14 DAY TRIAL // Watch Dogs developer Ubisoft Montreal has revealed quite a few more details about the delay of the game and just what it managed to achieve during the extra time it was allowed to polish the title.
Watch Dogs had been eagerly awaited for quite some time and it was set to debut in November of last year across a multitude of platforms worldwide.
Unfortunately, Ubisoft took a last-minute decision to postpone the open world experience until spring of this year.
Now, after finally sharing a brand new release date with fans from around the world of May 27, Ubisoft Montreal's Dominic Guay has shed some light on how the extra polishing time was spent by the development team.
According to Guay, who talked on the UbiBlog, the polishing period usually means a lot of reiterative work, in which developers go back to the finished game and make tweaks based on testing.
"For us polish is that very hard-to-plan period where in theory you’re finished but you need to still adjust things a little bit. This is true for any form of content. It could be usability testing showing us that certain UI [user interface] elements aren’t seen correctly by gamers, or certain things aren’t perceived the way they should be, or certain inputs aren’t working exactly the way we want."
One specific area that definitely improved due to testing and extra polish time was the actual open world of Chicago, as Ubisoft noticed that some players were favoring certain parts of the city while largely ignoring other ones for various reasons.
"Once you do a lot of playtests you realize there are certain parts of the city where players go more than others. So look at it and we say, OK, there’s all these things happening in the city that many players may never see, there’s those areas they’re going in, and maybe if we had more variety there it would be better."
"So we actually produced more content that would fit into the areas where the players went more, moved content around a little bit, looked at it again, played it again. Iterating on this huge of a game takes a while. It takes weeks for anyone to get through our game."
As such, fans who are still unhappy with the game's lengthy development cycle should be thrilled that at least Ubisoft is making the most of it by improving the game in various ways.
Watch Dogs is coming in late May for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. A Wii U version is set to debut at a later point in time.