14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has shared some more details about its upcoming Watch Dogs open world action adventure title and has confirmed that it wanted to implement realistic hacking, albeit with one exception, and to make the AI-controlled non-playable characters react in a believable way when the hacking becomes suspicious.
Watch Dogs surprised quite a lot of people back in 2012 when it was unveiled to the world not just through great visuals but also through a novel premise, as protagonist Aiden Pearce used his cell phone to hack into different things and bend them to his will.
Ubisoft has since revealed that Aiden's world is a modern day Chicago that's controlled by the CtOS, a central operating system that can be hacked into by him and used to cause all sorts of things.
The development team at the publisher's Montreal office has tried to make the hacking feel as believable as possible, according to an interview with GameSpot, and even consulted with Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs. One area, however, that was kept intentionally non-real was the speed of the hacking, as Aiden can control things with the press of a button.
Even so, the studio took care not to make things too easy for players when they start hacking their way into all sorts of things.
"The core for us is having a simple way to connect and interact with the world," Ubisoft's Danny Belanger said. "But by doing that, it has to be useful and not feel like a win button. It's a window of opportunity. It's a win against one guy, but the other AI might become aggressive and start searching, and that puts you in even more danger. And then you chain the other hacks to distract them. So it's all about risk-reward and giving people windows."
According to the studio, if players keep on triggering different things, the AI will most certainly become suspicious, especially if these changes are done in quick succession and without a regard for being as stealthy as possible.
"If the player doesn't respect our AI, he won't take the time to use stealth or hacking," Belanger added. "Maybe he's played a lot of shooters and says, 'I'll just shoot everything.' And if he succeeds all the time, why would he change? Why would he try hacking? We want him to have a certain fear of the AI."
The AI reactions will be lifelike, as players will become more immersed if they realize they are causing genuine reactions from NPCs.
"When you do a hack and you interact with the world, you want to feel like these are humans. It's a bit unpredictable. Having some chaos and noise keeps things interesting. It creates gameplay stories."
Watch Dogs launches on May 27 worldwide for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.