Ubisoft has finally dropped a little bit of information about the multiplayer side of Watch Dogs, its upcoming surveillance state and hacking open-world epic.

Although you’ll always be playing in an individual session, creative director Jonathan Morin told the PlayStation Blog that these sessions can temporarily overlap according to Ubisoft’s “pacing”. Once the encounter is over, you’ll go back to playing entirely alone.

Morin admitted that players don’t necessarily want somebody else in their game, potentially ruining everything – but said Ubisoft has been working on this problem in a pretty interesting-sounding way.

“When we watch people play together in Watch Dogs, most of the time they don’t even realise that it was another player. There are no signs. There is a great thing there that someone can be in the experience and naturally enter a situation. They become part of the story. ‘That was another player? No way! That’s awesome!’ They didn’t notice. That’s spectacular!

“As a developer, I can immediately tell when it’s another player in a game – jeez, that guy doesn’t walk like an AI, that’s a player. But in Watch_Dogs, players won’t notice that immediately. It’s a new form of emotion and it fits perfectly in the Watch_Dogs universe where everybody watches everyone else.”

Naturally I’m a little bit dubious as in my experience multiplayer gamers tend to be fairly obvious – it’s the teabagging that gives it away – but the Assassin’s Creed series has created a whole new genre of “pretending to be an NPC” in its multiplayer modes, so let’s see what Ubisoft can pull out of its bag of tricks.

Source: PlayStation Blog EU

YouTube channel GamesHQMedia have somehow got hold of six minutes of edited Watch Dogs gameplay footage — despite nobody being able to identify where it came from or when Ubisoft released it (which seems appropriate, given the theme of the game). It’s definitely new stuff and hasn’t been shown before, and if the description is to be believed it is running on a PC specced to the power of a next-gen console.

Take a look below and see what you think.

UPDATE: The original video has been taken down. We’ve got one up now from Eurogamer — thanks ali_gray.

Source: Joystiq

Ubisoft are keen to make sure the hacking in Watch Dogs doesn’t stretch the bounds of reality — too far, at least. Senior Producer Dominic Guay from the company’s Montreal studio explained that the team had been working with Kaspersky Lab to keep it vaguely realistic.

“We’re working with Kaspersky Lab, a big security firm,” said Guay. “They have really hardcore experts there on hacking. We send them some of our designs and we ask them feedback on it, and it’s interesting to see what gets back. Sometimes they say, ‘Yeah, that’s possible, but change that word,’ or, ‘That’s not the way it works.’”

According to Ubisoft, this sort of coordination with real-life security teams is meant to reduce instances of “Hollywood Hacking”, which anybody who has ever used a computer will have seen in movies (and then immediately groaned and looked away).

Watch Dogs lands on November 21.

Source: Joystiq

Watch Dogs looks good, and the trailers we’ve seen for it look good as well. Interestingly, Ubisoft have chosen to release a new trailer at GDC that provides a sort of meta-commentary on the last trailer, from the point of view of the CTOS system administrators who run the city’s networking software. It’s worth a look as a companion piece to the first one, revealing some details I had originally missed. Check it out:

The Dutch gaming site InsideGamer has been speaking to Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guilllemont about Watch Dogs (as you do, naturally), who revealed that the PS4′s new x86 architecture makes it really easy to develop for the PC as the lead platform and then quickly port across.

“We have, in my opinion, but a game that had really had problems with a port and that’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier,” reads Guillemont’s comments, translated from Dutch by Google. “The PC project could be better managed. But with the other brands there is a lot of time and effort in which all platforms have the perfect game.”

“We also expect fewer problems with porting games to the PS4 than the PS3, which had a completely different infrastructure. It is now easier. Previously, we developed first games on the Xbox 360 and which were then translated into the PS3. It took a lot of time and money to make that port. Now we develop from the PC and which versions are translated into a console like the PlayStation 4.”

The news follows the reveal that the excellent-looking Watch Dogs trailer used at the PS4 announcement event was actually running behind the scenes on a high-end PC.

Source: Blue’s News

Here at games.on.net we’re partial to a bit of PC gaming, which is why the PS4′s announcement event that happened today has somewhat flown under our radar. We’ll have a wrap-up of the major points shortly, but one of the biggest reveals was this new Watch Dogs footage, embedded below. Slated as a PS4 launch title, the footage shown at the event was actually being run behind the scenes on a high-end PC. Check it out.

Watch Dogs was my number one most anticipated game of 2013 and, based on this footage, it still is.

Source: Thanks, VG247

Alright. Who called it? Yes. It was me, thankyou for asking.I’ve written extensively about my jacked-in love for ‘80s sci-fi baby cyberpunk in the past, both for games.on.net and elsewhere. Naturally and because every game dev hungrily devours just about everything I write ever*, the resurgence I picketed for in an annoying way has not stopped at Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Syndicate and even Gemini Rue.

In fact, it looks like it’s becoming a thing all over again in 2013. This year alone we’re gonna hear from Watch Dogs, Remember Me, maybe Prey 2 (I’m an optimist), and most blinding and recently of them all, Cyberpunk 2077. Okay, that last one’s slated for “when it’s ready”, but it’s definitely got your attention. Kick. Ass.

You know, I just finished reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time. I was pretty late to that party, but I seriously still wasn’t ready for that book. It may not have coined the term “cyberpunk,” but it made it what it is. It’s futurist and quaint in the same way that makes the genre so sort of beguiling on an almost cute level; a crystal ball and a relic in one. It invented and visualised the concept of “the matrix” way before the Wachowski kids ever put keyboard stroke to screen, but yet it somehow failed to anticipate the mobile phone. It’s just so ‘80s that way.

Cyberpunk is full of turns still unrealised and contradictions only made known to it decades later. There is nothing else like it, and it’s such a perfect antithesis to brown military shooters I can totally envision the day when everything is instead a grey cyberpunk shooter instead (please don’t, big three).

It’s also turned out that it’s a cyclical kind of thing, and the ideas explored in it – the dystopian paranoia, the technological mores and the sinister enablement contained within – are now more relevant than they were 30 years ago. There are mechanised killing machines in the air above Syria, just watching (waiting). Your personal identity becomes more and more a part of the internet with each passing year. All those numbers that are so important to you – your credit card, your mobile – are in there in vast quantities, held by corporations mostly. The corporation rules; the world’s richest could have ended poverty four times over. The great irony is that gaming demands the most dedicated connectivity of all. We’re all cowboys; some of us are even artistes, as Ratz calls Case in Neuromancer, “of the slightly funny deal.”

And when I saw Cyberpunk 2077, I thought not of sexism and the patriarchy or whatever else gamingdom at large is hating on right now, but of Neuromancer’s Molly, the book’s real main character. Molly the razorgirl – Steppin’ Razor, to the Zionites – a street samurai augmented beyond belief by the black market surgeons of Chiba City. Ten 4cm double-edged blades, one in each finger. Mirrored lenses and she has cat’s eyes now. Reflexes to match, too. Hot-rodded nervous system. None of this stuff is cheap, she tell us later. She had to do some things to get the money. Work as a meat puppet, she says. Renting her body out for the night and turning off her consciousness. One night her employers switched her back on in the middle of things and her John was acting sick. Something had to be done. You were definitely watching cyberpunk that rainy trailer day.

*live in the golden clouds, it’s fantastic

Watch Dogs, the surprise new IP from Ubisoft in which hacking electronic devices forms a primary aspect of gameplay, has created a lot of hype – and a behind-closed doors demonstration of the game seen by games.on.net reveals just how much freedom players will actually have. But there’s also some disappointing news, with the developers remaining coy on whether the title will ever actually make it to PC.

In a demonstration shown to games.on.net today, we viewed the same level seen in the Ubisoft conference reveal, but with some more options for physically – and digitally – moving around the world. When the demo begins, the protagonist – Aiden Pierce – is walking down the street, just as he is in the conference demonstration. But the presenter shows off a few more hacking options along the way.

Across the street there’s a few different video cameras. The presenter hacks into one, and in a second is immediately able to spy on whoever’s in the camera’s vision, revealing more information about them, such as their age, profession, and income.

“Everyone has a story. There are no secrets here… if it’s networked, he can access it. He can watch anybody, and he can listen to anybody,” the demonstrator says. The demo also shows off the ability to hack into mobile phone conversations, even while watching through a security camera.

The demo continues as normal, with Pierce walking to the front of a club. The demonstrator reminds us again we’d be able to enter the club forcefully, but it would attract too much attention. He jams the mobile phones of everyone nearby, and casually walks in.

From here the demo continues alongside the example given in the Ubisoft conference. But the demonstrator is keen to point out the open-world aspect of the game, saying this extends to indoor locations like the club. Players will be able to enter that location at any time and talk to the people who are there.

When Pierce leaves the club after being detected by security, the demo takes a shift. The demonstrator tells us Ubisoft is keen to make this as much of an open-world title as possible, as he guides Pierce up a flight of stairs onto the train tracks.

“Anywhere you can see, you can go,” he says. From here, Pierce is able to create the same car crash in the original demonstration, but from a different vantage point, taking out bodyguards from on high. They’re small changes from the demonstration showed at the conference, but they emphasise how much power the player has over the world.

The demonstrator is keen to remind us the player has so much information at their disposal – personal details of friends and enemies – and it will be up to the individual to decide what they do with it. The amount of detail is so precise some NPCs even carry descriptions such as “paedophile” and “HIV infected”.

Ubisoft also showed off a new online capability. Players will be able to monitor that status in the game through a tablet application, following their progress, and the progress of their friends. They’re trying to “create an online experience that has never been done before”.

When creative director Jonathan Morin spoke to games.on.net 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.”

Morin was also adamant in saying one of the fundamental tenants of the game was the ability for players to fulfil their curiosity by combining different play types, such as using the technology with other weapons and systems in different combinations.

“If players want to be violent and confront them, they need to the tools to do so, and with technology, they can do whatever they want. The technology in Chicago is going to be layered through everything, so it’s up to the players to decide.”

“If someone wants to play through just hacking and not being violent, that’s completely fine.”

E3’s kicked off with a visible bang this year, and if the excitable LA ruckus cluttering up my Twitter feed is anything to go by, “HYPE” in big capital letters is a cool new thing and anyone who’s not over there is missing out big time. The other thing that’s become increasingly clear, with the revelation that is Watch Dogs, is this: Ubisoft are increasingly and somewhat bafflingly making a case for themselves as the new word in contemporary shooters.

What with Ghost Recon: Future Soldier coming out of nowhere to pip everyone at the sales charts and striking an unforeseen chord with firefight-fans the globe over, and Far Cry 3 continuing to impress just as it divides (to Ubi’s discredit, they’re really not showing this game’s full potential off in the right ways, which is sad), Watch Dogs’ sudden arrival on the scene is the third game in a trilogy that suggests the French publisher has been paying attention.

The introductory trailer was enough to whet my appetite. From memory, my personal GOTY for 2011, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, has been the only release of the sixth gen to adequately modernise and explore that distinctly cyberpunk paranoia I crave – a paranoia that’s becoming more and more of a reality in this day and age of global connectivity. Whereas in the ‘80s stylised dystopias and almost comical depictions of future hackers reigned, now we’re seeing those utilitarian concepts once thought unexciting next to robot-people and men with exploding brains take center-stage. We’re dooming the planet as we bridge its divides, sure – but we’re potentially dooming ourselves at a much faster rate. Knowledge has always been power, and knowledge is becoming instantaneous and free.

The trenchcoat, the neon ‘n rain, the grizzled and world-weary monologue: It’s not wholly unlike Ridley Scott’s Blade Runnerbefore the radioactive kipple sets in and we all escape offworld to the colonies, but Watch Dogs’ narrative is a distinctly Orwellian near-future that could very well be ours in just a few decades. That and it looks like it’s goddamn Grand Theft Auto Xwith mad tech. The plodding pace with which the demo proceeds is understandable given how many fresh ideas are at work here, and initially I took it for more of a storied adventure game. The ability to electronically mess around with your environment, too, seemed a new and exciting joy not to be rushed through.

Then the shooting started. Until today, I thought I could go the rest of my life without playing another cover-based shooter ever again. Once I’d seen our man vault over one car and seamlessly slide across the hood of another whilst capping the goon hunkering behind it, I realised that a large chunk of everything I’d ever hated about the largely stoic genre had been tended to, right there. It makes Max Payne 3 look instantly dated, which is quite the feat and one that, whether Ubisoft intended it or not, stands them in promising stead.

Although Watch Dogs’ themes seem concerned with the ailing freedom suggested by technological advancement and centralised governments, its nucleus is that of complete control, both personal and impersonal. As dynamic as its gameplay, fittingly. Only one question remained: Hey, can you drive any of those ca- oh.

Nice.

We’ll have more information for you soon when our Ubisoft press conference wrap-up comes in, but for now, enjoy this trailer ofWatch Dogs - the new IP from Ubisoft where you hack, hijack, and socially manipulate your way through a digitally connected open world. It looks superb, and makes a hugely refreshing change from the tidal wave of sequels we’ve seen so far.

(UPDATE) And here’s the intro trailer as well!