Midway Newcastle art director Cumron Ashtiani recently gave us the low down on the long delayed Wheelman, a new IP co-developed with shiny headed action star Vin Diesel, which he described as a "Hollywood summer blockbuster car chase action film as a game". Phew.
We found out why it has been delayed so long, why it's not going to include a softer side aimed at casual gamers, and why the studio's opting to neglect multiplayer game modes.
Wheelman mixes driving, combat and open-world elements. What genre excactly does it fit into?
Ashtiani: One of the most interesting things we've come across with Wheelman is that no-one has really played a game that's exactly like it. It's a lot of different things and really it's more than a sum of all of its parts. I'd probably best describe it as being like a big Hollywood summer blockbuster car chase action film as a game, with the mechanics of vehicle combat and ballistic combat as well as special super moves.
With Vin Diesel and his production studio Tigon being heavily involved in Wheelman, where does ultimate control of the project lie?
Ashtiani: From an intellectual property point of view Vin's the driving force behind the IP and the franchise idea. From a development point of view Midway's not involved in the film process. From a game development point of view, if there s any link between the film IP that he's got and our game then it's not directly linked. We're not making a game of the film, but a game in its own right, using the idea that Vin Diesel plays Milo Burik, an undercover agent and elite driver who infiltrates the Barcelona underworld.
What more can you tell us about the story?
Ashtiani: Without giving too much away, there's some information Milo Burik must get hold of which is of international importance. The gangs don't really know the importance of the information so he's kind of playing them off against each other to get what he wants, so there's a whole kind of espionage angle in there as well.
What kind of combat elements and special moves should we be most excited about?
Ashtiani: We do a multitude of things but what we're probably best known for is the driving combat. We have vehicle melee, which is where you steer with the right hand stick and with the left hand stick you can ram other cars. Depending on what the distance was and the speed you were at it has a different effect on the cars, so if you give them a little nudge at the tail they'll spin out in one angle because you destabilised the back, or if you nudge them at the front they'll destabilise in a different way. When you get good at the game you can strategically knock a car off the road so that it hits another car and then the two of them barrel roll off and explode.
We also have a currency which we call 'focus power' which you can use to pull off super moves like Cyclone, which is where you spin the car 360 degrees while firing out of the window first person style at the individual targets.
For a game about speed, Wheelman has taken its time in getting here. It was originally due out in 2007. Why has it been such a long development process?
Ashtiani: There are a number of reasons that the game's been in development for three years. We moved all of our technology onto next gen, so in the first year of development we had a lot of tech work. We're using our own modified version of Unreal Engine 3, so we've got open-world Barcelona with cars racing at 100 miles an hour, which UE3 isn't usually geared towards, so we've had to do a lot of modifications ourselves.
And then also Vin has been particularly involved in the script and background of the characters, so it's getting his time. And then there's also just the fact that we wanted to get the game right, so rather than just push it out the door, we wanted to release PS3, Xbox 360 and PC all at once and for it to be a completely polished product as good as we could get it.
The longer the development period rolls on, there must be a danger that your product will become outdated?
Ashtiani: It's a risk, but we've been lucky because we've still got something that no one else has done, we've still got vehicle combat which no one else has done, and nothing else encroached into what we were trying to do with our game.
Midway uses a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 3 across its studios. How has the sharing of tech and experience across studios benefited Wheelman?
Ashtiani: It has been excellent. We can share technology, so for example we were able to take a lot of the combat systems directly from Stranglehold, and it also means that we've got a more mature mechanic because more people have worked on it and fine tuned it. And now, with us doing an open-world driving game, if any of Midway's other products wants to add driving into their game they can do that. But at the start it probably slowed us down a little bit because we were having to launch a code base across multiple studios and projects.
With regards to the open-world elements of the game, where do you set the boundaries with what players can and can't do?
Ashtiani: That's a difficult one. Because we're focusing on the driving we've deliberately not gone into a lot of depth on human interaction. So for example we have a living breathing Barcelona, the traffic has rules and it can do its own thing, so if a car crashes the one behind will try and move around it. We've got pedestrians that avoid danger and have their own behaviours, so you might have a tourist wondering and looking around, or a guy who'll get out his mobile phone and talk, but we haven't got the level of interaction of going up to a hot dog seller and buying a hot dog because this game's all about driving and the Hollywood action angle. You wouldn't see a Hollywood action film where someone just stops and says, 'I'm going to go and get a hot dog.' We kept it within the limits of what you'd need to get the feel of the game across.
What can you tell us about the modelling of Barcelona and how in-depth it is, for the travel fans among us?
Ashtiani: It's pretty accurate. I think we've done 2,000 square km of Barcelona, so pretty much the centre of Barcelona is all there with all the key monuments and streets. I think the only thing we've had to take a bit of artistic license with is some of the angles of the roads. In a real city the roads are actually designed to slow people down and if we'd gone with the exact streets we'd have had big problems racing the cars around at 100mph, so we had to smooth some of the corners out, but in general it's accurate.
With Midway's recent financial problems and Newcastle being the only non-US-based studio in an American company, how much pressure is there on you to deliver?
Ashtiani: I don't think there's any more demanded of us than there is of any of the other studios. We're all trying to make great games. I think the management of Midway has a lot of confidence in us. As a studio we've been making driving-related games for about ten years so there's a lot of heritage there and so far we haven't made any big mistakes.
More and more games these days have a softer side designed to appeal to broader audiences. Does Wheelman have a softer side?
Ashtiani: It's a Hollywood action film as a game, and if you think about the greatest recent Hollywood action games with car chases, action and shooting weapons, it really is a market of its own, and so we obviously didn't want to put some kind of comic relief in there just to soften it up because it just wouldn't be true to what the game's about. We have the open-world element, and just driving around and playing with the pedestrians and the game mechanics will probably appeal to people who aren't usually fans of the traditional Vin Diesel action film like xXx.
Online plays a massive part in many of the big current-gen titles, and we've seen the emergence of some great co-operative multiplayer games this year too. What will Wheelman offer in the way of an online experience?
Ashtiani: This game is a single player experience and that was a decision we made early on in the process. Because you play one particular character and it's all about these hardcore driving and combat mechanics, if you think about trying to do a co-op driving game you're either going to have to have one of you driving and one shooting, or you're going to have to have two cars on screen at once, which is going to hinder the speed which you can travel at, and we didn't want to do split screen for that because it wouldn't have been particularly cool.
Also, because we use bullet time slow-motion for super moves, what would happen to the other guy while you're pulling off your moves? Will he just have to sit there and wait until you finish? So really it just didn't make sense to do it as a co-op or multiplayer game. We probably could have had some kind of superficial tacked on car chase type of stuff, but really it's a single player game in essence.
Is the lack of a multiplayer element something you might address moving forward if the game's a success?
Ashtiani: I think by all means it's something that, moving forward from Wheelman, we'd probably look at, but with this particular game it all about getting these mechanics right for the single player experience.
