How Reflections is steering the series back on course.
Driver: San Francisco is a game that has its chief character in a coma for much of its duration, his consciousness flitting across The City by the Bay as he shifts from car to car. If it's a little disingenuous to draw a parallel and suggest that Driver has been a series on life support these past few years, it's definitely been drifting out in the ether for some time; by the time Driver: San Francisco is released, it'll be nearly five years since the brand was last seen on a home console.
That's a long time for a series that was once at the cutting edge of driving games, a place that its developer Reflections sees as its rightful home. The Newcastle studio's PlayStation launch title Destruction Derby was a brilliant Ballardian funfair ride, and with Driver's release in 1998 it introduced a then-novel cinematic sensibility to its cars and open world.
A couple of years later Reflections could proudly boast that it beat Rockstar to the punch in delivering an open-world 3D game in which you could leave your car and walk around the city, being the first to offer the kind of digital tourism that became so prevalent in the decade that followed. But famously, the empire would soon all come tumbling down.
Source: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-12-behind-the-wheel-of-driver-san-francisco-preview
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