Ubisoft Montreal Explains Watch Dogs Delay

by David Sanchez March 11, 2014 @ 2:20 pm

Watch Dogs

Following an unexpected delay, Ubisoft’s latest franchise Watch Dogs is now set to debut on May 27. Speaking on the Ubisoft blog, Senior Producer Dominic Guay explained exactly what the reason was for pushing the debut game back.

As it turns out, Ubisoft Montreal had expected to finish development of Watch Dogs by the holiday 2013 season. According to Guay, the studio wasn’t under any pressure from Ubisoft to have the game ready by then — it just seemed like the team would’ve completed the project by Christmas.

That wasn’t the case, though. Instead, Ubisoft Montreal found things it wanted to polish and tweak, and doing so was a lot more time consuming than one might think.  This was especially true in the case of Watch Dogs, which is a brand new IP with a big load of expectation and anticipation resting on it.

“We had the game playable front-to-back in spring [2013], which meant we had like five, six months ahead of us to iterate and debug, which is more time than a lot of games need,” explained Guay. “But because we are a new IP, a new game experience, that wasn’t the case. We needed that time and we needed more.

“When we got close to the end, we still could have shipped. That’s why it’s hard. It was not like we were failing miserably, the game didn’t work, or it couldn’t be played! We’d been playing this game from front to back for so long it really looked like this would happen. But when you iterate on a game and you make a change, look at what it impacts, make another change, it takes time.”

Guay went on to say that when the Montreal team explained the situation to management, the company agreed that Watch Dogs needed more time. Not one to pass up the luxury of extra time, Ubisoft Montreal continued to toil away on the game, in the process incorporating features that would’ve been omitted otherwise.

“Someone had an idea a while ago: What if we had high-pitch, high-volume sound push into those headsets? How would someone react to that? You can imagine how someone would react to that while he’s shooting a gun or is in cover or while he’s preparing to throw a grenade! So we added that in, it created a lot of new emergent moments, a lot of new ways for the player to be smart with hacking.”

Ubisoft Montreal clearly wants to get everything right as far as Watch Dogs is concerned. This is, after all, the company’s newest endeavor, and this inaugural entry could make or break the future of this fledgling series. As a fan of new IPs and ideas, I’m pretty excited to play Watch Dogs. The game’s delay could very well mean that we’ll get a highly polished and deliciously exciting new experience come launch, which is pretty awesome to think about.

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