Midway's Simon Woodroffe on Wheelman

We get behind the wheel with the lead designer

More Images

Midway's Vin Diesel-endorsed open-world racer Wheelman is out in February, and despite the publisher's financial wranglings creative director and lead designer Simon Woodroffe is confident his team has mustered something new in this genre-mixing opus. We sat down for a candid chat about the new game and everything else besides.

Thanks for speaking with us Simon. How long have you been working on Wheelman?

I've been with the company for two and a half years, and I've been working on Wheelman the whole time.

Wheelman was underway when you arrived?

Yes, it had had nine months of development before I arrived.

We were talking earlier about the blending of the genres; you're trying to find your own path through a mix. What are your aims here?

Ultimately, we're aiming to make a... well, the one-liner is "the ultimate cinematic car chase experience". That can probably be interpreted in many ways, but what we're trying to do is make an accessible, high-speed driving game, but one that's played in an open-world environment. So, there are elements of things like Burnout Paradise in Wheelman, in terms of the racing, the pace, the collisions, that kind of stuff. There's also elements of GTA, the sort of freedom to choose your own routes, the side-missions, that kind of stuff. We really wanted to cherry-pick what we felt were the best elements from those two games, forge a path down the middle in some way.

The celebrity endorsement of course comes courtesy of Vin Diesel. Has he been involved from the outset?

Yes, he's been involved since the project was initially conceived. It's a Midway IP, and I wasn't here when the partnership was struck, but it seems Vin was really keen to make another game following the success of the Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, and he approached Midway via his company (Tigon) with an idea for a game they wanted to do, and Midway countered this with, well we've got this open-world driving game which we think you might be interested in. So, essentially, the project spun from there. His involvement is from day one.

So... did Vin Diesel basically come to you and say I want to star in GTA, can you make that happen for me?

Basically, yes! It's all hearsay from my point of view. But that's how it seems to have turned out!

You've got some licensed vehicles?

Yes, we have the Opal Astra and the Pontiac G8, the two licensed vehicles. The biggest problem with licensing vehicles is that most companies don't want you to blow their cars up. Vehicle combat, destruction, damage and all that is a really big part of the game and if you have licensed vehicles there's a limit to what you can do to them. Fortunately, Pontiac and Opal were understanding about the fact that we were going to trash their cars, so... if anything it proves they're safe!

Was there the temptation to go more licensed, more realistic, given the real open-world setting... or is an element of the arcade, the cartoon, important?

The gameplay is obviously more arcadey. Its evolved a little over its life-span, a couple of years ago it was more arcade-like than it is now. But I think that was almost to the detriment of the experience. It didn't feel satisfying to pull off the moves, the cars felt like they were floating, they lacked weight. While initially this was all a positive thing, from a focus-testing perspective, while this was initially good, once GTA came out - particularly - people's expectations changed. They wanted something heavier, more realistic. That's not to say this is a realistic driving game - but it has veered more in that direction, and following the feedback we've had from the testers. So, we have a lot of really cool vehicle parameters; the designers can tune everything, so it was quite simple for us to adjust a few sliders here. Make the cars heavier, and more satisfying to drive.

It sounds like this is the direction you want to push the game in anyway...

Yes, changing the core feel of a major game like this, the cost; there's a lot of stakeholders, and changing the direction - you need good evidence.

You mention focus testing. I've heard mixed reports on this, and the impact it has on development. What are your thoughts?

Well, you can't design your game around focus-testing, that's for sure. I mean, I think the trick of it is how you analyse the data basically. If you ask the wrong questions, then the answers you get will lead you down the wrong paths. We heard from our testers that the traffic in the game could be frustrating. Now, the obvious solution is to lighten it of course, but that's not the vision. We had a different problem. We needed to make driving through traffic fun and cool. So, while the testers were telling us we needed less traffic, we interpreted their feedback in a different way. We made the player's vehicles handle better, changed the way they interact with traffic, how the other cars behave, how they signal - that kind of thing. By doing this we started getting reports we didn't have enough traffic, so, we ended up being able to increase it. That's the problem. You have to know how to interpret the data, how to ask the right questions. You can't just get scores and draw conclusions. It isn't enough.