Ubisoft on player choice in Watch_Dogs, more on being able to avoid conflict
A portion of a El33tonline interview with Ubisoft lead game designer, Danny Belanger...
El33tonline: You spoke about player choice – can you get through Watch Dogs without firing a shot or killing anyone?
Belanger: I would say 95 percent of the game. There are some narrative moments… we strongly believe in good narrative and good acting and good dialogue, so sometimes we’ll create a context that’s interesting but it involves action. But most of the time it’s free approach, you can do the whole thing stealth, you can arrive anywhere you want, use hacking or use a combination of all of these things together, go from stealth to combat and back, so you can play a lot with the game dynamics.
For us, it’s so fundamental to not put you on a train track, ‘This is playing as designed’ – that’s not what we want. That being said, if there’s something we want to teach you we’ll obviously create a context in which the thing is useful so we’ll definitely create some moments and teach you something. Then the moment will arrive again, but then it will be a choice for you. Because there are a lot of new things we really wanted the player to understand the dynamics, and then allow them to choose to use them or not when they become available later.
El33tonline: You spoke about player choice – can you get through Watch Dogs without firing a shot or killing anyone?
Belanger: I would say 95 percent of the game. There are some narrative moments… we strongly believe in good narrative and good acting and good dialogue, so sometimes we’ll create a context that’s interesting but it involves action. But most of the time it’s free approach, you can do the whole thing stealth, you can arrive anywhere you want, use hacking or use a combination of all of these things together, go from stealth to combat and back, so you can play a lot with the game dynamics.
For us, it’s so fundamental to not put you on a train track, ‘This is playing as designed’ – that’s not what we want. That being said, if there’s something we want to teach you we’ll obviously create a context in which the thing is useful so we’ll definitely create some moments and teach you something. Then the moment will arrive again, but then it will be a choice for you. Because there are a lot of new things we really wanted the player to understand the dynamics, and then allow them to choose to use them or not when they become available later.
