Ubisoft's high anticipated "Watch Dogs" might have experienced a delay, but the amount of detail the developers put into the game may make the title worth the wait.
During an interview with Gamespot, "Watch Dogs" Creative Director Jonathan Morin explained the development process for the title, which began in 2009. The development team was fascinated by the emerging popularity of smartphones and the world was connected through a handheld device.
"It's very rare when you start a project and you have this canvas of possibilities," Morin told Gamespot. "Facebook, social media, privacy--it was so easy to go into hour-long discussions about those subjects. That fascination early in the project became a weapon for me to [go to management] and say, 'Let's do something where fun can collide with thinking.'"
Morin's idea was simple: "Control an entire city through the press of a button." According to Gamespot, Morin always wanted the main character to have a certain level of access to information. From there, the development crafted ideas relating to hacking and surveillance.
"When we started to talk about the game, we asked, 'What should he do while he's at his safe house?'" Morin said. "Well, he should be monitoring everyone. He should know about everybody...The fantasy has always been, what if you can access everything? What if you were the invisible man in the room?"
Once the team finished researching for mechanics of the game, next came the gameplay and story line. Lead Story Designer Kevin Shortt wanted to make it seem like you can interrupt any conversation no matter where you were.
"We had to create a lot of content," Shortt told Gamespot"A lot. If the fantasy is I can hack into your phone and read your text message, we've got to pay that off. If you see that text message once, you can't see it twice."
"I was in combat one time and I had my profiler on," Shortt added. "These guys were trying to kill me, and I was trying to kill them. Then this one guy comes around the corner, and his profile tells me he's a newlywed. And I'm like, awww... Blam! [Laughs] And that's what our goal always was. Let's take these NPCs and make them characters."
You can read Gamespot's full feature here. "Watch Dogs" will be released to the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC on May 27.
