14 DAY TRIAL // Watch Dogs developer Ubisoft Montreal believes open world and system games, like its upcoming title, can be ruined by exploits and by missions that force players to do a certain thing or use a certain item in a specific play style.
Watch Dogs puts players in the shoes of protagonist Aiden Pearce, a hacker who can not only use his wits but also guns or blunt weapons to take out foes in his quest for vengeance.
Ubisoft Montreal has already emphasized the different ways in which the game will delight players and how it will support different play styles, from going in guns-blazing to using stealth and hacking everything without hurrying, as to not alert AI-controlled non-playable characters.
Such an open nature can easily result in exploits, so one play style becomes the easiest and most efficient. Such a scenario can kill a game's nature, according to Ubisoft Montreal's Jonathan Morin, who talked with Edge.
"Systemic games are hard," he said. "If you end up in the situation where there’s an exploit – one single exploit – and the player finds it, then they won’t express themselves ever again. I know if there’s an exploit, I’ll use it every time, and I’ll call all the missions repetitive and boring."
Another possibility that might ruin a game is to force players to do certain things or use a specific play style, instead of letting them discover things for themselves or just motivating them to use different strategies.
"So I think that balance is something we took a lot of care with. We always make sure the player can express themselves the way they want, but sometimes events evolve in a certain direction where you need to adapt to things [to make it] more likely they will become interested in combining the systems," he added.
"I wouldn’t say, 'Here, I want you to use this gun, because you haven’t and it’s really cool.' I don’t like that. But say you always play stealth, we’ll find a moment to destabilize you, to make you try to explore hacking or shooting instead of going for your comfort zone all the time. That’s a very important nuance and it does pay off quite a lot. To have every player find the variety for themselves – that’s hard."
Watch Dogs is set to feature plenty of different possible game styles, so it's going to be interesting to see how viable they all are.