The latest game in the Driver series has been a hugely ambitious project for Ubisoft Reflections. But after more than four years of development, the studio has created a game which will allow drivers to tackle the streets of San Francisco, whether they're sliding across the road or floating above it. John Hill pops down to the Newcastle studio to find out more.

IT’S only been five or six seconds, and the sound of you hitting the wall is entirely drowned out by your frustrated yell. Your friends are off around the bend, jeering at you. It’s the curse of the driving game, and it pretty much means your race is over.

But instead of plodding around the track backwards to pass the time, wouldn’t it be great if you could just transport yourself into one of those cars speeding off into the distance?

It’s this sort of thinking that gave birth to “shifting”, a gameplay feature which has put an interesting spin on the latest Driver title from Newcastle game studio Ubisoft Reflections. The idea is that, with a few simple clicks, you can zoom up into the clouds and select a different car to plonk yourself into without re-starting the game.

“What shifting allows us to do is keep the player in the action all the time“, says studio founder Martin Edmondson. “In a race situation, it’s carefully controlled, but it’s great for things such as a Capture the Flag game.

“It’s like a scene from The Matrix, in that one of your opponents can pop up in front of you at any time. It creates a frantic energy, nervousness and paranoia.”

Driver: San Francisco is the result of several years of intensity. Planning for the game effectively started in early 2007, and there was a change in direction in 2009. But tomorrow, the studio will release a game that drew on the talents of up to 220 Newcastle-based staff at its peak, as well as over 150 other specialists and contractors worldwide.

“Innovation is very hard in driving games, as you’re effectively based in reality”, says Martin’s brother and company managing director Gareth Edmondson. “We’ve tried to smash out of there completely and innovate in an extreme way.”

Driver: San Francisco takes up the story from 2004’s Driv3r, the game released when Reflections was part of Atari. Cop John Tanner is again called upon to hunt down the malignant Jericho after he busts out of custody during a prison transfer.

However, Tanner falls victim to a crash which sees him sink into a coma. It’s this little plot device which allows the “shift” function to come into play, allowing Tanner to leap between drivers in his dream state while clues about his real state pop into the plot at various points.

Mind you, there’s a sense that this new title isn’t just another sequel. The rushed release of Driv3r by cash-strapped Atari prompted Martin Edmondson’s resignation from the company and a subsequently-settled lawsuit, but he returned to oversee this one. In the intervening period, Reflections brought out Driver: Parallel Lines and a PSP title dubbed Driver 76, and were also snapped up by Ubisoft in 2007.

Amidst all the talk of quality, setting high targets, and re-drawing the conventions of driving games, there’s a strong impression that Ubisoft Reflections is now a studio with the security and drive to throw itself into a game with lofty ambitions.

First of all, there’s the “shift” feature. Part of the reason Ubisoft Reflections re-started its pre-production process in 2009 was to make the most of this neat trick, which both the company and its new Canadian parent felt could be pushed even further.

It’s hard enough to develop that sort of effect on a regular day, but the team had also already raised the bar by deciding the game should run at 60 frames a second. While a few games such as Burnout run at this speed, it’s not unusual to see games running at 30fps.

“It meant we had to draw twice as fast as most games, and that’s a big technical ask. Some of the middleware stuff had to be re-written and re-written to improve performance, and that can be incredibly slow”, says Martin. “A lot of people say they can’t tell the difference, but it’s so obvious when you see one after the other. The biggest difference is that everything in the world is moving as quickly as the eye can register it, and there are huge benefits in terms of responsiveness and control.”

So you’ve set yourself the task of drawing a world twice as fast, while being able to leap across town into another vehicle in seconds. You’d think that’d be reason enough to have a nice quiet made-up city with tight corners and not many complicated buildings to draw at once.

Or, y’know, you could just set the whole thing in the eclectic, hilly sprawl of San Francisco.

“The film Bullitt was a big influence on the Driver series, so it was a simple location to choose conceptually”, says Martin. “But ask any game developer and they’ll tell you San Francisco is a huge problem. If you can choose to avoid doing it you probably will, as you’ll have the techie guys screaming at you about the problems it creates.

“Most games are designed so that you can see a little way in front of you and maybe a bend. You can’t do that in San Francisco. It’s hilly, so you can see right across the bay when you go to the top of Russian Hill, and you’ve got a block system of roads which means streets go for miles in one direction towards the horizon without a curve.

“We decided early on that we weren’t going to cheat by just fogging it, as we wanted the player to be able to locate themselves without constantly looking at the game map.”