Pacific Drive is a new take on survival games, incorporating roguelite elements with am emphasis on driving. Set in an alternate version of the Pacific Northwest, players will work to escape the Olympic Exclusion Zone through the use of their trusty station wagon. The game is the debut title from developer Ironwood Studios, and is set to release some time in 2023.
The general gameplay loop of Pacific Drive revolves around players taking excursions across the map for supplies and then returning to their garage hub to craft and make repairs and modifications to their vehicle. Each visit to the Olympic Exclusion Zone is heavily randomized, where players will encounter dangers like harsh weather and strange entities known as anomalies. The symbiotic relationship between the player and their car is a core facet of Pacific Drive, with each protecting the other as they work to escape the Exclusion Zone.
Ironwood Studios Founder and Creative Director Alexander Dracott and Lead Game Designer Seth Rosen sat down with Screen Rant to discuss creating Pacific Drive, the game's core car mechanics, and what players can expect from the title.
Screen Rant: For people who aren't familiar with Pacific Drive, how would you describe the general game loop?
Seth Rosen: So simply, the one sentence version is that you are driving around relying on your trusty station wagon to help you survive, looking for resources and exploring deeper and deeper into the zone on repeat expeditions to try and figure out the mystery of this area in the Pacific Northwest. Does that feel like reasonable distillation to you, Alex?
Alexander Dracott: Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably an even shorter version, which is like, repair your car at the garage, go out into the zone, you know, investigate stuff, grab resources and come back and do it again.
Can you talk a little bit about the different anomalies in the game, the purpose they serve and the design process behind them?
Seth Rosen: Yeah, so when we very first started kind of adding past our first like, "Here is an example obstacle that you shouldn't touch because it hurts" kind of prototypes, we experimented with some more complicated and sort of intricate entities that would have, you know, more like AI style behaviors where they've got different states and desires and things like that. And even just our simple experiments along those lines it became pretty clear that behind the wheel of a car, it is pretty hard to read all of that stuff and react to it, and we would be better served by making each thing a little bit more kind of atomic in what it does.
And then, you know, leaning into sort of how it all plugs together and makes the sort of game soup, as long as each thing only does one thing, it can do that one thing in a more exaggerated way. Because you know exactly what it's going to do, you can then plan around it, and the intrigue can be more about how it interacts with the surroundings. Like you know, a patch of landmines, that's maybe not such a problem in a wide open field, but if you get that same patch of landmines in a dense forest, that's a totally different proposition.
And we really wanted this game to be about kind of reading the landscape and trying to sort of understand what's in front of you, and trying and figure out how to navigate it on the fly, and not as much about like, a tug of war with a particular entity or a combat encounter or anything like that. We wanted it really to still be a road trip, so that meant that things had to be kind of fairly easily dealt with on their own, but able to kind of stack into this emergent system that can create more memorable moments and just more dynamic moments in general. So I mean, that's it from the design side. I don't know, Alex, if you have anything on the more creative and visual side to add.
Alexander Dracott: Yeah, I mean, it's been a lot of fun, too, because, you know, I think one of the interesting things about zone stories is that that stuff is weird, stuff is unexpected. And it's been fun building out like, honestly, as many of these things as we can, because it's going to fill our world with a bit of surprise - well, not a bit of surprise, probably a significant amount of surprise to the player, as they're navigating. We do want that sense of not knowing around with this, like, "What's the next corner?" And increasing that variety kind of doubles down on that.
But then on the flip side of it, it means that as we're actually creating the content, it means that there are some basic design visual rules that we've been trying to follow to help picture like, "Okay, the player understands that acid damage is acid damage, right?" We never want to confuse the player about that. But in of, you know, an interesting source for it, or where it can come from, or what out in the world it could be connected to, those are the kinds of interesting things that have allowed us variety. And I think we have some pretty varied anomalies that you can encounter out there. So it's been fun to try and poke and pull in as many different directions while still trying to stay, you know, concise when it matters.
Seth Rosen: Yeah, it's sort of a difficult line to walk of having clear and reliable, kind of visual gameplay language, but also make good on like, the weirdness and mysteriousness and uncertainty that kind of should come with this story. But I think we're finding some ways to work around the like, "Green means acid" and still make things feel interesting while still communicating their kind of gameplay function in an effective way. Absolutely.
And you talked a little bit in the preview about slowly over time in the game learning more about the environment and being able to sort of predict things more. I know you can collect stuff and take it back and analyze it and then it'll appear on the map?
Seth Rosen: I mean, there's kind of two ways in which players will learn about the zone and increase their familiarity in that way. And one of them is very much mechanical, doing as you mentioned where you have this headset, and if you are able to go around the zone and scan different resource providers and hazards and things like that, you'll get a little encyclopedia entry about them that gives you a little bit of narrative background. But it will also kind of add to your planning UI, so that once you've once scanned and identified a given anomaly, if that anomaly is appearing in a particular part of the world, as you're planning your route it will appear on the map, so you'll know. Especially as you get to the point where you've collected them all, so to speak, you'll have quite a lot of information about what challenges each level holds.
And then there's the sort of softer knowledge and familiarity of just playing the game for a while and poking things with sticks and seeing how they react and understanding. Like I was going out and testing something, grabbing some screenshots the other day, and I heard this gong sound go off behind me over and over again, and I was like, "What is that?" They've just been kind of swooping in behind us and sneakily adding sounds, and so sometimes I get surprised, like, "What makes that gong sound? What's going on?" And I start walking around the environment trying to find it, and the spores, little green balls - which I don't know if you saw in your preview - but they're there behaving kind of like the slime things from World of Goo, if you've played that. So they were kind of floating around, and with their little grabby hands were shooting down and grabbing the tourists and snagging them and just kind of like working their way across this whole field of tourists, making them explode and make this gong sound. I was like, "Oh man!" I even messaged Richard [Weschler], our gameplay designer, who has been working on these and he was like, "I didn't even realize that could happen."
So you know, the soft familiarity. Just knowing that a thing is there is obviously useful, but it's not until playing hours and hours of the game. And you know, as that story illustrates, even we will be surprised by some of the things that can manifest in the game. And that's a really exciting piece for me. If I can be surprised by my own work or my team's work, we're doing something right.
Yeah, and there's a lot of randomization in the game, right? Can you talk a little bit about all the different areas that randomization can affect?
Seth Rosen: Yeah, how much time do you have? [Laughs] I was actually just showing Richard - so our buildings, we're using this prefab system, so you have like a cabin or a trailer or something, we can have variations of different set dressing that appears inside of it. And then there's even within a given set of set dressing, there's variation of like, what resource containers are there and how they're arranged. And we were talking about just like, man, there's so many layers of radiation to this. And that's kind of the whole thing.
So a lot of that comes from Derek Yu's work, actually, who made Spelunky, and he wrote a fantastic, fantastic autobiographical book called Spelunky for Boss Fight Books where he talks all about the algorithm that he developed for the original Spelunky, and kind of his whole approach to this idea of like, layers of randomness. So in Spelunky, that means there's individual room layouts and it carves a path and picks different layouts according to the room shapes and needs. And then within those room layouts there's a block type that can randomize a two by three and blah, blah, blah - anyways, I read his book and took a lot of lessons from it and actually employed them in a Game Jam some years ago, and we found a bunch of pitfalls in my own approach to it from that.
And then when it got around to making Pacific Drive, it was kind of knowing from the outset that given the fact that we're such a small team, and we're making a car game, which means you need a lot of surface area, the only way we're going to really be able to do that is to be as clever as we can with kind of reusing things and recombining things to stretch every bit of content that we make as far as it can go. So that ranges from like, tricks with the mini map to disorient players to how maps are offered up to the players. Some of them are kind of fixed in locations in the world to give you kind of an anchor as you're as you're learning about the zone, but then a lot of the in-between spaces are randomized and it'll make sure that it's matching whatever filters we will request for what level it offers you.
But it'll randomly pick, you know, one of 20 or so maps to get, at least right now, to give you an in a given biome, and then within the maps we're randomly spawning different actors of all kinds of categories from resources to anomalies, to the building prefabs that I mentioned before to individual fuel barrels. The levels themselves are kind of semi-procedural, which I'll turn over to Alex to talk about in a moment, once I'm done rambling about this. And then even even within those things that we're spawning, like I mentioned, the buildings have different set dressing in different arrangements within those set dressings like that, that also applies to the field of landmines that I was mentioning, like we have different shapes and sizes of those that can appear.
And we have ways to force anomalies to spawn next to each other, or a resource next to an anomaly, and just find different ways to kind of push and pull the way that everything is assembling to create kind of spiky results. And also make sure that there's lots of different ways that that spikiness can manifest, whether it's what hazards are being put into a given level, the amount of those hazards, how those hazards get spawned in of their proximity to each other, you know, whatever it is, basically the guiding light here is that the more layers of randomness you have, though it makes it harder to test in some ways, it makes it that much harder for the player to identify the pattern, which is like the downfall of any randomized game. As soon as you can start to see the gears underneath it, then you start to be able to anticipate things and it doesn't feel as surprising and engaging.
Alexander Dracott: Yeah, and I mean, on top of what Seth described, when you think about a player's experience, all of that stuff happens when they're going into a map. But during their time at a map we're also tuning that, right? Where the weather may be changing, we may have certain major gameplay events - I think a couple of those you did see in the preview - which may be big and eventful and force you to take drastic action and change up your plans, or maybe smaller. But that is all part of reinforcing this. Like, we don't really want players knowing what's around the corner.
And that actually was one of the earliest, I would say, points of success for us, was we wanted to make players drive consciously, unless they really knew they needed to not drive consciously, for lack of better words. Unless they needed to floor it. And that became a big part of that, is not knowing what's around the corner, like not knowing, "Hey, maybe I do need to stop and use whatever tools at my disposal, be it like higher ground or something more specific, to get the lay of the land and see I want to go that way. But I see danger that way, can I go around? Is my car setup to go around? Can I improvise something on my car to help me get around?" That kind of thing.
Seth Rosen: You also, when you start in the level, like where you start and where you need to exit is randomized to. So even though you've been in a terrain before, your relationship to it might change because of the way that you need to cross it.
Alexander Dracott: Yeah, so what Seth was mentioning, this is all our runtime randomization. Where, because we're a small team, we're relying heavily on offline tools to help just make content, where in the demo that you saw, I don't believe outside of maybe a couple of trees at the garage, a single tree was hand placed. That was all placed procedurally in our content offering, it'll be locked down when we ship but it's the kind of stuff that allows us to say, "Hey, Kendall [Wix]," a level designer, "we just need more wilderness maps." And it's a fast turnaround for him to be able to go through and get a rough idea, click a button, that rough idea turns into organic landscape, that organic landscape gets textured, and then the texture has helped drive what actually gets placed there in of like, foliage and cliffs and rocks and pebbles and stuff like that.
Not literally placing individual pebbles to be clear, but that's been fun. Because when you're then looking at content at that scale, we can iterate at that scale. So Seth, myself, Kendall, and a couple others have been talking about, you know, how big are the patches of mud at this point in the game when the player is at this progression? Literally later today I will be going in and changing that and we can apply that to the entire game and be like, "You know what? We need the same amount of mud, but we need it to be broken up smaller, because it'll be more fun for the player that way." And I'm somebody, you know, my background is art, and I've got a pretty traditional 3D education where I learned about, like, long rendering, and like, taking two hours to render out a final shot. I've always loved real-time art because of iteration speed. And it's fun to be able to apply some of that iteration speed to the game itself, when it comes to how we're making stuff for the player.
And there's a weather system too, right? Is that randomized as well, or is that more fixed?
Alexander Dracott: So that's also randomized. We have the ability to kind of nudge it in certain directions. So if we decide, "Hey, you know what, this should be just a really foggy, foggy trip," or "this destination is just covered in rain, and it's always gonna be raining or wet in general," that's something that we'll be able to do. But when you're out there, the weather will change. As anyone that's been in the northwest knows, we do get those random showers.
I know in this game, striking a balance between realism and still being accessible when it comes to things like car maintenance and making changes to your car was really important to you guys. What's striking that balance been like, has it been hard to do?
Alexander Dracott: When it comes to the physics of the car and that aspect of driving around, I would say it's definitely been a challenge. But we have fantastic tools to play with, where we're obviously on the high end, we're limited in that our car physics are not the same level of crazy simulation of something like Spintires or Mudrunner, something like that, we're never going to have that level of tech. So there is a cap, but on the inverse, if we make things too accessible, then the game becomes too easy, or we're not promoting the right kind of choices by the player.
And so a lot of our integration has been around usually a three-part question of, you know, what do we want the players' experience to have, both in the moment and in the long term? What is the technical requirement of us getting there? Like, is there a specific piece of the simulated feel for being off road that we really want the player to have, but we don't have or we need to change? And then finally, testing it and iterating on it and making sure that it's matching up - did we think it worked? But yeah, Seth, I know, like, you've been a huge part of the general interaction model, you should definitely talk about that.
Seth Rosen: Yeah, I mean, when I first ed the project, at that point, you would swap parts by like, opening up a meta-menu and scrolling through your list of items and clicking on a menu button. And I was like, "Man, this doesn't make me feel like a mechanic at all." You get the nice sort of fun of configuring your car and driving it around once it's been configured, but it felt like we were really missing out on that piece of actually working on a car and kind of having that sort of close relationship to something, of like, "Hey, I like got this thing back on its feet."
And I think that's a really important aspect to the player-car relationship as well. Like if you just hit a "repair my car" button every time you go back to the garage, you wouldn't have the same impact. So I kind of started from there and everything just kind of tumbled out from that. And as I thought about what those interactions would look like - I am someone that will, not because I prefer it necessarily, but because most devs don't do it, I will always play on controller. Often it's just easier to keep playing on your keyboard because that's where you're doing your work, but I like to play on controller because as a designer it gives me a really good appreciation for the more limited experiences there. Not that controllers are limited, it's just that the precision of your kind of targeting is reduced, you can't snap around as much, and you just have fewer buttons to work with. So the number of verbs that you can give to the players is kind of necessarily limited by that without going after some like deeply modal control scheme that is going to be impenetrable.
So, you know, from there, it's just this process of kind of like, okay, if we want to be able to actually work on the car, we'll make this be the button to take things off. And in fact, actually, I initially wanted it to be on a face button, because I was so used to that being the convention, and right now our controls are that the primary interact is on a shoulder button, actually. Because we found that it's so important in this first-person driving experience to always be able to look around, so we never wanted to take your thumbs off the joysticks, which is sort of a weird thing and might be a little bit uncomfortable for new players. We're still playtesting that, obviously, but it has just been a thing that's always been really important to me, and has honestly been kind of just pulling on a thread in the sweater and following it from that initial starting point of like, if this is what it looks like to interact with your wiper handle while you're in the driver's seat, and this is what it looks like to install a wheel on your car, what other buttons do I have available? And how can we make sure that we're actually delivering on the experience of going through this journey with your car in a way that doesn't detract from that experience at the same time?
It hits that nice middle ground of where it takes a moment to swap out a wheel, but it's not like, "Alright, you're gonna take off that screw, and that screw, and that screw," and it's going to be so tedious and sort of simulated that you forget about the exciting drive you're hoping to go on afterwards by the time you're done with it. So it was just this balance of keeping it snappy, keeping a control scheme accessible, and making sure that you're actually putting your hands on the car in a way that feels real. And it also extends to like, if your car gets stuck on a rock, you can kind of kick it and get it out of there. And like that's a more personal and intimate connection to your car, again, as compared to like, the car warp, which we also have if your car gets completely flipped and stuck in some tree branches or something. But we want it to be really physical and immediate in that way.
And that's just kind of guided every sort of UX decision that we've made in trying to make sure that things are frictionless from a player perspective. I tend to approach my design work in a "say yes to the player" sort of framework, and that's both in of making it easy on them to do the thing that they were hoping to do and sort of reading their mind in that way in of how we respond to inputs, but it's also in of allowing them to creatively solve problems while they're out in the zone.
And that sounds like it really ties into the relationship between the player and the car, which is a core focus of the game. Can you guys talk about the importance of that in Pacific Drive?
Alexander Dracott: I mean, it's very important, is the short answer. I think when it comes to the experience that we want players to have, that's it, right? It's what gets you in this car, out in the mysterious place. And anything that we can do to reinforce that we want to try to do because it's, for lack of better words, if you're playing random other survival game and it's and this stick, but you're going to throw away the stick, or you're going to use the stick to make something new or you're going to make a tool that is going to break and you have to replace it - we wanted to give the player something that they could work on, right? Like it's a project car for lack of better words, it's something that keeps you safe.
There's a symbiotic relationship there, which I think is - when you look at like, examples of NPC companions in games, one of the important things is making sure they're relevant to gameplay. And that's actually been the really easy part for us, like, alright, well, the car is always going to help you get around faster, it's always going to protect you. For us, it's been about reinforcing all the other stuff. Can you customize it? Can you interact with it in a variety of ways like? Do you feel like you're making it yours versus just following the best template? Does it actually show the wear and tear as you kind of go through your adventure? Which it does, and those have been the touches that have kind of been the complement to the core experience, which is getting into these strange adventures, because you're always thinking about it, right? Like, "Where am I going? Where am I leaving my car? Can my car get there if I can't get there? What is the danger to me, but also what is it to my car? What is in my car that I need to protect?" These are the common mental loops that players are going through, and that's, that's exciting, because it is not necessarily a standardized way of going through these survival games.
And I love that it's a station wagon, it's so Pacific Northwest. I know it's real inspiration from traveling in a station wagon, right?
Alexander Dracott: Yeah, it is. The first car I drove was a station wagon, but I recently ended up getting another one that looks very, very close to the one in the game. And that's been the one that we've used to record some audio.
Seth Rosen: Alex and I have had some spirited discussions about dimensions of the car and compromising on that, on sort of like sightlines versus appropriate physicality.
Alexander Dracott: Yeah, and it's hard. There's a lot of stuff like how far the hood goes, like, we can make the hood not be in the view at all, but then does it still look like a station wagon? That kind of thing. And all the way down to really nuanced stuff, like, we do some clever stuff with how we've designed the undercarriage of the car just so that it's got a little bit more collision and space so that it's not annoying the player. But, yeah, the station wagon? Definitely. It's the Northwest vibe, for sure. And now I have literally our test station wagon here, anytime we need to have a discussion about physics, this is the thing that usually gets grabbed. It's come into use without a doubt.
The station wagon will also develop chaotic quirks over time, can you discuss what that will be like?
Seth Rosen: Yeah, I mean, this also really relates to the whole relationship to the car thing. If you just have the same literal car through the experience of playing a game some number of hours, like, you're probably going to develop some attachment to it, but it's not necessarily going to feel like your car. And and, you know, a bunch of the decisions that we've made about how to go about building this car and the systems to add to it are really geared at turning this sort of template car into, by the end of the game, something that actually feels unique to you. And you might have had a meaningfully different experience with it than someone else who started with the same starting point.
So you know that's about having your car your way, like, do you install your gas tank on the left side or the right side? And some of these decisions are somewhat trivial, but maybe not. But as far as the quirks go, you know, your car is going to take a beating out there in the zone, and especially if you if you don't make it back, then it tends to develop more quirks because there's kind of weird stuff that happens to it on the way back to the garage on a failed run. And basically, these are like things that someone might call into Car Talk about. So it ranges from like, if you honk, your hood will pop, like the latch on your hood will open, to every time you open the driver's door it'll toggle the radio. So most of them are these sort of like, on their own fairly neutral things - reasonable minds can disagree about whether having your own pop open while you're driving is neutral - but generally, you know, it's not generally like the back half of the car explodes and you lose all those parts, it's a little bit more mundane than that, and stuff that like you mostly have the means to within like one to five seconds deal with.
And it and it shouldn't really interrupt your plans in the way that a gameplay event or an instability front rolling in might, where you suddenly need to relocate to a new part of the map. It's more this just sort of like noise in the simulation a little bit, like another thing you have to pay attention to. It's like, "Okay, my gas meters getting to a quarter, I need to be thinking about making sure I can siphon some more fuel, but I keep getting distracted from that fact because every time I turn my wheel all the way to left, the interior light turns on, and then, because I'm picky about that sort of thing, I'll turn it back off. And it's kind of all about this time management and sort of just maintaining your plans and having your plan interrupted, and that cycle is so crucial to any survival crafting game.
Because they're kind of randomly assembled and given to you at runtime, and there's a large number of different chord combinations that you can get, the ones that you get will be different from the ones that your friends get, in all likelihood, and they might interact in different ways too. Like I could get one that makes it so when I honk my horn, the radio turns on, and also get one that makes it so when the radio turns on, the headlights turn on, and also get one that makes it so when the headlights turn on my hood pops, and all those things will chain together and make it a little bit harder to figure out what's going on. But you can pay attention to it and diagnose it, and part of the theory here is having to live with these quirks for some amount of time as you kind of diagnose them and then are able to cure them after diagnosing them adds to that personal story of your car.
And you'll maybe like, mission three you had a wildly different experience with because of these two quirks that were on your car that made it tricky in some way and you figured a way around it, and you're talking to your friend and they're like, "What are you talking about, that wasn't there?" So it's just another piece of this randomness, but in a way that is particularly targeted at that idea of like player and car personal connection?
Alexander Dracott: It's silly, but it's interesting that like - so one of the first things that we started doing, and I think I started way before the game was gonna be a real thing, was I just asked people stories about their cars. And we built a doc of these weird things that we've heard happen, and we're doing a good job on our end of filtering like, "Hey, is this actually good for the game?" A lot of those ideas did come from actual inspiration of weird stories that people have told us. At some point we'll probably pull up that doc and do a little audit and be like, "yeah, this could happen, that could happen, that one we didn't do because it would horribly inconvenience the player way too much." But somewhere there is a living doc of an original I think like 50 or 60 stories, everyone I talked to has a car story and it was fun to hear them talk about it a little bit.
Is there anything else you want players to know about Pacific Drive?
Alexander Dracott: We talked about a lot in the press preview, like in that demo, but I think there's a lot there that I think is honestly really exciting. It's a hard thing to verbalize, but there is a mood that I think we're really successfully hitting where it is you and the station wagon in this creepy place not knowing what's coming around the corner, and just that vibe and that tone and like the radio coming over the music.
It's something really special and we're really excited about that, especially when it contrasts with where that then goes, as that snowballs, as things get more more chaotic, as more anomalies start to enter the picture. I'm just super excited for the players to have their stories, even hearing Seth's story, which I hadn't heard that one yet. And I think more and more people on the team are starting to have their own version of "I didn't know this could happen that way." That's really cool, I had my version of that happen a couple days ago and it's just exciting.
Seth Rosen: I think the aspect that I want to reiterate, because I think, you know, we've talked a lot in the preview session and we've gone into some of the nitty gritty details here today, and I think hopefully at this point people will have a pretty good picture of what it actually is moment to moment to play this game. So the thing that I want to return to is that we really want people to play this game in a way that makes sense for them. Like, if that is turning off damage entirely and just experiencing the story, great, do that.
It is a first person driving game, if you are not comfortable driving from a first person perspective, it is probably going to be difficult for you to get through this experience on some level. But if you're able to deal with that, and find a way to make that comfortable for you, again, we'll have like lots of camera settings in the options menu and everything like that, you can turn off damage and just have a narrative experience with it, you can just kind of play it as a survival crafting game.
And, you know, obviously, there is content that opens up by progressing through the story, but we're not forcing you to do it, you can just do a run-based game forever. And for players that want to kind of straddle both of those, that's also available there. Because of all the randomness and procedural elements, continuing to go on runs should be exciting and engaging every single time whether or not you're still pursuing that kind of initial mystery. And what we've seen in play tests is that with all the sort of surprising combinations of things, you know, your story with you and your car can continue past credits rolling.
Source: PlayStation/YouTube
Pacific Drive is set to release in 2023 for PS5 and PC.
