14 DAY TRIAL // Jonathan Morin, the creative director working on Watch Dogs, says that his team wants to challenge the dominant position that Grand Theft Auto V holds in the open world genre, but they do not feel any pressure from the high-profile rivalry.
The developer tells VG247 that, “When you do a game you always want to make sure that what you put in is to the service of the game. I think GTA has a great fantasy and everything they put in it reinforces that fantasy. What you don’t to do is start copying or start feeling the pressure of your neighbor like, ‘Oh my god we need a chopper’.”
Morin reinforces the fact that Watch Dogs is built around the concept of surveillance and the mechanics of hacking, which give gamers an entirely new set of tools when it comes to interacting with the city around them.
The creative director adds, “It doesn’t mean we couldn’t have put in a chopper or something else in, but it would have always have been – if we had done it – because it fits or there’s one cool thing about hacking we could do with it.”
Watch Dogs takes place in a future version of Chicago that’s controlled by a central computer, which gives protagonist Aiden Pearce multiple ways to track his targets and affect them from distance.
Ubisoft says that the entire map will be open for exploration from the start of the game, but players will have to complete certain missions in order to open up more ways to interact with the world and its characters.
Watch Dogs will be out on the PC, the PlayStation 4, the PS3, the Wii U from Nintendo, the Xbox One and 360.
It will be available on November 19 in North America and November 21 in Europe.