Watch Dogs 2 will “carry on taking risks”, and there’s “a lot of room for improvement.”
That’s according to the series’ creative director Jonathan Morin, who has said that the game’s sequel will see the development team attempting to push the envelope, in a new interview with UK gaming magazine GamesTM.
“When you start a new project [and new IP], it’s a blank page and everything you do is what you want to do,” he told the publication. “With a sequel, there is more pressure to push a brand forward and we now have to appeal to fans in a new way.”
He went on to say that “You have to carry on taking risks. I will not do this job if there is no risk in it, that would just be boring. You shouldn’t prevent yourself from trying something just because it’s hard and the solution is not apparent.”
Morin says that the development team has plenty of plans for the sequel, but stopped short of detailing any of them, saying that it’s too early to discuss such things.
However, he did say that he’d like to see the sequel expand on the alternate reality scenarios seen in the original which, among other things, saw the player piloting a giant Anime-esque Spider Mech and laying waste to the windy city: “Players loved the idea of other players who create an alternate reality in their games and knowing that now opens up a lot of new possibilities of what online can do,” he said.
While Watch Dogs was released to a lukewarm critical reception by many outlets - including ourselves - it nevertheless did well at retail, selling in excess of 8 million copies. It’s clear that Ubisoft sees the franchise as one of the pillars of its business strategy moving forward; the first game had plenty of flaws, but then so did the first Assassin’s Creed - and that went on to become one of the biggest franchises in the industry.
Morin’s comments will no doubt be welcome to many gamers, many of whom found Watch Dogs to be a rather by-the-numbers affair which stuck closely to Ubisoft’s established formula for open-world games. While the city of Chicago was undoubtedly beautifully realized - despite the fact that it didn’t live up to the pre-release hype when it came to the game’s visuals, and ropey PC performance.
Nic Bunce reviewed Watch Dogs for Continue Play and scored it 7/10 - good, but not exactly groundbreaking. “Even though it may be a little rough around the edges, taken in isolation it’s a perfectly enjoyable – and occasionally hugely entertaining – slice of open-world action,” he said in our Watch Dogs Review. “But don’t expect it to be anything new or marvelous, because you may be let down terribly.”
Dale Morgan
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