14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has once again discussed the delay it had to announce for Watch Dogs last year, confirming that the time spent on the title was mainly focused on polishing and making sure the many different systems worked together in harmony.
Watch Dogs was set to debut in November of last year, right alongside the next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft, in the form of the PS4 and Xbox One.
Unfortunately, about a month before its release, Ubisoft surprised many with the announcement that Watch Dogs had been delayed until the beginning of 2014.
Last month, the title finally got a new release date in late May, and Ubisoft's Montreal team has started talking about the work it did on the future game.
According to Director Jonathan Morin, the team didn't use the extra time to fit in new features or ideas that were abandoned to reach the initial November deadline. Instead, it just focused on making sure the existing systems worked smoothly.
"We didn’t really start shoehorning features in one after the other," Morin told Edge. "It’s tempting to start saying, 'Oh, let’s add this and that, and we so wanted to add this,' but the reality is we’d just end up repeating the same thing over and over again. Our new starting point was an almost-shipped game, so the smart move was to not touch too much."
"Let’s just know exactly what we want to change and deal with it in a very precise way. We already had a huge game. Now the thing was to make sure everything connected with each other in a nice way. We didn’t really add anything huge to the game. We just tweaked everything."
A bit more content relating to NPC voices as well as profile backgrounds for the civilians to make the game feel more alive were also added.
Even so, it was really all about polishing, according to co-art Director Mathieu Leduc, who shared the philosophy of the whole team.
"Naturally, with an open-world game, you polish the main path and you kind of… not let go of the side stuff, but overpolish the main path. So this extension allowed us to just go back and polish a little more of the side stuff, the hidden stuff that’s not on the main path."
Watch Dogs is set to debut worldwide on May 27 for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One platforms. You can expect to hear more as we get closer to that date.