Watch Dogs exploded out of nowhere earlier on Monday, impressing us with its slick portrayal of cyber-crime and assassination in an always-online Chicago. The Ubisoft press conference demo left everyone with questions about the final few moments. In a scene that doesn't appear in the demo footage that Ubisoft have since released, the camera pulled back from the action and started following a different person entirely. Was it the same player taking charge of another character, or a second player controlling their own avatar in the same city?
It was a second player. VG247 have spoken to him. His name is Dominic Guay, executive producer on the game. "Online is in the DNA of Watchdogs," he said. "It's super important to us. We couldn't announce our game and not at least tease online."
"Basically, Jonathan, our creative director was playing agent Pearce at the conference, and I was playing another character, who hacked into him, who had his own objective and we crossed paths. It was basically two players who crossed paths with their own objectives."
In the conference demo, the character that Guay was playing watched the carnage that Jonathan was causing from afar. After apparently scanning Johnathan's brain, he turned and vaulted over some rooftops in a different direction entirely, it sounds now as though he was pursuing an entirely different mission in the same city.
It's a situation that doesn't fit neatly into your traditional "co-op" and "competitive" multiplayer pigeon holes, but the idea of players interacting through co-incidence and experiencing the collateral damage of each other's independent objectives is intriguing.
"We definitely want to blend in multiplayer online and singleplayer in ways that haven't been done before," says Guay. We'll be hunting down more info on Watch Dogs as E3 progresses. Meanwhile, here's the Watch Dogs demo, albeit without that multiplayer tease that Ubisoft threw into their live presentation at the end of Monday's conference.
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