14 DAY TRIAL // The team at publisher Ubisoft working on the upcoming Watch Dogs reveals that its original incarnation was not focused on hacking and surveillance in any way and that the aim of the team was to create a reboot of the old Driver series.
Laurent Detoc, the leader of the North American division of Ubisoft, is quoted by VG247 as saying that, “Watch Dogs wasn’t started as Watch Dogs. They were working on a driving engine, working on something. We had the Driver license. This was years ago. Then we were thinking, ‘no, this is not the way we want to go with a driving game’, so we cancelled that and restarted.”
The switch from open world car races to open world hacking was made about three years ago, but the development team is still using some of the core mechanics of the first engine.
The executive explains that the Driver reboot was not actually canceled because it never got past the prototype phase.
The team working on it decided that it could not create an interesting new experience around that idea and moved to what is now Watch Dogs.
He adds, “I wouldn’t say that Driver became Watch Dogs, because that’s not true. That’s not really what happens. What happens is that a game gets cancelled, and then you take pieces of that game to make a new one. We could have had another driving engine from another team in another place, and then it would have been used by the Watch Dogs team.”
The new game from Ubisoft aims to capture the same audience that appreciates the open world mechanics of the GTA V series and will also deliver a story that comments on the current state of government-powered surveillance.
Watch Dogs will be launched on the PC, the PlayStation 3, the PS4, the Wii U, the Xbox 360 and Xbox One before summer 2014.