What I Learned From Driver SF's Multiplayer

Teleporting into any car on the road...

How has only one videogame used this mechanic?

Driver San Francisco came out 10+ years ago and it's still a remarkable game for anybody, not just racing game fans. While there's lots of reasons for that, from its surprisingly great script, sheer amount of NPC dialogue, and presentation that holds up today, it's primarily because of one mechanic.

Taking notes from Battlefield 2 Modern Combat's hotswap mechanic, the team at Ubisoft Reflections brought this into the context of an open-world driving game, and while the campaign makes great use of it, where it really comes alive is multiplayer…

I've been hosting Multiplayer Nights on Discord, and one night, we ended up playing 3-4 hours of Driver San Francisco.

This is everything I learned from that session.

Lobby integration is something we really gave up on. Probably because lots of games did it poorly. Making you sit through multiple loading screens, clunky menus, or just boring environments to run around in with friends.

Driver's lobbies just let you and friends drive around in the same open-world you're going to be playing in, with any car on the road available, and any change made to your profile or powers updated instantly.

Whether you're tweaking things in menus, or driving into someone else tweaking menus with a semi-truck, it's something that keeps your attention far more effectively than staring at a lobby screen.

A couple games do this today, like GRID (2019), but the problem lots of these games have, is they construct purpose built environments for multiplayer lobbies that most of the time, end up just being painfully bland test maps.

Driver San Francisco's lobbies have everything from the main-game. All the cars, streets, jumps, NPCs, abilities, boost, everything. All that's missing is the context of the modes, which is what you're about to experience when in free-roam.

It's a party, practice mode, and lounge, all in one. It's so effortless and seamless, it's really rather baffling to boot up games today where you're just sitting in a lobby that looks like it was made in Sony Vegas.

Qualifying is rather serious in an arcade racing game. Normally, this is something reserved for the Gran Turismo and iRacing's of the world. Where time differences are separated by thousands of a second, and setups can make or break a driver.

You can't possibly squeeze that into a pick up and play arcade racing game elegantly. You either dull it down to the point of pointlessness, or add an unbelievable amount of complexity for a sub-genre that's summarized as VROOM.

Yet, Driver San Francisco manages to feature qualifying in manner that's not only fast, effective, and brilliant, but most importantly… welcome!

Qualifying is done in the form of challenges!

These are purpose built objectives like drifting challenges, breaking objects, spending the most amount of time at top speed on the highway.

The gameplay is a break from what you're normally doing in the regular matches.

They're not this streamlined, direct, and fast.

They're unique from the regular game, but related enough to serve as something to learn, excel, and be rewarded with advantages in the main event itself.

So many driving games have really lost Project Gotham's art of racing, and that Driver San Francisco manages to squeeze that into a qualifying format is just fantastic.

Context is everything, and driving games are no different. Driving in the city is completely different than the country, and it's the same when you're racing.

Go Karts aren't Nascars, and Monaco isn't Daytona. Yet, for racing games, a lot of them are focused on delivering the same thrills.

Nailing high-speed turns, vast drifts, and exceeding 240+ mph.

To be honest, even as a mega-fan of the genre, it gets rather tedious after a while.

There's only so many times I can listen to Linkin Park's In The End…

Driver San Francisco's nerdy stuff, it's physics, city layout, sense of speed, is all great, but not world changing.

What makes Driver's core gameplay feel unlike any other driving game on the market in Multiplayer is that it's game modes encourage you to drive in a such a way you never would in Gran Turismo or Need for Speed.

I've never had so much fun going forty miles per-hour in a game before, because I'm not doing it to recover from a spin, or nail a drift challenge.

I'm doing it to evade my friend whose charging me at 180mph as the world's angriest cop to stop me escaping.

I'm using the handbrake in an alley way to catch someone off-guard in a game of tag.

I'm frantically looking in front and behind me while running a flag in CTF, as my enemies can teleport into any vehicle on the map, have played against me long enough for each other to know our traditional tactics, and will attempt to subvert them.

It's filled with so many mental games in your head and physical games with the controller.

Yes, I'm just driving a car, like I've done a million times before, but I'm driving it in a manner I've never been encouraged to, because of the game modes facilitating the sandbox Driver has made for itself.

Lastly…

You can't beat Surviv0r at Trailblazer.

That fuck.