Watch Dogs Wiki

Watch Dogs was unveiled in E3 2012 and it took the video game industry by storm.

The game is an open world, and is built like a GTA game but with a lot of new features. The city is connected and the main protagonist can hack into any info he chooses.

It was released on 7th and 8th gen consoles and the demo that was shown at the Sony press conference for PS4 reveal ran on a PC.

Watch Dogs was slated to launch on November 19th, 2013, but due to development issues the game has been delayed until May 27th, 2014.

There was an ARG for the game which tried to expose the flaws in cyber security. [reference] Ubisoft acknowledged the email leak via the viral ARG but didn’t apologize. [reference]

• 1. Development
• 2. Gameplay
• 3. Story

Development

The game runs on a new engine called the Disrupt engine and the AnvilNext engine that was used to power the Assassin’s Creed games will not be used here. [reference]

The engine has been built from ground-up and is not a modified version of Anvil.

“We expect fewer problems with porting games to the PS4 than the PS3, which had a completely different infrastructure. Previously, we developed games first on the Xbox 360 and then translated them onto the PS3. It took a lot of time and money to port. Now we develop first on the PC and port to all other consoles.”

The lead platform has been confirmed to be PC.

Ubisoft’s Pauline Jacquey, recently revealed that they need teams of up to 600 people to make open world games on the PS4. This probably only applies to Ubisoft games but it could be true if the publishers are trying to churn out games quickly. [reference]

“Yes. We do parts of games, but it’s very actually standard at Ubisoft now to do AAA games, like for the new PS4 console, you need teams of up to 600 guys so you can’t do it at just one site,” she said.

“We already have interesting technology that we develop for the group that’s linked to what we did in the past, driving. It’s really cool, I think it’s in the top technology you have at Ubisoft. And we have collaboration but we are already doing our own thing, but I can’t talk about it.”

The PS4 version will push all aspects of the game further, Senior producer Dominic Guay revealed. [reference]

“Every core pillar of the game is able to be pushed further. We’re able to push the immersion. The fidelity of the graphics is one part of the immersion, but it’s more than graphics.

“I’ll give you small examples; it’s like the fidelity of the wind, how it will have everything reacting as it blows through the city, the AI reaction when something happens, every AI has to make a decision on how they’ll react to it.

“We can spend more time in the brain of each AI with a more powerful machine, saying, ‘OK, how will I react to what just happened there? Where will I run to? Will I call the cops?’, or stuff like that. Fundamentally the core, innovative part of Watch Dogs is the same on every platform. But on PS4 we’re able to push every lever a lot further.”

He said that PS4 has a very fast memory and it helps in making an open world game. He revealed the benefits of that RAM as well.

“[PS4 has] very fast memory. I mean, 8GB of RAM. What that means in short is that there’s a lot less limit on your creators, on our artists, and details and the diversity of what they can create. For an open world game like Watch Dogs it also means something very important because if you have a game that happens in a small corridor, yeah, you can put a lot of detail in the corridor.

The game was supposed to release in November of 2013 but was delayed by Ubisoft in order to make it more next gen worthy.

Gameplay

Watch Dogs is an open world game and players can expect to drive cars up to 150 mph. It’s sort of like a GTA game but has a lot higher visual fidelity based on the early media Ubisoft has shown and will also be released for the next gen consoles.

The main protagonist can hack into people information and the city’s infrastructure to make it his playground. In the gameplay video that was shown during the PS4 press conference, Aidan Pierce was shown catching a criminal who tried to mug a woman, and also escape from the police.

He used the city’s infrastructure in ingenious ways to escape the police. The demo showed a live city filled with people and everything looked realistic.

Story

Watch dogs is a game where where you play a man called Aidan Pierce who comes from one of the toughest neighbourhoods in Chicago and people close to him have been hurt so he is going to take justice into his own hands.

There’s not a lot of information revealed on the story yet.

This wiki was last updated on 1st January, 2015.