Watch Dogs changes the role of NPCs from moving windowdressing and dynamic obstacles like we're used to in sandbox environments to integral parts of the gameplay experience. How hard was it to add this entirely new layer of dynamic systems and to come up with ways to interact with NPCs and figure out how NPCs would react?
It was interesting actually, it's just one of those things we do. We start with one thing, then we discover another thing. It all started with the profiler idea. We wanted to add dynamically generated stuff like a background and a different identity for each person since we were doing a game about that. So it started with a few possibilities and words, just to see how it felt. A lot of people were like "why are we adding text? Nobody will read it, we gotta stop" but then we were like "Let's try it anyway" because we were convinced about it. When you start to play with that, you will notice you care a bit more about the NPC's. And the challenge is to discover that, because at the beginning we were just playing with the identity to see where that would lead us. It became a big part of the game. Definitely not easy to achieve. That said, I feel like it's only scratching the surface. It's crazy to see a player not rob someone to benefit his own game just because he saw a few words [when reading the profile of the NPC]. So if it's able to do that, I cannot imagine what will be possible in the future.
The cellphone plays an essential role in the game. I haven't had the time to try everything myself yet, but you seem to have a lot of options next to the hacking. Will there be stuff available like a social network on the phone or did you focus on other things?
Well, you don't really have a social network. I think the phone is there for the identity of the game, it's where everything goes. It's pretty extensive, but it needs to remain thematic to the game. We didn't want to fall into the stuff every other typical phone has, but we did look at a few inspirations. For example, the way we treat music. You have your player, you can play music in your car or on foot. That's our take on things. But then we added to that because we thought it would be cool if you could steal music from other people. So you can hack their phone for music. Or when a song is playing in the bar, you just open your phone and it's yours. So we have some stuff like that in the game, but the cellphone is still concentrated on the main gameplay so we can connect the player to the phone. But yes, we have a few interesting tricks left for people to discover.
How many radio stations are there in the game and how in-depth is the radio? I've listened to a few songs, but I was wondering if you will also hear news reports about the actions of the player himself and other things in the city, maybe even realtime.
Actually, they're not *really* radio stations. Like I said, we wanted to focus on the digital aspect of the music and we wanted to have our own take on things. So there is a news app on the phone and you can connect that with the radio, so all the news you receive comes from that layer. You can have updates on what you did, what is happening and all that stuff. And you have the music you can listen too, that's part of your playlist that you can customize. But we didn't really use the radio stations type of thing, which we felt had been done really well already. What we wanted to do is talk about the new technology and how we live our day to day lives today. I guess it's a personal thing, hooking up my phone and listening to my music instead of popping on the radio. It's more in line with the style of the game.
And of course, it adds the option to keep listening to your music, even when you leave your car.
Exactly, you can keep it on. There's moments where we smoothly take over it. Funny enough, we had a lot of sound challenges because the ability to listen to music wherever you are in the game is harder to make than you might think. Like when you're talking to someone, the music is still playing. You can barely hear it, but it's still playing. We had to use tricks like that to make it sound right in the game.
Now that the development of the game is over, do you think it matches the original idea you had 5+ years ago when it all started?
Definitely. The original idea of Watch Dogs... well, at the beginning you don't have like: here's the entire game. The original idea was a single slide on powerpoint with a big red button and it said: control an entire city with a single button. So yeah, I think to that... definitely! Our game today, everything is an essential layer to the original idea. Whether it's the freeroam, shooting, stealth or just driving around... it's always useful and most of the time extremely efficient. So I think it definitely stayed true to it. It wasn't always easy, but it definitely stayed true.
The game revolves around technology and hacking and I guess some of it is science fiction, but how much is actually based on reality?
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