E3 2012: Exploring the Open World of Watch Dogs

[News Portal]

For many people, the game of the show at this year's E3 was [app=8874]Watch Dogs[/app], Ubisoft's surprise new IP centered around hacking and near-future terror. Patrick Stafford hacked his way into Ubisoft's E3 booth to discuss how open their world really is, when we can expect a PC version, and how much of their mind-blowing demo was scripted.

Read full story →



Read full article by Patrick Stafford

[Relaxed_Possum]

Cool, might play it when it comes out on PC

[shlaimon]

thats kind of dickish, playing it on a PC and demoing it for xbox and ps3 crowed. And then not releasing it on PC....

[vcatkiller]

When creative director Jonathan Morin spoke to GamesOnNet on the show floor today, he said the game demo was running on a PC. But when pushed to confirm whether the game would appear on the PC at retail, he replied, “right now, the game (we just saw) is running on PC”. “It’s announced for 360 and PS3, but it’s not for this year, and we don’t have a shipping date right now. We have multiple platform entrants, including on the iPad and tablets.”

So wait, they have the game running on PC, but it's only announced for 360, PS3 and some mobile devices?

Otherwise, haven't been following this title. Sounds kind of interesting.

[Deserteagle1266]

play the game without being vilent.. then why buy the game

[DarkMellie]

That you can cause that same moment from a different place is intriguing... is it still just an event trigger, or can you alter the shape of the entire crash-scene? Does it need to be a crash?

I no longer get hyped by E3, I've learned that lesson too many times, but I'm going to keep a very close eye on Watch Dogs.

[unspoken]

So by running the demo on the pc wouldn't that make it look and run better than a console? All about marketing.

[Nebby_99]

The one bit of open-world-ness I was assuming was that you could kill him in some way other than the car crash. I hope that at least is possible.

[Black Patriot]

Rock, Paper Shotgun mentioned this phenomenon, apparently many of the multi-platform titles were running on PC, simply because it looks so much better than the consoles. It's a "realtime" version of the old pre-rendered gameplay trick that Sony tried a few years ago; you show "realtime" gameplay, but forget to mention that it won't actually look or play that well on a console, which is where most of the sales are.

Quite frankly, if they've spent that much time and money developing a demo for the PC, that looks really good and seems to be pretty solid framerate wise, why the hell wouldn't you release it?

[Yapa]

Many demos at e3 are shown on pc bcos the new consoles are coming out and they illlook the. same.

Shame he can't say if it will come to pc.

[Black Patriot]

Many demos at e3 are shown on pc bcos the new consoles are coming out and they illlook the. same.

Shame he can't say if it will come to pc.

Those consoles won't be coming out this year, or the start of next, which is when most of these games are coming out, so it's still dishonest to show a game running on a PC when the consoles will be inferior, whilst implying that it's the consoles that are running it.

[exe3]

It'll be on PC, it's just a simple case of they're not allowed to talk about it yet for whatever reason but it'll be on PC. I don't know how to feel however as it looks like it's a game i'll want to play on PC but on the other hand Ubi's DRM. -_-

I really want to know how free you are though. Already mentioned was whether it had to be a car crash he caused. Also he left the club, why'd he leave the club? He was using himself as bait yet bailed as soon as he was discovered.

[shlaimon]

I heard that it wasn't actually 100% sandbox free roam, and that you play as multiple people, theres no set protagonist. At the end of the demo there were other people with the same blue icons, where they other players? or other people you could use to complete your goal? Dunno if this is all true though.

If it is 100% free roam sandbox, its impressive.

[Rogue]

The one bit of open-world-ness I was assuming was that you could kill him in some way other than the car crash. I hope that at least is possible.

It doesn't seem like it from the example they gave, otherwise the guy would have given a 'sandbox example' that actually resulted in something different, not just a different way of creating the car crash.

[Yapa]

A mission in a game has to be scripted to some extent... I think it might be very much like GTA IV... where its free roam/sandbox but when you start doing a mission a certain target or NPC will be in a certain area and you have to do something there to finish the mission.

The only way to make it totally non scripted would be to give the NPC a 24/7 behaviour script and you would just have to find them and kill or whatever at some point in their daily routine... and I dont think we'll see a game like this for a while.