Ubisoft Montreal senior producer Dominic Guay says hacking sequences in games will undergo a similar evolution to 3D platformers thanks to Watch Dogs. Speaking at E3, Guay said the central theme of hacking in Watch Dogs meant that the mechanic - usually relegated to mini-game status in other titles - needed to overhauled. "There have been good hacking in some games, but the jump we're making is similar to the one in platforming games," Guay said. "Remember when platforming was all about timing jumps? Now in most platforming there is not even a jump button, it's automatic. In Assassin's Creed it's no longer about timing your jump, it's about finding your path. I think that's where we're going with hacking as well." Guay said that through reassessing hacking, the studio has seized on a more creative approach which allows for more open-ended results. "Instead of making it a mini-game challenge, we're making it more of a case where it's systematic: it's easy and you can do it, but how will you use it? "How are you being creative and how are you executing these hacks to achieve something useful." Guay also told CVG that Watch Dogs will feature more organic environments, in contrast to the urban settings demonstrated thus far. "We're actually going to allow the player to go outside of the city limits," he said. "We're not sharing the specifics yet, but we do want to send players out into more organic environments." Watch Dogs' hacking and surveillance themes will be especially resonant following the PRISM scandal. Guay agreed that many of the game's themes are influenced by contemporary surveillance technology. "The subjects that we're discussing are the ones that are very much in current affairs and will remain so for a while now," he said. "What we were in interested in when we started on Watch Dogs was how technology around us was changing the way we live and how basically, we were more and more putting all that information on computers and allowing anyone or anything to connect with it. We thought: how can we exploit those vulnerabilities." In our E3 preview for Watch Dogs, we described it as "the best bits of Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed, transported to a Cyberpunk cauldron where anything can be used as a weapon." Watch Dogs will release on November 22 for PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, PC and at launch for PS4 and Xbox One. Source: Computerandvideogames
