Watch Dogs Has 13K Individual Animations
Watch Dogs is finally out today for PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One (a WiiU port is still planned, but there’s no release date yet from Ubisoft). One of the main things that the studio promised is huge interactivity and depth with the NPCs - here’s a specific extract from a lengthy video interview by 640 Toronto, who attended the launch event and managed to talk with Animation Director Colin Graham.
We’ve got a lot more volume of animations than we had before. We developed our civilian system right at the beginning, it wasn’t an afterthought like it can be in a lot of games. We have, like, 13K animations - individual animations - we’re motion capturing everything so that it has this really realistic look, so for us it’s the volume of things. Every character in the game has a very deep set of reactions, every civilian is actually an artificial intelligence, they’re not a fake crowd. They can tell the difference between things that they hear and things that they see and they’ll react differenctly to hearing a gunshot or seeing someone shot in front of them.
There’s a huge level of detail and of course it’s all backed by this massive library of animations. They’re influencing each other as well too - if you pull a gun and somebody freaks out, as they’re running away, somebody else is going to see that person and they’ll become curious; some people will try to call the cops and you have tools to deal with that. It ends surprising us - me - all the time, that makes interesting gameplay - it’s not predictable.
After spending some time with Watch Dogs, I have to agree about the sheer volume of animations - Colin and his team certainly did an amazing job in that regard. However, I don’t really feel that the AI is as complex as it’s being described here - the main thing they’ll try to do is to call the cops, but that won’t generally happen if you have a good reputation.
Check back soon for our full review of the game. In the meantime, please leave your first impressions on Watch Dogs in the comments!