Archief - Watch Dogs

Building an open-world game ain’t easy. Without a strong foundation, everything can quickly collapse. In the case of Watch Dogs that foundation is the Disrupt engine, the product of over four years of dedication and tests and trials. In that time Ubisoft Montreal has built an engine that’s both flexible and efficient, while allowing for an astounding level of detail and a seamlessly online environment.

Senior Producer Dominic Guay breaks down this awe-inspiring engine into three parts: dynamism, impact on the city, and connectivity. And because the Disrupt engine was built specifically to power Watch Dogs, we also uncovered a healthy helping of new gameplay details to go along with all the tantalizing tech talk.

Dynamism

The surface layer of the Disrupt engine is focused on what Guay describes as “dynamism,” or the simulation systems within the game: “In our city we simulate the way people drive cars. The electricity is simulated. The water is simulated. The wind is simulated. Everything reacts to everything. Making all those systems talk to one another is where you get branching reactions.”

Take the rain, for example. When the sky starts to open up, civilians will pull out umbrellas. The lights reflect off wet surfaces. We can see the wind shifting the direction of the rain and blowing debris around. Even leaves and trash on the ground will begin to appear damp and weighted down by moisture. These small but significant details lend an unparalleled level of immersion to Watch Dogs.

Even the clothing comes to life in Watch Dogs. It boggles the mind to think about just how long was spent getting the simple act of Aiden putting his hands in his pockets to look just right. The wind pulling at a passerby’s clothing will cause them to tighten their jackets. “Everyone on the street should have clothing simulation,” Guay says. “We want to see it blow in the wind and move with them.”

These are merely the “details,” though. Something major like a car crash will create a widespread ripple effect. Civilians will get caught up in a traffic jam and start honking or even leave their cars to investigate. Others will be injured in the wreck. Onlookers will alert emergency response teams. It all combines to offer an unprecedented amount of realism in a videogame.

Impact

As important as those details are, a game isn’t made with raindrops and dynamically generated bullet holes alone. Also important are the ways in which a player can affect the entire city, primarily noticeable through its residents. While there’s no simplistic back-and-white morality system in Watch Dogs, Aiden’s actions will trigger reactions from the game’s NPCs. We got the breakdown from Animation Director Colin Graham: “The reputation system isn’t a good or evil meter. It’s actually the perception people have of your actions. It completely affects how the city will react to you. If you run around just taking everybody out and killing tons of people, the citizens are going to think you’re kind of a jerk and they’re going to call the cops every time you do something wrong. You’re going to get spotted by the media more.”

In other words, should you choose to play the game in a more openly violent fashion – gun constantly in hand, killing indiscriminately in front of civilians – the people of Chicago will be more liable to turn on you. They will call the police when they see you, and your face will wind up on the news a lot more often. “We think it’s much more empowering to the player if he feels like he has made an impact on the city,” Guay elaborates. “We want him to make his own decisions instead of us forcing decisions on him.”

Connectivity

In Watch Dogs, you can go from being connected and online with other players to being fully disconnected – without affecting the world or changing the environment. That’s no small feat, and this seamless connectivity is another key pillar of the Disrupt engine. “There’s no loading or matchmaking or waiting for a game to start,” Guay says. “That means that every single thing in the game needed to be ready to be synchronized with the network. Every aspect of animation and physics and the AI needed to work online with other players.”

But don’t worry about thousands of stalkers, hackers and griefers ruining your day. When you’re in your game, you won’t see other players just running around wreaking havoc. That would diminish the immersion Disrupt works so hard to build. The only time another player will actually enter your world is when they accept a contract with your name on it. From there they can creep through your city streets, stalking you until they decide to strike. They will appear to you as any other Chicagoan, just like you would appear nondescript to them should you invade their game. There will never be two Aidens on the screen.

Though the engine is built with this connectivity in mind, it can be turned off for players who prefer to explore unhindered by any outside influences. The multiplayer will also be unavailable during story missions, so you don’t need to worry about hackers while you’re in the middle of an important moment.

Flexibility

We know not everyone will be rushing out to buy the new PS4 or Xbox One right away and that’s totally okay. Enter the “fourth pillar” of Disrupt: The engine was built for next-gen, but it’s flexible enough to allow owners of current-gen systems to still get an amazing experience. “We knew we would have next-gen hardware coming out before we ship,” Guay says. “But we started off knowing we wanted to support PS3 and Xbox 360.” The trick is in knowing how to scale things appropriately for both console generations. This allows designers to keep the overall experience the same. “On current-gen systems we may need to cut down the number of people on the street a little, but it’s still the same game. You don’t get the same sense of the crowd, but it allows us to scale certain bits and keep the same experience.”

Graham illuminates the graphical differences: “Players are going to know they aren’t getting a bad experience if they play Watch Dogs for the current gen, but the next gen is the real HD experience. You can zoom in another level. You can have better shaders, better simulation on the wind or the water, more particles, better atmospherics… Basically anything you can get with more computing power.”

So have no fear if you plan on playing Watch Dogs on the PS3 or 360. There are no trimmed-down mechanics to make you feel as though you are missing out on the core experience. Watch Dogs is truly a next-gen game – not just in terms of offering cutting edge graphical performance on the next generation of consoles, but also when it comes to the gameplay, the immersion and the seamless online experience. And that’s due in large part to a great foundation: the Disrupt Engine.

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Watch Dogs sounds like it will become a long-running series, following comments from Ubisoft’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, Tony Key, who has said the company won’t start a game unless it can turn it into a franchise.

[...]

Tony Key: “Watch_Dogs for us is really a franchise because we’re tapping into something people really care about, never more than when the NSA PRISM scandal broke.”

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If it’s true that we’re defined by the company we keep, then Aiden Pearce is arguably a pretty seedy guy. That’s because the star of Watch Dogs knows people. People on his speed dial who can make bodies disappear. People who can hang out at a Sunday barbecue as easily as they can hack into the most secure networks. His besties are veritable lunatics. Of course, when you have a past like Aiden’s, these are the sorts of individuals you tend to attract.

Just like Aiden himself, these friends occupy a moral gray zone: a hazy, murky place where the proverbial line shifts and dances around, where all ethics are defined in the moment. Indeed, these are the same types of “friends” who had put the hurt on Aiden’s family back before he became the man he now is. And now that Aiden’s on the path of revenge (and, perhaps, redemption), he’ll need a little help from other less-than-savory people he’s met on his life journey.

Enemies? Allies? It’s often hard to tell the difference. We sort through the Aiden’s tangled relationships with the help of our own friend: Lead Story Designer Kevin Shortt. Following are some of the major players in Aiden Pearce’s hunt for the people responsible for his family’s pain.

T-BONE GRADY

You might remember the scatterbrained, dreadlocked T-Bone from an earlier preview. “He’s kind of a distracted, crazy guy who’s very tech-savvy,” Shortt says. (Shortt also describes T-Bone as a “flighty, crazy hippie.” Awesome.)

“T-Bone is key to helping Pearce find the people responsible for hurting his family,” Shortt continues. Of course, T-Bone also has his own issues he’s trying to deal with. He’s not just running from a barber – he’s also running from his own past. “He made a mistake in his life and some people died because of it so he’s been wrestling with that. I wouldn’t say he’s messed up, but he’s scattered and he’s affected by the things that happened in the past. He and Pearce share that. They deal with it in different ways, but they share that past and it bonds them in a way.”

We’ve already seen a hint of that shadowy past catching up to T-Bone when a group of men out to kill him have him cornered, forcing him to call on Aiden for help. In order to maintain these kinds of relationships there will need to be some give and take, so expect more story-driven gameplay missions like this.

JORDI CHIN

When your plan runs into some… complications, you call a fixer: the type of guy who you hire to make a problem go away – whatever the problem is. That’s where Jordi Chin comes in. We’ve seen him once before, in the gameplay demo that came out of our E3 2012 press conference. He’s to-the-point, has a wicked sense of humor, and comes with the solutions to all your problems – so long as you can pay him. Along with their financial relationship, Jordi and Aiden share a complicated friendship. Shortt explains: “Pearce uses him a lot, to the point where they kind of become friends, but they both know they could kill each other if they wanted to. They like each other but it’s strictly business. If Pearce doesn’t pay Jordi the right amount, Jordi will not help him out.”

Among all of Aiden’s acquaintances, Shortt picks Jordi as his favorite. “It’s hard to pick one, but I gotta say there’s something about Jordi that always makes me smile every time he comes on the screen,” Shortt says. “He can be quite violent and ruthless in what he does, and yet he’s always got this quirky humor that goes with it. He’s a pretty lovable guy, even as dangerous as he is.”

CLARA LILLE

Clara Lille is perhaps as much a mystery as Aiden himself. While Shortt doesn’t want to spoil her secret past, he offers up a few tidbits about Clara: “She’s a dangerous woman who can weave her way through any system and expose every secret you hide. She might be an ally… but she might just as easily ruin Aiden.”

Aiden meets this mysterious French-Canadian woman early on in the game and they form a deep bond, but beyond that Shortt was wary of saying anything too revealing. “She has a bit of a dark secret that she’s holding onto. You’ll find out eventually through the course of the game what that is.”

AND THE REST…

“Jordi, T-Bone and Clara are just a high-level shot of some of the people you’ll end up seeing,” Shortt smiles. “There are many more.” Aiden’s journey causes his life to collide with a wide range of people. Some might be allies, some might be enemies and some might be both, depending on their moods or Pearce’s wallet. These even include an as-yet-unrevealed “old friend” who re-enters Aiden’s life and makes it a whole bunch more complicated.

All these friends and associates have a real impact Aiden’s development as well. “The people Aiden crosses paths with have an opinion on what he’s doing. Their actions affect how he thinks.” And it’s not just people: Aiden also crosses paths with the shadowy DedSec – a hacker collective out to enlighten the citizens of Chicago to the dangers of the CtOS. (We’ll have more on DedSec soon.)

Aiden’s family also plays a role in the story. As you might guess, they aren’t completely behind Pearce’s self-destructive, compulsive behavior. “Pearce is determined to find out who’s responsible by any means necessary. He doesn’t know who did it; he only knows his family was seriously hurt. He becomes obsessive about it. His family says, Let it go. We’re moving on. But Aiden can’t.” It’s this borderline fanatical Aiden that we meet when Watch Dogs begins, but we’ll have to play the game to see where his thirst for vengeance takes him…

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During an exclusive interview with Examiner.com, Dominic Guay, who is the title's senior producer, provided the explanation as to why players will not be able to fly aircrafts in Watch Dogs.

"Players will not fly aircrafts in WATCH_DOGS," Guay said. "We did not feel it was core to the experience we wanted to create."

Another item we were curious about was whether or not Chicago would be the only location that players would be able to visit over the course of the game. While the Watch Dogs senior producer did confirm players will be able to go outside of Chicago, he did not elaborate any further.

"Players will be able to drive any wheeled vehicles, from trucks to motorcycles, or boats. This will allow them to explore the city proper, the rivers, the lake and even beyond the limits of Chicago," Guay said.

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