DRIVECLUB Update from Evolution Studios

Hi everyone. Following Shuhei’s message yesterday, I’m here give to you an update on DRIVECLUB direct from Evolution Studios.

I’m proud to be leading the extremely talented and hard-working development team here at Evolution. As gamers first and foremost, we are determined to deliver the game we promised to the quality we know you expect.

We appreciate all of your support — it’s motivating and humbling for us to have such a vocal and supportive community. Your messages drive us to do everything we can to live up to our original ambition of making DRIVECLUB the game that invigorates the racing genre again.

Your great support deserves us to be open with you. I know we have been quiet for a while since we made the decision to delay the game, so I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know exactly why the team felt that DRIVECLUB needed more development. We wanted to make sure we got one important feature right.

The dynamic menu is key to how much fun you’re going to get out of the game because it is the glue that connects you to everyone else in the DRIVECLUB community. Whenever you fire up the game; between every race you play, and when you log in to DRIVECLUB on your phone or tablet, the dynamic menu has to be slick to ensure your experience is seamlessly connected. Essentially it’s where you discover what to play, and who to play with.

It’s also absolutely vital to our ambition of growing a vibrant network of millions of connected clubs, who all share the excitement of driving amazing cars together. Whether they play just to have fun, or to complete every challenge and beat their rivals in every race, it’s this connected community who will keep the game fresh and enjoyable well after launch, so it makes sense for the connectivity to be perfect.

No racing title has ever combined the development of a socially charged, multi-platform dynamic menu with all the other connected online elements that DRIVECLUB delivers. We know that what we are creating here is hugely ambitious and we’re proud of the fact that we’re getting close now because we’re a relatively small studio. The progress we’re making is great, so I’m looking forward to showing you more as development continues and prove that all the hard work has been worth it.

While that work goes on, the rest of the team here is relentless when it comes to exploiting the power and confidence of PS4, so we’re also raising the bar even higher across other aspects of the game including:

• Visuals — We’re constantly improving how stunning the game looks as we continue to optimize visuals and find new ways of pushing PS4. You can see for yourself how it looks right now in the latest video we shared yesterday because all the footage was captured on PS4 from the game. It’ll look even better in October.
• Audio — It’s absolutely state of the art. We’re continuing to refine the authentic sounds that we have for each and every car in the game, and we’re going to put together videos that focus on this.
• Driving — It already feels great to play and we’re continuing to add further layers to the physics to make it both more accessible for everybody and more sophisticated for experienced racers.
• Clubs — We’re making it easier for you to keep up to speed with what’s going on in your club as part of the rework on the dynamic menus. We’ve also tweaked clubs to support up to 6 players instead of 12 (because the game is more fun with tightly-knit clubs and it paves the way for awesome 6-on-6 club races).
• Tour — The difficulty curve for the campaign mode is becoming even smoother as we continue to optimize the vehicle handling and also refine the game’s AI for non-player racers.
• Cars & Tracks — More time means more staggeringly detailed cars and exciting tracks, too. If you haven’t already, check out the Ferrari in the video released yesterday. There are loads more exciting cars for us to reveal in the coming months.

I’d also like to confirm that the PS Plus Edition of the game will be available on the same day as the full release. Offering a selection of cars and tracks from the complete version, we think it’s the perfect way for those new to the genre to get an idea of what the full DRIVECLUB experience is all about. Look out for more details on the PS Plus Edition very soon.

Thanks again to everybody for your continued support; it really is a huge source of inspiration for the team. We appreciate that there’s a lot of anticipation and excitement for everything that DRIVECLUB promises to be, so we hope that you understand why we won’t compromise on quality to rush it to you.

It’s been a long and hard Winter, but it’s great that we can finally start sharing updates with you again about all of the cool things that DRIVECLUB does. We don’t anticipate another quiet period for a while so you can expect to see plenty more from us in the coming weeks leading up to E3 2014!

More soon,
The DRIVECLUB Team