14 DAY TRIAL // Watch Dogs developer Ubisoft Montreal guarantees that players will never see the same thing twice in its upcoming open world game, as all the NPCs will behave in different ways and have personalized backgrounds.
Ubisoft has praised the open world of its upcoming Watch Dogs game, as it's filled with all sorts of non-playable characters, and protagonist Aiden Pearce can use his hacking skills to find out various pieces of information about all of them.
Animation Director Colin Graham is so proud of the many different backgrounds and behaviors built into Watch Dogs that he actually guarantees on the UbiBlog that players will never see the same thing twice while exploring the open world of Chicago.
"You will never see the same thing twice, guaranteed," Graham said. "Your experience is unique. You go around this corner and the ten people that are there will be ten completely different people. Ten different profiles, ten different backgrounds, different actions, different combinations of actions."
Graham also went on to say that, thanks to the bigger memory on new consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, animations can be much more diverse and numerous, as bottlenecks caused by the low amount of RAM on the PS3 or Xbox 360 are a thing of the past.
"The animation is always a bottleneck on memory, so we can have a lot more diversity and variety now. You’re hacking people. You’re responding to crimes. You can rescue people if they’re trapped in their cars in gunfights," the developer said.
"You can cause people to panic and they will see your face on TV and recognize you and call the cops. You can take their phone and smash it. All this is fully integrated into the system so they’re not just cardboard cutouts or mannequins. They interact with you."
Watch Dogs will still have some special NPCs, according to Graham, including one who will start playing the drums while using just buckets. In order to recreate this great moment, the animation team recruited one of the game's sound engineers and took him to the motion capture studio in order to see just what movements he makes while playing.
Watch Dogs' Chicago promises to be quite expansive, so it's going to be interesting to see if Ubisoft does manage to populate it with different and unique NPCs.
The game is set to debut on May 27 for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. The Wii U edition is coming this fall.