Though the critical reception wasn’t universally positive, Watch Dogs certainly did the business when it came to sales, shipping around 8 million copies by July 2014. Still, developer Ubisoft says there’s improvements to be made for the future of the franchise.
Speaking to CVG, Ubisoft Montreal’s vice president of creative Lionel Raynaud admitted that the game wasn’t perfect, but claimed that the team is listening to criticisms of both the narrative and the occasionally uninspired story missions.
”There are flaws, obviously,” said Raynaud. ”We absolutely want to tackle these flaws and surprise players, and the way to tackle some of those flaws is going to be quite radical. There are parts of the game that will need to change.”
Raynaud suggests a parallel with the original Assassin’s Creed, in that both games have clear potential that perhaps wasn’t fully realised at the first attempt. And like Assassin’s Creed, the hype generated by an E3 trailer proved hard to live up to.
”Very often it’s a positioning issue,” he admitted, ”that the way in which we have introduced the game or what we have shown promised things players didn’t see in the final version, and that was the thing they were after so we have to deliver that now. More than the fact that (the E3 2012 demo) was running on PC, it’s the fact that the scope and the scale of the final game presented more possibilities but also more challenges than the vertical slice.”
The bulk of the criticism regarding Watch Dogs seemed to be concerned with its repetition, limp characters and forgettable plot, so it’s hard not to feel a little wary when Raynaud says that better technology is the answer to the game’s problems.
“We have this ambition to have games that are worlds with systems that offer more agency and freedom for players, that allow them to discover the world in the way they want. We want them to be less narrative or character driven and more creative, with more choices for the player. This is quite a high ambition and will require us to develop technologies that we didn’t have for Watch Dogs 1, but this combined with fixing and refining what worked well is probably the way to go for Watch Dogs 2.”
