The company compares the evolution of Watch Dogs to that of the original entry in the Assassin's Creed franchise

Sep 23, 2014 15:39 GMT  ·  By

Ubisoft's open world action adventure video game Watch Dogs came out on May 27 this year, and the developer is apparently already looking at how to improve its sequel by analyzing the feedback it got from the gaming community.

The game had many flaws and was criticized for a lot of reasons, but it was a best-seller nonetheless, and Ubisoft is already making a list of improvements for a potential next entry in the franchise. The company has apparently admitted many of the flaws and is currently investigating radical ways to solve them.

The Vice President of Creative at Ubisoft Montreal, Lionel Raynaud, thinks that Watch Dogs' reception was pretty close to the one the first installment in the Assassin's Creed series got, and considers that the parallel between the two games means that there is a lot of room for improvement.

Better watch, bigger dogs

"We had a lot of flaws in the replayability of gameplay loops and you could feel that the game was a first iteration. At the time, there was clear potential but it was not easy to know it was going to become the franchise that it is today," Raynaud tells CVG.

“It's the same thing with Watch Dogs: it was difficult to do everything at the right level, which is why we took more time. The time we took was definitely useful – it allowed us to release the game without compromises and do everything that we wanted. We also kept parts of the game we felt didn't fit with the original for the sequel," he continues.

Since the title has been a commercial hit for Ubisoft, shipping over 8 million copies by July, according to the company's internal data, it's likely that a sequel is currently considered.

Plans for the future are built by reflecting upon the past

The game was criticized for being incomplete in many areas, and for offering an open world experience that was only skin-deep, with many aspects being very shallow. The areas that received the most criticism were the narrative and the campaign as a whole, panned for not delivering the immersive experience that was advertised.

Raynaud believes that the E3 stage demo back in 2012 simply set the bar too high, promising people an experience that wasn't attainable, and it reflected poorly on the final product, even if in some cases it was unwarranted.

He says that Ubisoft has to weigh in everything very carefully, in order to gauge which elements appealed to the broader audience and which were only criticized by a very vocal minority, and to strike a balance between fixing the game's problems and expanding on the initial promise.

As was the case with the original Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs was criticized a lot but turned out commercially successful. Ubisoft hopes this is as good an omen for its newest IP as it was for the AC franchise back then.

Watch Dogs screenshots (5 Images)

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