Let’s get the cat out of the bag: none of us will be playing Watch Dogs next month as expected. Ubisoft announced a delay to Spring 2014 on their blog just yesterday, explaining it with the need for polish and making the game the best that it can possibly be.
Still, we have some interesting gameplay details coming out of an interview with Lead Game Designer Danny Belanger published by El33tOnline . He promised that for 95% of the game, players will be in complete control and choose a stealth approach if they wish to.
I would say 95 percent of the game. There are some narrative moments… we strongly believe in good narrative and good acting and good dialogue, so sometimes we’ll create a context that’s interesting but it involves action. But most of the time it’s free approach, you can do the whole thing stealth, you can arrive anywhere you want, use hacking or use a combination of all of these things together, go from stealth to combat and back, so you can play a lot with the game dynamics.
For us, it’s so fundamental to not put you on a train track, ‘This is playing as designed’ – that’s not what we want. That being said, if there’s something we want to teach you we’ll obviously create a context in which the thing is useful so we’ll definitely create some moments and teach you something. Then the moment will arrive again, but then it will be a choice for you. Because there are a lot of new things we really wanted the player to understand the dynamics, and then allow them to choose to use them or not when they become available later.
It looks like Spring 2014 will be an incredibly crowded release window with games like Destiny, Titanfall, Watch Dogs, Dark Souls II, Project Eternity, Elite: Dangerous, The Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar and possibly more already slated.
Watch Dogs will be out for PC, PS3, PS4, 360, XB1 and WiiU.
