14 DAY TRIAL // Watch Dogs, the open world experience from Ubisoft's Montreal studio, has seen improvements in quite a few areas during its recent delay, including animation and NPC behavior, as the team wants to nail down all the different aspects of the big game.
Watch Dogs takes place in the open world of Chicago, allowing players to take control of Aiden Pearce, a notorious hacker who breaks into the CtOS operating system that governs the whole city and uses it, together with brute force, to take revenge on certain people.
Ubisoft Montreal was initially set to launch the game in November right alongside the new PS4 and Xbox One consoles, but unfortunately fans weren't able to get it, as the studio made the tough decision to delay the game for several months in order to be able to deliver the best experience possible.
Since then, Ubisoft has confirmed that the title will launch on May 27 and that the delay allowed it to fine tune many different aspects.
According to a new post on the UbiBlog, one such area was the animation, as the team was able to make improvements to the thumb movements of protagonist Aiden Pearce. Apparently, while the animation was present, it wasn't as smooth as director Colin Graham wanted.
"We animated Aiden’s thumb movements so he’s better at hacking," Graham chuckles. "For example, when he hacks a tower, you’ll see he clicks on the screen properly with his thumb. We didn’t have that quite right before."
While those small details make a big difference, the animation system goes beyond that, according to Graham, and covers manipulating big amounts of data and making sure that the non-playable characters react in believable ways.
"Let’s say you hack a traffic light and cause a car crash. The animation team has to think about what exactly the citizenry is reacting to. Is it the traffic light? The car crash? The resulting fire and explosion?"
"If you pull out your gun, what level of reaction do they go to then? Some people will react to your gun and others will react to the people that are panicking. They haven’t seen you. They don’t know what’s causing it. But they do know something’s up," he added.
Watch Dogs developers have confirmed in the past that the delay also allowed it to make sure that all the different systems and mechanics in the game will work smoothly with one another, including the animation and the AI one, for example.
The game is set to appear on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One on May 27. A Wii U edition is expected this fall.