When Ubisoft unveiled Watch Dogs at its press conference a week ago, the company immediately won an army of acolytes to its techno-paranoid urban adventure. Visually, it’s a beautifully rendered game. More importantly, it offers opportunities to explore a modern urban environment in new ways.
It’s like GTA but with a dash of intellectual vim. Players don’t just wield guns to achieve their goals (although that is a part of the game), they also use secrets. The game is about manipulating technology to unlock information your enemies do not want made public. IGN’s Rich George recently explained why Watch Dogs is his favorite game at E3.
Creative director Jonathan Morin believes players will identify with this dynamic. “A lot of games will go and invite the player to just explore the environment. We're letting you explore human beings as well. Pierce [the game’s main character] looks at the people around him in a different way. Every person is not a robot following a sidewalk. It's a human being, you can tap into his life, you can find new side quests, stories. So it's pretty much an action-adventure game, that pushes the limit of what it means to walk into a living, breathing city.”
“Today there are new ways for people to express themselves publicly. Some people don't like that. It gets harder to govern a society when people have access to so much information. So we were talking about those things, and instead of talking about being a victim of that, we started to ask ourselves, wouldn't it be cool to be that guy? The guy who can tap into that information, and to reverse-engineer that conversation, and to make gameplay out of it. As soon as we tried it, it was pretty interesting."
Built at Ubisoft Montreal, Watch Dogs is an open-world game set in a fictional version of Chicago. It's about Aiden Pierce, a man shaped by violence, who's obsessed with revenge, and with surveillance technology. Morin says, “He's going to be forced to take justice into his own hands and aggressively take control of an entire city. Expect to be able to control, aggressively, every infrastructure, every device, in fact, everything you can think of that's connected to a computer or connected to wi-fi that runs a city. You can control it.”
Players will be required to use their imagination to escape from difficult situations, not to merely select a pre-ordained set of procedures. He explains, "Pretty much everything you see that's an infrastructure element can be hacked. It's not one thing that's mission-based, it's something you can do at will, to escape cops or use in a mission or anything like that. You can control the El trains, you can tap into every device, whether it's a laptop, whether it's a cell phone, and a bunch of other surprises that will come in the future."
Speaking on IGN’s E3 Live show, Morin also talked about the game's online multiplayer plans. "It's correct that we have an online experience. If Aiden Pierce can control everything and watch everybody. It's logical that somebody else is capable of doing the same thing. So what would happen if anybody in single-player and multiplayer and somewhere in between were all watching each other and had an impact on each other? That's the kind of excitement that we want to build."
For Morin, the game is about turning the tables on powerful people. It's about using technology and information against people who are accustomed to getting their own way. "Aiden Pierce is not necessarily that kind of guy who goes in a room and punches a guy in the face until he talks. He's more the kind of guy who goes in the room, sits down at the table, looks the guy in the eye and says, ‘I'm going to slide an envelope in front of you, and if you don't do exactly as I say, I'm going to destroy your life’. It's a very powerful feeling, to say that you can tap into people's lives that way. Suddenly the most powerful man in Chicago can be scared of you, it can really have an impact on a corrupted system, and that, I think, is pretty interesting."
One issue that's causing confusion is whether or not the game is current-gen or next-gen or both. Morin explains. "Well, the game is going to be coming out in more than one year for sure. We have an attitude where we're not shipping until it's done. As far as the platform goes, we're running on PC at the current E3. It's official for PS3 and 360. And since we don't have any ship dates, we're also hoping for any other platforms, multiple platforms, for the future.”
