Watch Dogs Hacking Was Repetitive; AI Now Far Deeper

Today is a big day, with lots of great news about upcoming games, but the announcement of a release date for Watch Dogs likely takes the crown. The highly anticipated title by Ubisoft was unexpectedly delayed last November, and now, after a very long silence, we have some of the motivations that led to this decision.

Speaking with Polygon, various members of the development team expanded on this delicate topic:

It started to feel repetitive. The fantasy doesn’t make the AI feel alive. We knew some things needed to be upgraded, improved and polished; we weren’t happy with that.

Let’s say there’s a 30 percent chance that there’s one. Well, you’re an unlucky guy and you get four missions with no AI that can be hacked. That’s not cool. For you as the player, that experience is not what we want, so we changed the math. We said, ‘OK, we want a guarantee.’

Sometimes it was great, but then you could be the unlucky player who didn’t get the right math. Or you play with the system too much and you started seeing some repetition. So we added variety. We added lifelike reactions. Watch Dogs is very complicated. You can hack AI and [see] how do they react. You can do that in every mission and repeat it and repeat it, and at some point we weren’t happy with the variety. We wanted to make it better.

You can run in and shoot everyone if you want, but we really wanted to make sure you could actually hack and lure guys away, and that they’d have more stages of reaction so that they got progressively more frustrated. If you’re hacking this forklift, they’re eventually going to get mad at it and they’re going to try and break the thing because they’re frustrated with it, this stupid piece of machinery. And that leads to the search: If they realize they’re being hacked and manipulated, they’re going to start searching. We just wanted to make sure we have enough detail in that area.

As a major fan of complex AI, especially in open world games, I’m really glad to hear this. We need more games with complex AI and if Watch Dogs can deliver on this front, I’m pretty sure it will make me happy.

Watch Dogs releases on 27th May for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The WiiU version will release at a later date.