Watch_Dogs Catch-All

The game was being played on a PC:

In an interview with Geoff Keighley on Spike TV's E3 live stream earlier today, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed that the press conference demo of Watch Dogs was being played on a high-end PC, and announced the game would be releasing on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

Has Ubisoft recently employed some kind of new tech for facial capture and cloth dynamics? Witness the main character's trenchcoat while he's strolling down the street near the beginning of the gameplay segment.

Watching this trailer, as well as the new Splinter Cell and AC3 stuff, I was struck with how good the faces and the coats looked. Because, really, it's all about the faces and the coats.

chaosmos wrote:

Because, really, it's all about the faces and the coats.

Hell yes. I remember back in 2009 watching a gameplay trailer for Batman: AA. The cape looked so awesome.

Do a youtube search for physx/apex clothing demos, there's been a few around.

TempestBlayze wrote:

The game was being played on a PC:

In an interview with Geoff Keighley on Spike TV's E3 live stream earlier today, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed that the press conference demo of Watch Dogs was being played on a high-end PC, and announced the game would be releasing on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

No WiiU, even though this game would appear to be the perfect showcase for the secondary display features of the WiiU's tablet controller. Your main "weapon" is a touchscreen device!

Whistler from Sneakers killing innocent motorists and Tobias Fünke before losing his eyesight? I'm in.

Watched the gameplay demo and was insta-sold.

Does this thing have a release date yet?

If I had to guess we'd be looking at holiday 2013 and that's just when new MS/Sony hardware would be landing. Looking at the video, it's obviously doing visual tricks the 360/PS3 can't handle, so if it were truly a gen-straddler like Gun, I'd be more than happy to pick it up for the next Xbox.

I'm not going to make judgments yet. I was excited by what I saw, partly for the story. I'm curious to see if they show different approaches to the same problem.

As for the woman in the car crash, she didn't die in the crash itself. She was alive until a stray bullet hit her, which spider-webbed the windshield and painted it crimson. That's what actually startled me. On one hand I felt really bad, but on the other hand it excited me that civilian casualties could become something for the player to keep in mind.

I'm not sure what was and wasn't scripted. This is a game still in development, after all. However, they probably wanted to showcase a variety of techniques. While a lot of us are tired of cover-shooters, I think they wanted to showcase the hacking puzzle-solving abilities as well as the combat, trying to deliver a taste of the wide palette of options.

That's my guess, at least.

Game of the show (so far) for me.

http://www.videogamer.com/pc/watch_d...

videogamer.com wrote:

The behind closed doors demo for Watch Dogs repeated the mission from Ubi's conference. Once again we followed cyberpunk protagonist Aidan Pierce as he infiltrated a futuristic exhibition at a theatre, met with his contact, and then hunted down his target - a man by the name of Joseph DeMarco.

This time, however, the demo concluded with a demonstration of a real-time iPad app that supports a kind of meta-game - much in the manner of Microsoft's Xbox SmartGlass.

Here players were presented with a wireframe map of futuristic Chicago, drawn in a similar style to the one that used in the press conference demo. The map can be scrolled and zoomed, with pop-up boxes and icons providing real-time information about the game in progress.

"As we said, everything is connected - and we've extended that to mobile devices," said the Ubisoft demonstrator. "We have Chicago in the palm of your hand. Everything that you've seen in the game will be accessible, so different shops - pharmacies, gun shops - will also be available here. You can see everything.

"Remember the theatre that we saw? You can go and check the details, what the layout is, so that you can plan your mission. You can also get information about the organisers - facts about DeMarco."

But it's not just NPCs who fall under the app's scrutiny. Other human players will also find that their details have been uploaded to the CTOS - the American information network in Watch Dogs' cyberpunk future.

"You can monitor bad guys, and you can also monitor your friends. That way you can see your friends in real time - what they are doing, and how they did it. You can access their mission log and prepare yourself in the same way."

During the course of the main demo, Pierce took the time to 'profile' a female NPC - scanning her and then adding her details to the CTOS. This meant that new data was added to the tablet app - information that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

And according the Ubisoft demonstrator, this kind of action will have a significant impact on the overall game.

"The more you know about CTOS, the more power you going to unlock. And the more power you unlock in different districts, the more competitive you will be. That way your friends will never be the same thing, and sometimes you're going to be able to help them, or sometimes you're going to be able to challenge them."

Naturally this all leaves us with a tonne of questions, and unfortunately the Ubisoft demo team were very hesitant to provide answers.

And this isn't on the Wii-U because...?

That was a cool demo, optimistic about this but there's way too many questions raised about it for me to be drooling. It certainly looks nice, but if it doesn't turn out that well then you're left with a GTA clone with a clever gimmick. In a weird way, this looked like a mishmash of GTA, Max Payne (slight bullet time during the shootout/pileup), The Net, and for some reason Epic's Samaritan demo (don't know why, just gave me a similar vibe).

I did like the scripted dialogue. It's not often you see good body language like that in a game.

I'll be surprised if this is out before end of 2013.

Geez, I hope it's out before the end of 2013. I may wind up needing to spend money on other things then, providing they're not strictly football and TMZ.

skeletonframes wrote:

"As we said, everything is connected - and we've extended that to mobile devices," said the Ubisoft demonstrator.
[...]
But it's not just NPCs who fall under the app's scrutiny. Other human players [...] and you can also monitor your friends. That way you can see your friends in real time - what they are doing, and how they did it. You can access their mission log and prepare yourself in the same way."

And... another bites the dust. Is it just me or do the bolded parts spell out always-on internet connection with required "community" participation, a la EA/Bioware?

MoonDragon wrote:

And... another bites the dust. Is it just me or do the bolded parts spell out always-on internet connection with required "community" participation, a la EA/Bioware?

Probably not (just you), but also, probably not (required community participation). The latter isn't going to fly on consoles where internet connectivity isn't guaranteed, and they're targeting two dominant consoles in addition to the PC. Based on this and the concepts he specifically mentioned, I'm envisioning what he's referreing to as an optional online component - similar to how in Demon's/Dark Souls, you've got ghosts of other players and crossing into other people's games and the like, but the absence of the online components won't break the game.

Unfortunately, I'm primarily a PC gamer. And this IS Ubisoft we are talking about here. Ah well, isn't the CD Projekt's Cyberpunk supposed to come out around that time as well?

"Meta-game" talk makes me slightly anxious. Not that I care about always-on or marketingspiel that much, but simply because it can turn out to be really superficial and not contributing to the gameplay in meaningful way.

The metagame bit sounds neat, as long as it's optional. The last thing I want to do when I'm playing a game on my PC or console is have to be constantly looking down at a tablet balanced in my lap and futzing around with it while I'm trying to be immersed in the game world. I can use my laptop and watch TV at the same time but when I play games, that's all I want to be doing. It's a neat idea and I applaud their effort but if the game experience is detracted by choosing not to play it that way, that will be disappointing to me.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

The metagame bit sounds neat, as long as it's optional. The last thing I want to do when I'm playing a game on my PC or console is have to be constantly looking down at a tablet balanced in my lap and futzing around with it while I'm trying to be immersed in the game world. I can use my laptop and watch TV at the same time but when I play games, that's all I want to be doing. It's a neat idea and I applaud their effort but if the game experience is detracted by choosing not to play it that way, that will be disappointing to me.

Put me in this camp as well. I always have a smartphone by me when gaming, but I don't want another controller that is required for the full experience.

ccesarano wrote:

And this isn't on the Wii-U because...?

Yeah, I had the same thought when reading the bit about the iPad.

Minarchist wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

And this isn't on the Wii-U because...?

Yeah, I had the same thought when reading the bit about the iPad.

My guess is that if there's a Wii U version in the works, it doesn't have any special Wii U functionality to demonstrate. Give it time.

Is the Wii-U at least a bit more powerful than the current consoles? If so, it would have the best chance of matching the visuals they showed on this high-end PC demo.

Slumberland wrote:

Is the Wii-U at least a bit more powerful than the current consoles? If so, it would have the best chance of matching the visuals they showed on this high-end PC demo.

I don't think the WiiU would get us all the way to that level of visual fidelity, but it's certainly more robust hardware than 360 and PS3.

I don't think we can make concrete predictions on what the Wii-U can or cannot handle yet. The only hardware specifications in that regard they've released is that it is using an AMD-Radeon graphics card of some sort, but haven't specified anything that could hint to its power capabilities.

ccesarano wrote:

I don't think we can make concrete predictions on what the Wii-U can or cannot handle yet. The only hardware specifications in that regard they've released is that it is using an AMD-Radeon graphics card of some sort, but haven't specified anything that could hint to its power capabilities.

Well, here's what's publicly known:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_U#T...

Wii U dev kits have substantially more RAM than 360 and PS3, and while the Radeon GPU is apparently not exactly cutting edge, it's several generations beyond what's in the 360 and PS3.

Interview by RPS

RPS: The demo opened at a very methodical, atypical (at least, for games) pace, but ended with slow-mo shooting and cyberpunks dying very real deaths. So, is this an action game, or a game about hacking that just so happens to contain brief, powerful moments of action?

Dominic Guay: It’s definitely going to be an action-adventure game at the heart of things. Every player is going to play differently. It’s an open world, and every mission objective has different ways of pulling it off. You saw how he got into the [art show] center by doing something very subtle – hacking the system. He could’ve also stealthed in through a back door or barged in through the front. So some players may want to play very violently, and some others might want subtlety and control. Obviously, we’re going to give you options to use all of those things, and you as the player – depending on your type of approach – are going to be able to mix that up.

I really hope that the part I bolded turns out to be true througout the game. The reason I stopped playing Deus Ex is because your character's options were taken away during the boss fights.

For those who may think that Watch Dogs will be a cross-generation game, like Gun. Ubisoft isn't ruling it out.

http://kotaku.com/5916567/e3s-unsolv...

Kotaku wrote:

I pressed Ubi PR again yesterday, and a rep wrote this to me: "So far we have only confirmed PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. However, since Watch Dogs will not be shipping this year, we have time to build content for multiple platforms should we choose to. We'll continue to update you as details become available."

Rather interested in this. Tagging for later.

This video was at the PS4 show:

I guess I'm thinking, what the hell is this game about? What's the objective? Your guy apparently wants to stay incognito, but then goes and plays vigilante and tries to escape in the most overt way possible. I guess it's not a big jump in logic to say they're not telling us everything, but I'm wondering what there is to it besides Assassin's Creed: Modern Chicago.

TBH i dont need more to be sold on this game