14 DAY TRIAL // The development team working on Watch Dogs at Ubisoft says that it has not included a morality system in the game because it wants players to have as much freedom as possible to create their own stories in the open world title.
Danny Belanger, a lead game designer, is quoted by VG247 as saying that the team is tracking a lot of data about the player, but does not use it for any sort of karma meter.
He explains, “We could have easily used the data to power a karma system. The data is all there but the point is not that, the point is if we put a score to that and gamify it then the question becomes ‘are you doing that to optimize your game-play or are you doing it because you care?’”
A morality system would have constrained some players and the company chose to only use the tracking tools to show gamers the actions that they performed and how they influenced the world around them.
Watch Dogs will be launched on May 27 on the Xbox One from Microsoft, the PlayStation 4 from Sony, current-gen consoles and the PC and promises a complex open world game built around themes like hacking, social impact and surveillance.