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VG247 [...] Speaking to three sources – one working at Ubisoft, the second a former senior Ubisoft employee, and the third Driver’s original creator, Martin Edmondson – a picture has emerged of a game that gradually and organically grew beyond the bounds of the Driver license, birthing the Watch Dogs series we know today.
“The game that was released as Watch Dogs started life as a sequel in the Driver franchise, but was always largely what you see in the final product,” says the source at Ubisoft. “It was always modern day, it had on foot, parkour, combat as well as driving, all set in a large open-world city, and the main hook was always modern technology and hacking. After a while trying to make this concept fit into the Driver franchise, the decision was made to turn it into its own, new IP.”
Typically, a publisher will back a single game to reboot a series, then build on that foundation if it turns out to be a success. But Ubisoft was working on two distinct visions for what Driver could be at the same time. One, headed up by Edmondson in the UK at historic Driver studio Reflections, was subtitled San Francisco. Both bold and nostalgic, it locked players inside the car, just like the ‘90s original – but allowed them to swap between vehicles via a funny and fantastical concept called ‘shift’. Players would float disembodied through the city to possess other drivers, and have conversations with their passengers.
While development of San Francisco was underway, a team under Far Cry 2 veteran Jonathan Morin at Assassin’s Creed studio Ubisoft Montreal pitched and conceived its own Driver sequel. Reflections had no input on the story, which left out series characters like undercover cop Tanner, his partner Jones, and shotgun-toting villain Jericho – though it wouldn’t have been the first Driver game to do so. [...]
Full: Inside the Driver game that died so that Watch Dogs could live - VG247
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