Driver San Francisco's multiplayer is "chaotic", "Matrix"-like

Driver: San Francisco's key feature - shifting from one car to another - has had some interesting implications for the game's multiplayer.

"The shift feature has allowed us to design games that you wouldn't normally associate with a driving game, like capture the flag and base defence," Martin Edmondson, Ubisoft Reflections founder and creative director, told CVG.

"Obviously standard races and cop chases are in there as well. The games have been designed around the shift.

"So in a game like Tag or Capture the Flag, there's a lot of shifting, people grabbing cars. It's almost like this Matrix-kind of thing where a car will suddenly transform in front of you, because one of the other players has grabbed it."

Watch Neo demonstrate what Edmondson means at the end of this clip from the first Matrix movie. Madness.

"It does become quite chaotic in some situations," Edmondson said. "We've controlled the number of players on each game. Some games we don't allow eight players, because they're just too chaotic."

Driver: San Francisco is due on Mac, PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in early September.