More Watch Dogs screenshots, details
A whole bunch of new Watch Dogs details (plus a few screenshots) are now available thanks to an extensive article published on GameSpot. We’ve rounded up the latest content below. You’ll find even more information and developer commentary over at GameSpot.
– Your phone is the primary tool for interacting with the game world
– The phone is also a thematic focal point int he story
– A team inside Ubisoft Montreal was created in 2009 to work on a new open world game
– Only thing they had to follow was to make it an open-city title
– Surveillance infrastructure ctOS extends far beyond cameras, controlling everything from traffic lights to steam vents
– Hack objects on the fly
– Trigger massive pileups at intersections
– Flee from the police or tap into the system’s crime prediction mechanism to stop crimes before they even happen
– One of creative director Jonathan Morin’s earliest presentations conveyed this structure through a single image: a finger hovering above a red object accompanied by the phrase “Control an entire city through the press of a button”
– Team spent time working on who this character was, what his ambitions were, and how far he was willing to sidestep ethical boundaries to get there
– Focus on surveillance soon came together with that initial fascination around smartphones to form the game’s profiling system
– This lets you tap into the city’s repository of personal records and surveillance data to form a quick impression of every single pedestrian in the city
– You’ll see details such as profession, salary, and Web browsing habits flash across the screen as you pass strangers on the sidewalk
– Can learn more about an interesting person by listening on phone calls and remotely hacking his or her text message logs
– This is all done through Aiden’s smartphone
– Watch Dogs is still very much an action game
– Guns to fire, cars to drive, and a city’s worth of criminals and heavily armed security guards to deal with
– Hacking remains a constant theme
– Will see a context-sensitive white outline drawing your attention to objects you can hack everywhere you go
– Ex: in a police chase, you might hack a drawbridge just as you pass over it in order to lose the cops on your tail
– Ex: if you’re sneaking into a ctOS facility, you might hack a window washer to elevate you up to a second-floor window before accessing the security camera network to get a feel for the guards’ patrol routes
– The Watch Dogs team worked hard to maintain believability within the ctOS fiction
– Consulted with Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab to ensure that none of the various hacks were too extravagant
– Team took creative liberties is the speed with which these hacks are done
– Mostly everything can be hacked with one button press
– AI system is both aggressive and a little bit unpredictable
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/watch-dogs-and-the-terrifying-power-of-smartphones/1100-6418761/
