He’s curious why he isn’t asked more about things ‘you’ve never done before’ in a game? Watch Dogs has ”obvious things” like driving, but forgoes helicopters for the sake of just having them.
You do your game little credit if you just copy the success of another, in this just Grand Theft Auto V. Unless it make sense to the game world, don’t bother including it.
”You know, when you do a game you always want to make sure that what you put in is to the service of the game,” Jonathan Morin told VG247. ”I think GTA has a great fantasy and everything they put in it reinforces that fantasy. What you don’t do is start copying or start feeling the pressure of your neighbour like, ‘Oh my god we need a chopper’.”
”Some stuff is inevitable, like we need cars. If you don’t drive it’s going to take a long time,” Morin explained.
”So you do need those obvious things, but afterwards it was all about hacking, or what you want to do, and it’s constantly got to be about that. It doesn’t mean we couldn’t have put in a chopper or something else in, but it would have always have been – if we had done it – because it fits or there’s one cool thing about hacking we could do with it.”
The creative director wishes he’d get grilled more on features people hadn’t seen before.
”I get bombarded on Twitter like, ‘Oh, can you buy real estate? Can you do it?’ and they ask all those questions. It’s funny because on one side it’s cool that they want to know what’s going on in the game, but on the other I’m curious. I ask, ‘Why are you asking me if you can do stuff you already did? Why are you not asking me about the stuff you’ve never done?’”
Given how close Grand Theft Auto V and Watch Dogs are in terms of marketing and release dates it was inevitable there’d be a heavy amount of comparing the two. Fortunately Watch Dogs really does stand apart with the fantasy of empowering us with control over an entire cities infrastructure. Sorry, no mini-submarine adventures in Chicago.
Watch Dogs releases on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 November 19th in the US, 22nd in EU.
