courtesy of ign
Today we kick off a week of Crackdown coverage brought directly to us from Real Time Worlds. Each day they'll go in-depth with one of the abilities in Crackdown with new screens and movies to illustrate their points.
Driving Skill Overview
Today I'll go through the different methods of progressing the Driving skill and explain how and why it's a little different to the rest of the skills.
Figuring out exactly what we wanted to do with the Driving skill was tricky, we knew we wanted a skill based on Driving - everybody loves to drive fast cars - but the very fact that our skill system means you need to progress towards a top level means that you need to make the base level a somewhat condensed version of the final results; because of this we had to be incredibly careful that we didn't cause an adverse effects on the handling of the vehicles when the player was at the base skill level. To counter this we decided to focus the Driving skill on Agency tech rather than driving abilities, which allowed us to keep the same set of solid, intuitive controls for all of the vehicles throughout the game. So, as the player progresses their Driving skill, they don't actually get any new abilities while driving the vehicles; what they get is far more impressive. Each new driving skill level grants the player access to the next version of each of the three Agency Vehicles: the Supercar, the Truck Cab and the SUV - I just love those Agency tech boys.
Similar to the way that the player has to collect orbs to progress the Agility skill, the player won't progress the Driving skill too far during normal play, instead it will require a slightly more focused approach to playing the game. We didn't want to simply reward skill for driving fast, doing donuts or skidding around corners, we wanted to really challenge the player to progress this skill - and believe me, getting your hands on the maxed out Agency SUV is worth every single nano-second of your time!
Inspiration
As I mentioned, the Driving skill is completely focused on gaining access to the ever more impressive versions of the Agency Vehicles. Rather than have completely separate vehicles for each level of progression, we quickly decided to make each of the Agency Vehicles transform physically from one level to the next. Our original versions of the vehicle transformation were far too close to the liquid metal style of the T 1000 in Terminator 2, which was something we wanted to avoid. We were really aiming for something more mechanical as we firmly believed that a solid, believable transformation would be more appropriate to the contemporary setting of our game world. Like I've said before, we want our Agency tech to appear to be at the very cutting edge of what may be possible in the here and now rather than 50 years into the future.
For the aesthetics we started looking at anything we could get our hands on that transformed from one mechanical shape to another, and what better than the Transformers movies and toys! Then we let the art team go nuts - which led to some fantastic results. ?º
For the functionality of the Supercar we looked at formula 1 cars, dragsters, anything that was really, really fast as our aim for this vehicle was to reach incredible speeds - fast, and still be easy to control. One of the issues we ran into - literally - was that of oncoming vehicles. When you're moving this fast - on the wrong side of the road - you have very little time to react to oncoming vehicles, so not only did we design the Supercar to travel at light speed and stick to the road like glue, we also made it scoop anything in it's path up into the air, allowing it to stay on course - albeit with a little reduction in speed for the pleasure.
The SUV was a completely different approach, for the Supercar we went under obstacles, with the SUV we wanted to go over them. The SUV was intended to handle any form of terrain that was thrown at it - even vertical walls! So we looked more at trial bikes than anything else as these things are the spiders of the vehicular world. We gave the SUV amazing grip on any surface at just about any angle, explosive acceleration in first gear, as much torque as we could muster from the Havok physics engine, and an extra special surprise at max level.
After those two were in the bag it was time for the big fella - the Truck Cab. We'd been under and over obstacles, now we wanted to go straight through them. We looked at just about every Hollywood sequence we had ever seen where an out of control truck is used to crash through police road blocks and any other unfortunate vehicle that happens to get in the way. So we set up the Truck to have massive weight, and maximum momentum, which meant that virtually nothing could stop it once it got going - but it just wasn't enough, it needed something else, something a little more 'Hollywood'. So we came up with the idea of not just ramming vehicles out of the way but blowing them the hell away too! We set up the truck to explode any vehicles it hit so long as it was travelling above a certain speed, and it suddenly clicked, we knew we had nailed all three Agency Vehicles.
Progression
As I have already stated, our goal was always to tie the progression of the skills to actions and activities that the player enjoyed performing during play. People loved running over the bad guys and watching as their ragdoll bodies slid up and over their roof, or crunched underneath the wheels of their vehicle, so we reward skills for that. We also had a very similar reaction to co-op Driving as we did with co-op Agility where everyone was creating their own impromptu races across the city - "race you one lap around the freeway…driving into the traffic…go!" So, we once again created checkpoint races specifically for vehicles that snaked along our favourite vehicle routes with set time limits for the races to be completed within. If the player completes the race within the specified time they will pass one of our 'Road Warrior' sub Achievements which will also reward the player with Driving skill points. The other thing that everyone loved to do was vehicle stunts, jumping massive distances, performing barrel rolls, doing flips, etc. So, if the player manages to successfully perform one of these stunts and land on their wheels then we reward them with Driving skill points. All great fun to try and all packed full of lovely skill points when accomplished.
Driving Abilities
At the base Driving skill each of the Agency Vehicles can already perform their key abilities, the Supercar scoops up obstacles, the SUV climbs over them and the Truck ploughs through them, but none of them will find it easy. The Supercar will take a pounding, slowing it down and causing damage, the SUV doesn't have the additional suspension it really needs to eat up the terrain as well as it eventually will, and the Truck will take a bit longer to get up to the speed where it can cause vehicles to explode on impact. By the time the Agent gets to the top level these shortcomings will be a distant memory. The Supercar is barely affected by a head on collision at 200+ mph and my God is this thing fast; the SUV can literally ride up the side of a mountain, and the Truck Cab is always there when you've absolutely, positively got to kill every last mo' fo' in your path! And that's not all; at the top level each vehicle gets a new special ability. The Supercar suddenly has forward facing twin machineguns that fire from either side of the vehicle, and they can do some serious damage. The SUV has the new ability to compress it's suspension then release using the spring from the vehicle's suspension to launch it into the air - jumping over a bus just as it looks as if you're about to smash straight into it is fantastic, and the scope for new stunts that suddenly open up is insane. The Truck always had problems getting up to top speed - it's a big fella - so we gave it a speed boost, allowing it to get to top speed in a matter of seconds - just be careful when you activate the boost!
With an additional sixty or so uniquely tuned and great fun gang & civilian vehicles to play around with too, the Crackdown driving experience is one of the things we're most proud of. Everyone has a different fave motor, which is always a good sign, but the top level SUV has to be my favourite vehicle in any game EVER!
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/...714/vids_1.html
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