Are we not victims of our dedication to the future? Just as the world continues to spin, we continue to sync our lives to a broader ecosystem. Social networks display our lives on a timeline, servers in a warehouse are entrusted to protect our finances and, as the past year has shown, our video game consoles can be pried open digitally to compromise both entirely. Seemingly not a month goes by without an incident of hacking or cybercrime causing irreversible damage; a scary thought when you consider everything we do online is openly available through a friend request. It's funny really: the more we put of ourselves online the more we become another entry in a system - trading individuality for connectivity.
Much like many of Ubisoft Montreal's projects, Watch Dogs is an easy sell. With any new IP, Ubisoft is known to blend the lines between genres to create a more approachable experience. Far Cry dances with the supernatural while Assassin's Creed plays with science-fiction tropes - though the studio is playing it straight with Watch Dogs. Hinging instead on a grounded world to sell the experience, the all-too-familiar facade of privacy fuels Ubisoft's exciting new venture into the next generation.
"The instability of our hyper-connected reality is omnipresent in the news worldwide. Everyone at least has a friend who's had issues with either credit card or privacy thievery," says creative director Jonathan Morin when considering what it is about Watch Dogs that resonates with players even at this early stage. "It talks about us as a society. It makes us think about our day-to-day lives and how it will shape our future. In the end, we can easily relate to it."
Our playground is a near-future Chicago - one that houses the country's most advanced computer system; a network that controls almost every piece of the city's technology. With security cameras on every street corner, and electricity and technology all powered through one centralised operating system, it wouldn't take much for one man with a grudge to take it upon himself to dismantle society. Enter Aiden Pierce, a former thug turned master hacker who becomes embroiled in a quest for revenge following the death of his family. Ubisoft is keeping tight-lipped about his past, but one thing's for certain: with Aiden able to use the city's infrastructure as his arsenal, a new videogame experience is about to be born.
We can easily understand how it works We believe next generation should be heavily focused on new gameplay experiences. Hacking everything a city has to offer dynamically certainly fits that goal. I think players know next-generation games will be more beautiful, but what they want is new experiences. So everything people see in our game right now is not only true, it is fully systemic and based on player's expression. It is this philosophy tied to the exotic tools the game has to offer that gets people excited about how they will interact with our game world."
Following the PlayStation Meeting in February, the industry has been ablaze with talk of Watch Dogs. Ubisoft confirmed a debut on PlayStation 4, while affirming that wild open-world concept presented at E3 the previous year was very much a reality. For a game so focused on the idea of connectivity and social intrusion, there couldn't have been a better pairing than that of the P54. It's certainly no surprise, then, that when Morin presented Watch Dogs to Sony the two hit it off immediately.
"When we showed the game to Sony they understood it right away. They did because the 'always-connected' vision they have of our industry is the very same we are thriving for on Watch Dogs. So it was easy to extrapolate from there," says Morin. "As for what it brings to the table in terms of technology, I would say I am not a big fan of technology driven game concept," he claims, perhaps commenting on David Cage's assertion at the PlayStation Meeting that greater polygons translate to greater game experiences. "I firmly believe creativity is what drives people. So in our team we always pushed a crazy vision and then let the experts on every field see how they can go around the barriers in order to achieve the impossible. So in many ways our team was already in a next-generation 'game experience' state of mind."
That's not to say Morin isn't excited by the physical possibilities of the next generation; in fact, he is very interested in what the next consoles will do in terms of speeding up loading times and improving artificial intelligence. These are important aspects of Watch Dogs, boasting an open world for Aiden to hack and explore while dealing out his own brand of criminal justice.
Watch Dogs has been in development for four years at Ubisoft Montreal, which has allowed the developer to create a new engine codenamed Disrupt. While it looks to have a lot in common with the Assassin's engine - with Aiden able to hop, scale and vault across buildings and environments with ease - Disrupt allows the developer to completely re-establish the restraints of the sandbox. Couple that with the power of next-generation systems, and Watch Dogs is somehow getting more exciting every time we see it.
"When the PS4 showed up it did bring new possibilities to improve graphics and every Al systems we have. But in the same way we did for four years already, we will continue to look beyond what is possible to achieve in order to bring this little something extra out there for players to enjoy. And from what we've seen so far, the PS 4 seems to be great to work with in that regard. So expect more Al behaviors, more realistic consequences to your actions and an overall improvement in visuals and realisation. Our team have been working on this very complex ecosystem for more than four years now; this is what is required to build such an intricate set of Al systems.
"What the machine brings is new processing power and memory to run these things, but the biggest investment is always the time and the quality of the resources required to pull it off. So not only does the next generation bring more possibilities, but it also brings new challenges that we believe are extremely exciting from both a player's and a developer's perspective," asserts Morin, before detailing his vision for the future of gaming...
"For me, next generation is all about connectivity. I do love... all the power new machines have to offer. But in the end, players have seen [that] happen repeatedly in the past. The new exciting era now is how everyone remains connected; it is how multitasking is becoming a second nature in all of us. I am excited to see on how many levels this will impact our approach towards play and even business models... It is a very exciting time to be a game designer." While all the talk has centred on Sony and the PlayStation 4, Watch Dogs is going to play across generations, with Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii U gamers all able to experience the fun. From the footage we've seen, it looks like the next gen will bring larger worlds, more dynamic Al and a seamless transition between investigating citizens on the street, exposing crime in the underbelly of Chicago and setting out on heart-stopping cityscape chases, before enacting some street justice with a retractable nightstick.
It all looks a little too good to be true, but Morin assures us that the footage shown publicly so far has all been running in real-time and that we should continue to expect bigger and better things going forward. E3 2013 is set to be one of the biggest in gaming history. Until we get a hands-on, we have genuine concerns about the truth to the claims, but we can't help but be overwhelmingly impressed. "Both the E3 demo and the P54 conference demo were played in real-time... The team have worked so hard and so long on this project," says Morin. "We always managed to get more and more excited about it even after all those years. But there's nothing more stimulating than to see that players out there share our enthusiasm about Watch Dogs. "We feel privileged to have the trust of all those players and the only thing we all have in mind right now is to make sure we do not disappoint. We will push until the very last second to make sure that every single detail will make it into the box. We all know players want more out of their games and this is precisely what we want to give them. So keep watching us because we are certainly watching you back."
