Ubisoft talks Watch Dogs Wii U – reasons for delay, may ship this year, wants to make full use of Wii U
Ubisoft senior producer Dominic Guay has opened up about Watch Dogs’ lengthy delay on Wii U.
The publisher announced plans today to ship the title across all platforms on May 27 – except for Nintendo’s hardware. Guay couldn’t offer up an exact date as to when Watch Dogs will be hitting Wii U, but said an arrival later this year is a “possibility.”
Guay told Polygon:
“Yeah it’s still alive. We still haven’t defined a ship date for it, though. So it’s on hold, to a certain extent for shipping.”
“We don’t have a specific ship date for it yet so it’s considered within the year. So we’re going to look at that and we’re going to let people know as soon as we figure out an exact date for it.”
Guay also touched on how Ubisoft Bucharest is developing Watch Dogs for Wii U. All other versions are being made at Ubisoft Montreal.
“We have our studio in Bucharest working on it, and we wanted that team to have the time to explore the GamePad and be able to have fun with it and see how far they could push it. It’s also an interesting platform, because it has its own strength, which we want to take advantage of, and we didn’t want to delay all the other platforms for that one. So we’re going to take the time we need to make sure the game is good (technically) when we ship it and that it also, game design-wise, makes good use of the specifics of the Wii U.”
“I mean, for our game, when we play with everything being connected, we need to make smart use of it. And also, the Wii U came along at some point in our production, so it planned through for it, and now to a certain extent we wanted to be ambitious with it, be able to go full-on and make full use of the platform. That’s why we’re taking more time, but it’s being worked on so that’s good.”
“It wasn’t running on Wii U initially. They were the perfect team to do it. Our Bucharest studio is super strong, super strong engineers and I was impressed by how quickly they got to get the game running on the console. And they were so autonomous in doing it. Obviously we’re communicating and we’re working together, but they were so quick and smart in doing it, it still made sense for them to keep ownership. Obviously they’re using the same game content, so they’re not building other game content. It’s the same game content that we’ll adapt for the needs of the specific needs of Wii U. But at the core, same game, but they made all the technical adjustments for it.”
