Anyone who isn't aware of the Driver series must have been living under a rock for the past couple years. Driver is the reason to why the Grand Theft Auto 3 & Vice City were so successful. Reflections Interactive, the guys behind the Driver series, brought the concept of being to able get out of your vehicle and jack any other vehicle you wish in a totally 3D inviroment. What DMA Design did was basically take Reflections Interactive's ideas and build up on them to create a game much better than Driver 1 and 2. The announcement of Driver 3 got us excited because it gave Reflections Interactive the chance to go back and improve on their original idea.
In Driver 3, gamers will take the role of Tanner who is basically an undercover cop on a mission to take out a local carjacking network. The game will start in Miami, Florida. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto series, you won't spend the whole time in one single town on certain missions. After you finish your missions in Miami, you're off to Nice, France and Istanbul, Turkey. Similar to "The Getaway", the developers of Driver 3 will actually spend time in each city to successfully create an authentic virtual model. Thanks to this, players who live or know their way around in these cities will know their way around in Driver. In total, there will be around 150 miles of roads and over 30,000 buildings.
Reflections Interactive are also responsible for Stuntman on the PlayStation 2. Because of that, you can expect a very realistic physics engine because it will most likely be a bit more advanced version of Stuntman's engine. This will give Driver 3 another upperhand over the GTA games because you can expect alot more realistic crashes and car damage. For instance, if you ram the side of your vehicle in a wall, not only will you inflict damage to the vehicle's body but you'll shatter glass. Overall, there is much more damage done and shown in the Driver series than any other game on the market. The one thing we're upset about is licensed cars. At this point, the game will not feature any licensed vehicles.
Driver 3 won't be only about wild car chases and getting out on foot only to shoot someone, but gamers will also be able to enter buildings and fight thugs with hand-to-hand combat. Along with that, Driver 3 won't be as difficult as the previous games and Reflections Interactive has confirmed this. With that said, Driver 3 will allow gamers to take a different aproach to every single mission. Martin Edmundson, director at Reflections, describes one mission where your mission is to steal a car from a gang. They have a truck set to pick up the car. In this mission, you can either shoot the driver of the truck before the car arrives, load it up in, and act like your one of the rival gang's team members and then take the car to safety. You can also wait for the truck as it's returning with its cargo and hijack it. You can even just take out the truck's drivers and then head out to retreve the car.
Those wanting to play with friends may be a little disappointed because as of now, there are no plans for a multiplayer option. In fact, at this point don't even know if Reflections will take advantage of Xbox LIVE! and the Xbox's hard drive to offer new downloadable goodies such as new cars or maybe even cities.
Driver is slated for release sometime in the Spring of 2004. We'll keep you posted on any other information as it gets released! For now, enjoy the screenshots.
