Ubisoft discusses Watch_Dogs' vehicles, fantasy elements, NPCs and crafting
The following comes from a Examiner interview with Ubisoft's Jonathan Morin...
"We don't ride helicopters, planes or BMX. It's something we hear about a lot and it surprised me a bit. There's a lot of questions about the stuff that other games have, and [whether or not] we have them. Some of them yes and some of them no. One thing we did want to push is stuff that other current games don't have.
We wanted to have elements that pushed the fantasy of Watch Dogs a lot. So by pushing density and all of that, we didn't push for crazy scale and stuff like that. If you have planes or choppers, you need that kind of scale. We wanted to dig into a different area, put the money, put the resources, the five and a half years of research on something else that players might not have touched already in a game."
The following comes from Ubisoft's Colin Graham...
"We have a system to generate NPCs and you have to have some logic in it so you have the right people in the right area. The people you see on the street are going to be generated randomly on the fly to create the demographic of the locale you are in. There are some characters that are in some of the missions though and you will see them pop-up over and over again. Sometimes we play with them because they are important to narrative context. What's interesting about that on an animation level, we took the approach of trying to make this as random as possible, which make our job really tough sometimes.
For example, if Nick goes on a street corner I can guarantee you, you will not see what Jon saw because the person will be different, the arrangement of the people will be different, the combination of all of these arrangements are different and we have a large amount of variety of them. It's not really possible to see the same thing twice.
I think the biggest challenge is how everything is interconnected, which is part of the reason why we needed the extra time. Every component of every system, can affect another system, so Jon talked earlier about [Watch Dogs] being systemic, it's simulated. So it's the butterfly effect, you change one thing and the outcome will be different. A lot times, when we're playing the game, you're like 'what just happened?' It can take a long time to produce some of the things that happen, but [with that], the player then gets an infinite amount of unique gameplay."
The following comes from Ubisoft's Danny Belanger...
"Yes, crafting for us is a lot like hacking. All of these tools will either add hacking opportunities or disrupt the system, jam-comm is a crafting tool. You need to hack civilians to find system keys, which are passwords you can use once. A blackout is the same thing, so a lot of these tools are very powerful. Crafting is very, very easy in our game. We wanted it to be part of the core so you don't have to go somewhere, stop playing, if you find stuff you just craft it on the fly. Basically all of your non-weapon tools are crafting tools."
Link
"We don't ride helicopters, planes or BMX. It's something we hear about a lot and it surprised me a bit. There's a lot of questions about the stuff that other games have, and [whether or not] we have them. Some of them yes and some of them no. One thing we did want to push is stuff that other current games don't have.
We wanted to have elements that pushed the fantasy of Watch Dogs a lot. So by pushing density and all of that, we didn't push for crazy scale and stuff like that. If you have planes or choppers, you need that kind of scale. We wanted to dig into a different area, put the money, put the resources, the five and a half years of research on something else that players might not have touched already in a game."
The following comes from Ubisoft's Colin Graham...
"We have a system to generate NPCs and you have to have some logic in it so you have the right people in the right area. The people you see on the street are going to be generated randomly on the fly to create the demographic of the locale you are in. There are some characters that are in some of the missions though and you will see them pop-up over and over again. Sometimes we play with them because they are important to narrative context. What's interesting about that on an animation level, we took the approach of trying to make this as random as possible, which make our job really tough sometimes.
For example, if Nick goes on a street corner I can guarantee you, you will not see what Jon saw because the person will be different, the arrangement of the people will be different, the combination of all of these arrangements are different and we have a large amount of variety of them. It's not really possible to see the same thing twice.
I think the biggest challenge is how everything is interconnected, which is part of the reason why we needed the extra time. Every component of every system, can affect another system, so Jon talked earlier about [Watch Dogs] being systemic, it's simulated. So it's the butterfly effect, you change one thing and the outcome will be different. A lot times, when we're playing the game, you're like 'what just happened?' It can take a long time to produce some of the things that happen, but [with that], the player then gets an infinite amount of unique gameplay."
The following comes from Ubisoft's Danny Belanger...
"Yes, crafting for us is a lot like hacking. All of these tools will either add hacking opportunities or disrupt the system, jam-comm is a crafting tool. You need to hack civilians to find system keys, which are passwords you can use once. A blackout is the same thing, so a lot of these tools are very powerful. Crafting is very, very easy in our game. We wanted it to be part of the core so you don't have to go somewhere, stop playing, if you find stuff you just craft it on the fly. Basically all of your non-weapon tools are crafting tools."
Link
