Yesterday was all about the new details surrounding DriveClub revealed in the latest issue of Game Informer, and today we’re focusing on a comment featured on the DriveClub Facebook page, as well as interview between Matt Southern, Founder of Evolution Studios, and Edge.
Starting with Matt, he revealed that he’s been with Evolution for nine years and one of the first concepts he was told about was, in fact, DriveClub. Obviously, they put DriveClub on the back burner while working on the MotorStorm franchise for PS3, with Southern going on to explain why they chose one racer over the other:
There’s a number of reasons, really. It was all kinds of things lining up – we chose to go with MotorStorm and I think it was because we’d made a licensed game and we really loved making the WRC series on PS2. We’d lived that life, attended rallies, got to know rally drivers, gone all around the world, just been absolutely willingly absorbed in that sport. And so when it came to decide on a new IP for PlayStation 3 we just wanted to go insane. I don’t mean this in a kind of negative way, but we were free from the constraints of a licence and we wanted anarchy and insanity to be the hallmark of the game we made. So MotorStorm was a really liberating game for us to work on initially. Both felt like valid choices but that meant that some of the things we wanted to do with DriveClub, there were levels of details and accuracy, we could actually wait a little longer for technology to allow us to build it. There are online interviews with our previous owner Martin Kenwright – I think he says: “We’re already thinking about PlayStation 5.” What he was alluding to was this idea that we’d decided then that there was going to be another next gen at some point, and that DriveClub was probably best to wait for then.
Thanks to the PlayStation 4’s developer-friendly architecture, Scott Kirkland, Technical Director at Evolution Studios, said that the “power is just there, on the table, all very accessible right from the outset.” Also, thanks to every PS4 including a hard drive, along with the Blu-Ray disc, Kirkland went on to state that it’s “going to allow us to deliver awesome experiences to players in a fraction of the load times and download times that players experienced on PS3 and Xbox.”
As for that Facebook post, which has since been edited out, the official account replied to a fan saying, “I really hope this comes with the launch of PS4,” with “we’ll be there”:
It would be awesome if this meant 100% that we’ll see DriveClub available day and date with the PlayStation 4, but the original MotorStorm was slated to be a PS3 launch title, only to be pushed back four months, though still in the ‘launch window’. With that same Facebook posting telling us that they have “plenty more DriveClub news to come too,” we should be getting a definitive release date answer soon.
Would you like to see DriveClub at PS4 launch? Or a little after so you have something to look forward to? Let us know in the comments below.
