Midway’s Simon Woodroffe has revealed that development of free-roaming vehicular action spectacular The Wheelman was hindered by the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.
According to Woodroffe, who serves as Creative Director, GTA IV conditioned a consumer preference for more realistic driving experiences, to the cost of projects (like The Wheelman) which veer towards an arcade sensibility.
"Our game was already quite different, but GTA 4 moved the bar in terms of what people expected from an open-world driving game," Woodroffe told Videogamer in a yet-to-be-published interview. "Before GTA 4, open-world driving games generally had more accessible, more arcade-like, handling. Even the previous GTAs were like that. But GTA 4 moved the bar towards realism – even super-realism, you know?"
"We started to get feedback from our focus testers, within weeks of GTA 4 coming out, that the basic driving was dropping in popularity," he went on. "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 4 has changed gamers’ expectations"."
While Woodroffe found the comparison "fairly frustrating" at first, he commented that it was his "job is to be up-to-date with current expectations and to manage them well." Game development doesn’t take place in a vacuum, after all.
"I’m very big on choice, and I’m very big on design and control systems," he went on. "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 4."
The results are, Woodroffe feels, "right on the money in terms of what people expect from an open-world racer."
The Wheelman ships worldwide on February 16 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.