Wheelman Interview

Simon Woodroffe is both a nice man and the creative director on Midway’s Wheelman. Last week we sat down with him to discuss the game itself, Midway’s future projects, and why the driving in GTA IV is actually very good. Read on to hear his many thoughts.

VideoGamer.com: This game has been in development for a quite a long time. Wasn’t the original release date supposed to be December 2007?

Simon Woodroffe: I came on board in April 06, at which point the game had just been transferred from Midway’s studios in Australia, and at that point there really wasn’t much of a game going on. I think that probably the first half of that time was taken up with the whole technology sharing, Unreal stuff. Making Unreal stream well… a lot of people have failed to do that. I was just playing The Last Remnant, actually, and that suffers terribly with Unreal artefacts, Unreal effects- which is unusual for them [Square]. I think what we’ve done with Wheelman is to get rid of the elements of Unreal that weren’t suited to the game we were making. The technology hurdle was really huge, so in reality it’s probably a story that you’ve heard before: we made the game in the last two years. That’s what it comes down to. A large part of our initial period was getting the shared technology in, working around technology kinks, prototyping and working with our Hollywood writers and Vin. So I’ve been on it for two and a half years now, and there wasn’t that much that had been done before I got there, so it’s about two and a half years old now, as far as I’m concerned. Even that isn’t a bad achievement.

VideoGamer.com: But the game was being developed in Australia, before?

SW: It was a different game, really. They were working on the PS2 with their own tech. We basically started again.

VideoGamer.com: So you reinvented the project, then?

SW: Yeah, I think so. Midway had originally been commissioned for The Wheelman on the PS2, using the studio that made the Dukes of Hazard game. After a few months, the project apparently was going very well. They decided that the ideal scenario was to do it on next-gen, so they needed a next-gen developer. Which was instinct on their part. I think one of the main things was a lack of a design department. They [the original developers] were an old-school racing studio. They knew racing, but they didn’t know modern gaming, so that was one of the main reasons I was brought on board – to fill that design hole from scratch, to take the creative reins on Wheelman and make sure it was the game it had the potential to be – an accessible car-chase experience. That’s what I’ve gone for. It was very important to me that this was a polished product. I’m not interested in… you know, I don’t think gamers are ones to welcome non-AAA products. For me, they [Midway] have backed us all the way. They’ve backed all the creative calls we’ve been making, they’ve given us the time we need, they’ve allowed us to do focus testing and to react to focus testing – they basically let us do things our own way.

We have been spending the last year with our full feature set in design honing the game experience, since the technology essentially became stable enough. Midway have this vision for all its studios to share Unreal tech. It’s a really great idea in principle, but just recently there have been articles about some of the problems and flaws with that process. There are obviously going to be problems with sharing tech between MK, TNA, Blacksite, Stranglehold, Wheelman and This Is Vegas, as well as all our future projects. But we’ve now reached the point where most of those teams have shipped a title using shared tech. The tech has been used in the field, it’s out there and everyone’s got access to it. For the game we do after Wheelman, we can nick the brawling system from TNA. It actually works now. So it’s paying off, eventually.

VideoGamer.com: So was this a gamble, in a sense? It sounds like you took a risk but that it worked out well…

SW: Yeah. I just saw a demo of a new Midway game that’s in development. I can’t tell you too much about it, but they’ve been on it for three months and it looks as good if not better than Gears 2. This is only possible because of the sharing of technology…. The stuff in Wheelman is available to all of us. Don’t think it won’t be used in This Is Vegas, and so on and so forth. The fact [is] that we’re the first open-world game out the door for Midway. The others [Blacksite, Stranglehold] have been corridor-based experiences more suited to Unreal. We’re open-world, streaming… and you know, all the Midway studios are benefiting from this. But you know, the biggest factor that hasn’t been touched upon in recent articles is the shared knowledge. We have 600 to 700 devs, all with Unreal experience, all working for the same company, all of whom can talk to each other. When we hit a problem, we have more people working on the engine than anybody – by a long way. And we have a massive pool of resources to draw upon. At least one team has dealt with pretty much every feature you might want in a next-gen game. Which means that we, as designers, are in a great position – because we can now actually build games to be games, not just technology showcases anymore. It makes sense eventually.

VideoGamer.com: Before we move on, I have to ask you about this mystery game. What can you tell us?

SW: I’ll probably get into trouble! The problem is at the right time, I have a tendency to run my mouth off! It’s similar to Gears, but a totally different setup. I’d say that if we were to take all of the games that sold on next gen formats, averaged a couple of things out, this will as successful as anything in the top end. It’s a very exciting concept. I’ll tell you… no, no I can’t tell you that.

VideoGamer.com: No? Ah, go on!

SW: No!

VideoGamer.com: Aw… Okay then, when can we expect to see this game?

SW: Midway have got a really cool game, not the one I’m talking about but another one, a really cool game coming out of Chicago using the shared technology. It’s probably not due until 2010, and the same goes for the one I’m talking about. This Is Vegas will be out next year, and that’s looking really good now…

VideoGamer.com: But you think this new game will look as good as Gears of War 2?

SW: It’s already looking as good as Gears 2, but the game mechanics are kind of different in some ways, similar in others. It’s going to be really big and really important. It’s not often, especially when you’re a cynical type, that you see a prototype or creative slice and just get blown away by it. But in this case, the hype is justified. That has only come about because of the fact that they were able to take things from several studios – even visual assets, audio assets. Sharing those is a little more risky, in my opinion, because gamers will spot that stuff. But certainly the expertise and the technology, you can share those. I think it’s a plan that will pay off, in the long term, in a big way. It’s certainly paying off in terms of me speccing off what I want to do with my studio after Wheelman. Obviously we want to take a lot of the cool stuff and add a different tone, a different flavour to it. Something a bit darker, a bit more cinematic. We’ll see…

VideoGamer.com: These are difficult financial times for everyone. How much pressure is there on Midway for this game to perform well?

SW: There’s always pressure for any game to perform. If you’re not making back the money you spent on development, you’re not successful. It goes for everyone – EA laid off a bunch of people and closed their Chicago studio recently. It doesn’t matter where you are, every development studio needs to keep things together, and we’re no different. Now a large amount of the development budget for Wheelman is a forward tech budget. Wheelman will be profitable, I’m sure of that, because we’re coming out in a good window, and we fill a niche that will hopefully appeal to a lot of people. I know that anyone could have fun with this game for a good 10 to 15 hours. Even if they weren’t interested in the whole Cyclone Shooting thing, I think they’d enjoy the game for that long. All the focus testing is showing that should be the case, so… It’s a good game! There’s always pressure on us to do well, but that’s what we make them for. Or maybe some us make them to win accolades from journalists, or maybe we make them because our friends like to play them. I’m sure every designer has different motivations. I personally make games because I have an eight-year-old son who loves to play them. If he likes a game, that’s the highest praise I can get. He’s already given Wheelman a 10, so I’m happy!

VideoGamer.com: The action in this game is clearly very over-the-top, but I was surprised by the fact that the handling feels like a middle ground between GTA IV and something more arcade-style…

SW: We were aiming for that middle ground. At one point Wheelman was more in the arcade camp, but I think the current setup suits it better. This is really accessible. It’s hard to quantify, but I’d say the handling is even more accessible than Burnout. It’s not about being arcade-like or realistic, it’s about whether people can pick up the controls and achieve what they want to achieve almost as easily as if they were using an on-foot character. You know, driving isn’t my thing. The last game I worked on was a dark and moody FPS, a completely different thing! Most of the games I’ve worked on have been action based, certainly on-foot action-based, and I’ve brought some of that knowledge and experience to this driving project. One of the first pillars of the design was, “We need to take out of the equation the whole idea of putting the car exactly where you want it. We need to make that really simple to do.” Which is why you can instantly turn on the spot with the handbrake. It’s why the moves are simple to pull off. It’s why the steering is twitchy and responsive…

VideoGamer.com: But it doesn’t feel too light. You know how some games feel like you’re driving a motorised trolley?

SW: A lot of work has gone into making sure that’s not the case. A lot of work has been done by me and by our lead physics guy, who’s an absolute genius at this kind of stuff, to make it feel realistic but play unrealistically. Without going into too much detail, there’s a lot of assistance stuff going on behind the scenes that helps you feel cool. People who love driving games who want that sim experience aren’t going to be as affected by… well, in some ways it’s like dynamic difficulty, but approached from a different angle. It essentially changes the way the car handles based on how you’re driving – they’re systems that only kick in when certain things happen. If you’re the kind of player that tries to pull off drifts and stuff, it’ll let you, but if you’re the kind of player who doesn’t it’ll help you.

VideoGamer.com: And that’s all behind the scenes?

SW: Yeah. We don’t shout about it, it’s just something that’s there to make the game more accessible. It’s about making it so that my son can enjoy it, or your 70-year-old granny can enjoy it. Okay, so those are extreme examples, but the idea is that anyone can pick it up and get into the game. Basically, the driving is not an obstacle to the gameplay. The gameplay is the shooting, the Cyclone, the Air Jack, the car chases – that kind of stuff. It’s about using those moves at the right kind of time to take out your opponents. The last thing we wanted was for just moving the car about to be an obstacle. We had a… sorry to go on!

VideoGamer.com: Hey, it’s fine!

SW: When I came onto the project, one of the first lines for our design crew was that Wheelman should empower the player to be the ultimate car-chase hero. And at one point during the project I felt like saying, “You know what guys? We can’t hit this goal. It’s not achievable. Either we go too far one way so that casual players don’t find it accessible enough and they have to go through a drawn-out tutorial, or we go too far the other way and people say there’s too much of a help system.” Eventually we found the right balance between help systems, physics overloads and stuff, so that we could strike the perfect balance. I think we’re in a pretty unique place.

VideoGamer.com: Wheelman has been described as having elements of both GTA IV and the Burnout series. Could you talk about the influence of those games? Are there any particular lessons you learned from them?

SW: Our game was already quite different, but GTA IV moved the bar in terms of what people expected from an open-world driving game. Before GTA IV, open-world driving games generally had more accessible, more arcade-like, handling. Even the previous GTAs were like that. But GTA IV moved the bar towards realism – even super-realism, you know? In many ways they went beyond realism, in terms of what those cars can do. At first I found it fairly frustrating, in comparison with Wheelman, but it was different enough to make us say, “Look, people obviously want a more realistic experience. They don’t want to be given things for free. They want to feel like the ultimate driving hero, but they don’t want to feel like they’re being given it for nothing – otherwise there’s no sense of accomplishment. We started to get feedback from our focus testers, within weeks of GTA IV coming out, that the basic driving was dropping in popularity. It had gone from being the most highly rated element, to one of the lowest on the list. And I’m looking at this and thinking, “There’s only one reason for this”. GTA IV has changed gamers’ expectations, and our job is to be up-to-date with current expectations and to manage them well. I’m very big on choice, and I’m very big on design and control systems. All the physics stuff stays very close to me and the design team, so it was work for a few hours or so, and polishing things up for a week or two, to change the way Wheelman felt to be a little more realistic and a little more grounded, based upon the feedback we were getting, based upon the impact of GTA IV.

Some of this is me making assumptions, because when you do a focus test you can ask all the right questions, but you won’t always get the right answers. As any good statistician will tell you, you have to look at the data and ask, “what are they really trying to say?”. With Wheelman, I think what they were trying to say is that they wanted a more realistic drive. They liked the accessibility, they liked the arcade thrills, they didn’t like the floatiness, they didn’t like the silly-in-some-ways collisions from Burnout. Those things became less popular after GTA IV. I saw our scores go high-high-high to low-low-low, but we were able to make changes relatively quickly. We adapted to the feedback from our testers, so we should be right on the money in terms of what people expect from an open-world racer. Yeah, there are elements of GTA in the game – and there are certainly elements of Burnout. I think our driving, the accessibility and the speed of it… that’s more Burnout than GTA. But we’ve got an open world, a compelling story and a whole bunch of side missions – and those things are all GTA. We don’t have a sandbox – you can’t go bowling or go on a date. All that stuff is all well and good, but personally it doesn’t appeal to me. It seems like a good idea but actually it’s quote boring after a while, because in all of those mini-games, the micro-mechanics haven’t been developed to a level where you’d want to play them over and over again.

VideoGamer.com: Do you think Rockstar went too far with that kind of stuff?

SW: I think they can set their own path, because what they have backing it up is this awesome, interactive world. GTA IV is really an RPG – not in the sense of dice-rolls, levels and the like, but in the traditional sense that you are playing the role of a character in a world, and they make that world react to you and feel realistic better than anyone. They can set the bar, they can move the industry’s feeling towards certain features, certain ways of doing things. More power to them, I say.

VideoGamer.com: A lot of people didn’t like the handling in GTA IV….

SW: The driving part of it totally grew on me. At first I found it very hard, and a lot of that was to do with the fact I’d been playing Wheelman so much. I was used to cars that did exactly what I told them to. If I wanted to ram someone, I rammed someone. But in GTA, once you’ve learned and mastered the handling, you feel like a total badass because you’ve had to work for it. There’s certainly a sense in the industry, and I think it comes from an executive level, that gamers want an easy ride. I don’t think that’s true. I think they want an accessible challenge. There’s a big difference between “accessible” and “easy”. Too many games have become too easy, letting you walk through without a sense of challenge. For me, the fun in a game comes from overcoming something that I previously couldn’t, by getting better at it or by re-strategising or whatever.

VideoGamer.com: You’ve talked a lot about the legacy of GTA IV. Are there things in Wheelman that you think will be taken on by the rest of the industry?

SW: It’s hard to say, as you never know how people are going to react. I’m hoping… Well, I think the Air Jack is a little excessive for most open world games, but I think the ability to attack other cars quickly and easily, I think that’s something that will be remembered and that will carry on into other games. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that turning up elsewhere. I think Wheelman could appeal to a lot of people, and hopefully it will!

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time Simon.

Wheelman is due out for for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on February 20, 2009.