? After this mission, everyone wanted to go there in SA. Why? Because it was rare and mysterious, and that's what drives the people nuts (like the Dodge Monaco police car which you can't drive in DSF hehe). Just search on Youtube and see how many results there are for Liberty City in San Andreas. If I recall correctly, there was even a chase planned in the district of Portland.

Anyway, I am also one of the oldschool players like Spooky101_974 who was there from the start. And I was thinking of Chicago aswell for the next game. Even if it's flat, you would still have those amazing bridges and you can always add ramp-like objects around the city. And another thing which would be really cool to add, would be movie challenges again. This time with real licenses from each movie!

But now imagine the game is playing in Chicago, and you want to do the Bullit challenge. Well, obviously it would be stupid if the Bullit challenge played in Chicago. So I was thinking, maybe Reflections could make a very small part of San Francisco, where this Challenge takes place. I tell you, this would drive people nuts. Because they'll try to get out of the "available zone" and try to explore the city and how big it is, but they will not be able to hahaha! This is just fantastic. It's like the city says "Hey, look at me, I am rare, mysterious and beautiful. You can't explore me in free roam or anywhere else. So come and explore me NOW." and you know you can't! :P Fantastic, just fantastic. It's a slap in the face to all the players, and I love it!

And so they could make small parts of various cities for different movie Challenges, hell not only cities but also countrysides, deserts etc for like The Dukes of Hazzard or Vanishing Point. Wouldn't that be great?

Such a shame the Edmondson brothers are gone. I hope it will still go well!

Great idea, ManoeIM. I agree that having small sections within the next Driver game like that would be nice. More interestingly, in order to kind of change up these missions more next time, there could be an option for co-op. For example, in the famous Bullitt scene-based mission, one person can take the role of the good guy, while another player can be the bad guy, allowing for some competitive play and an interesting ranking/leaderboards system to expand on the replay value even more.

Why shift when you can get out of a car and run around causing havoc? Why make shift optional when we can just scrap it completely for on foot mode?

Shift would have been better if cars crashed in a realistic way. I'm not just talking about the deformation here, which was lacking due to licensed cars, but I'm also talking about how the cars behave in an accident. They put training wheels on for all the people who complained that it was too hard, you flip your car all the time or come to a complete stop and lose the mission. In DSF when you hit someone, it barely slows you down, and you don't lose control of the car, you keep going straight. Trucks and bigger vehicles are completely useless because crashing into cars is somehow boring now. With the addition of shift, cars should crumple like aluminum foil and flip to no end, because you can just hop into another car. I think they should do this anyway, but shift gives them more reason too

Just to make things more convenient, I'll quote two of my recent posts (combining them into one post to make the quote seem easier to read) in the Next-Gen Driver Wishlist thread here to demonstrate that shift is far from done, in terms of what it can offer towards the fun factor (and making Driver a lot more unique than most open world games out there).

With that aside, I thought that I'd expand on this post with a nice list of ideas on what I think we deserve to see in the next Driver game:

- Shift has been enhanced more than ever before: Tanner can now occupy virtually any type of vehicle you can imagine. Use cars, boats, motorbikes, planes, helicopters, tanks, etc.

-On foot and guns are back! Use shift to possess any pedestrian on the streets and take control of them. Later, you'll find that a lot of interesting story and activities around the city are possible with on foot and shift. Disguise yourself to gather intel or sneak stealthily into certain buildings or other restricted/off-limits places in the game. Use it to prevent yourself from getting completely killed off in the game (though it might kind of make the game a little too easy this way).

- a pretty good variety of difficulty settings help you customize your game to your own liking (i.e. how enemies react, permadeath or Game Over after wrecking your vehicle or dieing in one person's body, etc.)

- With the newly expanded shift, you can also do many crazy, over-the-top moves in the on foot sections of the game, like filling up your ability bar to perform limited bullet-time kills (where you can see your enemy die like in Max Payne 3 and where you can take control of the bullet or rocket to drive it into your enemy), etc. The possibilities seem like they're endless.

- a story that's more comic book-like is now more possible and may seem like an excellent idea, now that Tanner can use shift and his abilities in so many different ways. Take down Jericho and many other baddies in this game. Expect tons of wrecked vehicles, explosions, bullets flying everywhere, etc. Totally explosive, over-the-top action for both the driving and on foot gameplay.

- use many different weapons, including guns and melee ones, which can be customized to your own liking.

- customize the look and feel of your vehicles (not just cars, but every other type of vehicle there is)

- unlicensed vehicles: allowing for all kinds of incredible damage, explosions, and physics that weren't possible in DSF

- on foot melee and stealth moves

- a constantly changing day/night weather cycle in the game

- All kinds of new multiplayer ideas open up with using both shift and on foot gameplay.

- mind control shift gameplay: take possession of your enemies and cause them to commit suicide, turn on their own teammates, etc. Take control of their bullets to prevent Tanner from getting any damage or to hit a particular target that is in the direction that the bullet is facing. And, of course, this would be done with filling up the ability bar, making it sparingly used (to prevent the game from being too easy).

- ways to change the traffic system, weather, etc. With the 360 version, you could even have Kinect features, where you don't have to go through so many menus, just to change something simple like the time of day or weather. Instead, you just say, "change time of day to dawn," or "change weather to rain."

- a constantly changing day/night weather cycle in the game. With weather and wind conditions, you could see some pretty nice physics play out, too.

I think that the supernatural nature of DSF would completely need to be removed if shift were to not appear in the next Driver game. And that means we'd probably just end up seeing another D3, basically, which had a pretty boring, gritty feel to it. That isn't something that I would enjoy at all. Plus, it'd just make Reflections stuck again and have problems competing with other open world games.

The Just Cause games' grappling hook mechanic, while seeming like a gimmick at first, really makes the whole game's pacing feel very different from many games. Shift did the same for DSF. Do you really want to risk seeing another bland, samey-samey open world game that is too overly concerned with realism and is confused about what makes a game fun (like suspending a pretty big portion of realism to allow this to happen).

[ManoelM]

Great idea, ManoeIM. I agree that having small sections within the next Driver game like that would be nice. More interestingly, in order to kind of change up these missions more next time, there could be an option for co-op. For example, in the famous Bullitt scene-based mission, one person can take the role of the good guy, while another player can be the bad guy, allowing for some competitive play and an interesting ranking/leaderboards system to expand on the replay value even more.

Yeah man! Now that you're mentioning it, even in single player mode it would be cool to be able to choose who you're playing - the one who's getting chased, or the chaser himself.

The only thing here is how would they limit the city. Because with the other player controlling the car that is being chased, he can basically go anywhere. However, if he's the chaser, the area could be more limited with a system like in DSF - if you're too far away from the other car, you've lost. Which means you can't get that far away. It would need like some (red) walls like in DSF - but I think that would limit the area too much, also like in DSF multiplayer takedown. Maybe with next-gen it will be possible to just make these city areas bigger. And then say limit the time to 1 minute 30, and make that area only so big that from wherever you start, you will reach the limits of the area within 1 minute 30. I don't know, we'll have to see!

By the way - talking about supernatural nature. I'm wondering how they will do this if they add shift again, because Tanners out of the coma now.

Also a thing I'd like to say - I do think the game is realistic, but the part in which Tanner is in the coma (well most of the game) IS actually realistic - because he's in the hospital and the TV is on. It's all a psychological thing, and it can happen in reality too - what he hears enters the subconcious part of his brain, and that's where he dreams. And in his dreams, anything can happen. So I don't think that part is too unrealistic. In reviews and on various sites, they always talk about a superhero Tanner and blabla... this is all wrong, it's just a coma, and if people would research what happens during a coma on Google, they wouldn't be talking crap - so those reviewers are obviously very close minded. Just wanted to say that So in order to keep the realism it had now, it will be difficult, without having Tanner falling in a third (or second?) coma hehe.

[J_Frumpleberg]

DSF was bland, the colors were dull and washed out, crashes were boring, cars don't flip correctly or enough, the city was full of traffic, yet lifeless, wide open streets with easy turns, no offroading, invisible walls everywhere, at least Driv3r let you go most places on the map, there were a few invisible walls, but not everywhere

The only realism I care about is in the physics, even then the car handling needs to be fun

[PeaceMaker_101]

Yeah man! Now that you're mentioning it, even in single player mode it would be cool to be able to choose who you're playing - the one who's getting chased, or the chaser himself.

The only thing here is how would they limit the city. Because with the other player controlling the car that is being chased, he can basically go anywhere. However, if he's the chaser, the area could be more limited with a system like in DSF - if you're too far away from the other car, you've lost. Which means you can't get that far away. It would need like some (red) walls like in DSF - but I think that would limit the area too much, also like in DSF multiplayer takedown. Maybe with next-gen it will be possible to just make these city areas bigger. And then say limit the time to 1 minute 30, and make that area only so big that from wherever you start, you will reach the limits of the area within 1 minute 30. I don't know, we'll have to see!

By the way - talking about supernatural nature. I'm wondering how they will do this if they add shift again, because Tanners out of the coma now.

Also a thing I'd like to say - I do think the game is realistic, but the part in which Tanner is in the coma (well most of the game) IS actually realistic - because he's in the hospital and the TV is on. It's all a psychological thing, and it can happen in reality too - what he hears enters the subconcious part of his brain, and that's where he dreams. And in his dreams, anything can happen. So I don't think that part is too unrealistic. In reviews and on various sites, they always talk about a superhero Tanner and blabla... this is all wrong, it's just a coma, and if people would research what happens during a coma on Google, they wouldn't be talking crap - so those reviewers are obviously very close minded. Just wanted to say that So in order to keep the realism it had now, it will be difficult, without having Tanner falling in a third (or second?) coma hehe.

To solve the problem of being forced to recreate a pretty sizeable chunk of SF again (if that one Bullitt mission were included again) could simply be done with having certain sections of the game that you're not allowed to pass (much like how you couldn't pass the red barriers found in the earlier parts of DSF). As for the part about featuring Tanner in a coma again, Reflections could probably come up with something again as a new excuse (or, in this case, a premise). Heck, it could even take place during the coma that Tanner got himself into in DSF or just serve as an alternative dream of his. That part shouldn't be too complex for a group of talented writers to come up with.

DSF was bland, the colors were dull and washed out, crashes were boring, cars don't flip correctly or enough, the city was full of traffic, yet lifeless, wide open streets with easy turns, no offroading, invisible walls everywhere, at least Driv3r let you go most places on the map, there were a few invisible walls, but not everywhere

The only realism I care about is in the physics, even then the car handling needs to be fun

It sounds like you didn't get much enjoyment out of DSF. That's too bad because I was and still am pretty happy with the game. Sure, there had to be various sacrifices made to allow the game's development to eventually come to a stop, but that's just how it is with most games. The fact that there were so many things to do with the driving gameplay made it a ton of fun to play for me. Yes, I hope that Reflections does add back in those features which it had to compromise, like the better looking cars found in Driv3r, the off-road portions found in previous Driver games, etc. That still doesn't mean that shift has to (or that it should) be completely scrapped.

I enjoyed a lot of the creative freedom that was found in DSF's missions, especially where Jericho shifts into other cars, which then try to wreck your car (or the one where everyone/everything is frozen and you end up chasing after an ambulance). It'd be nice to see more of that in another Driver game and the random conversations you found as you shifted into different cars/vehicles within the game's city.

[J_Frumpleberg]

I like shift, but I prefer on foot. DSF was an ok game at best, the car handling was great, chases were good, but it still needs some work. Perhaps now that they have the framerate down they can work on the important parts of the game for a sequel.

The random conversations I didn't care for too much, apparently they recorded thousands of lines of dialogue just for people in the cars, but it seemed like I kept on jumping in on the same ten. Maybe conversations have more lines of dialogue than I thought.

As for including SF along with a new map, that could probably easily be done without just using a small portion of the map, look at TDU2, it had Oahu (I think) AND Ibiza on one disc, and both of those are pretty big and done in much more detail than SF. Oahu was somewhere around 1000 square miles

[ManoelM]

I also enjoyed the game a lot, I think it's the WAY you play it that makes it enjoyable. I spent at least some hours on multiplayer every day.

Just look at my channel, which I already posted, there's tons of secret stuff, and more that I will upload soon: http://youtube.com/manoelmdsf

You see that I found quite a lot of stuff. It's the details for me that make it such a good game.

I also loved the mission where everything freezes. I thought that the freeze would be something like spawn, impuls or shift later (I had not unlocked them all at the time, so I thought freeze was one of the missing ones) but unfortunately I was wrong! Would definitely have been a cool feature. The last mission with the bomb and the storm, and all the traffic being evacuated from the city is just fantastic. Missions were great! And dialogues always make me laugh. I do get the same ones often, but lately I've heard some I had never heard before. I don't know if they update them or something...

And the idea wasn't to make two huge cities - but to make one big city like SF (let's say Chicago) and then just small parts of cities/other places for the corresponding movie challenges. The red walls was what I was actually talking about, but that wouldn't give much ability in multiplayer to the one that is being chased. In DSF multiplayer takedown already I was sad that they put these walls, I don't understand why, in other multiplayer games this is sometimes not the case, let alone in free roam multiplayer. So I don't think it's a memory-fastness-thing.