Ever since Ubisoft Montreal revealed that other players can “bleed” into your play experience and appear in your game world while you’re participating in the single-player campaign, there’s been a clamouring for more details. The Official PlayStation Blog got in touch with the game’s creative director Jonathan Morin regarding the same, and how it differs from the key multiplayer mode.
As Morin noted, “You can play single player or multiplayer in the game. You’re always in your own session. If you’re playing alone, you’re playing alone. So it means there are millions of people alone in their own sessions. We’ve simply added the ability to merge those sessions together at the pacing of our choice.
“You can be free-roaming and naturally getting into some kind of activity that makes you intertwine with another player. You interact with them, then you’re done and it goes away. It’s not like you have someone in your game the whole time who can mess with your game, but it’s definitely the beginning of a solution to tackle those taboos.”
However, this doesn’t mean that your own experience will be messed up. Rather, Morin wants to somehow bring both players together in such a way that everyone wins.
“Players often worry that another player is going to come into their game and break their experience. That’s an old school statement. We need to fix that, and it’s a design problem, not a technical problem – how do you bring two players together and let them interact in a way that’s pleasing?
“One thing I can say is that when we watch people play together in Watch_Dogs, most of the time they don’t even realise that it was another player. There are no signs.
“There is a great thing there that someone can be in the experience and naturally enter a situation. They become part of the story. “That was another player? No way! That’s awesome!” They didn’t notice. That’s spectacular!
“As a developer, I can immediately tell when it’s another player in a game – jeez, that guy doesn’t walk like an AI, that’s a player. But in Watch_Dogs, players won’t notice that immediately. It’s a new form of emotion and it fits perfectly in the Watch_Dogs universe where everybody watches everyone else.”
Watch_Dogs is slated to release for PC, Xbox 360, Wii U and PS3 on November 19th in North America and November 22nd in Europe, with a PS4 release planned for year end.