Driver Madness

The studio behind the comatose-powered hijinks of Driver: San Francisco, Ubisoft Reflections, is lending their expertise on the freshly unveiled sci-fi thriller Watch Dogs at Ubisoft Montreal.

LinkedIn profiles reveals the Driver dev has producer and level design roles. Ubisoft make a habit of stretching projects over multiple studios. AC: Revelations was the work of six.

Watch Dogs was announced during Ubisoft's E3 press event and stole the spotlight for a lot of people with its extremely juicy premise of letting us play with a whole city.

We're told it's an open world set in Chicago, Illinois in the near future and we play as Aiden Pearce who has learnt to breach Chicago's Central Operating System (ctOS), which lets him have almost unlimited access to digital information and control over connected devices throughout the entire city.

Watch Dogs releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2013.

Watch Dogs: PC is Lead Development Platform, Says Ubisoft

Like many others at Ubisoft, company boss Yves Guillemot has a lot to say about Watch Dogs. In an interview yesterday, the game was touted as a competitor to the Grand Theft Auto series of games by the game's director Alain Corre. Speaking to Inside Gamer (via VG247), Guillemot explained how the PC would serve a the lead development platform for the game, which marks a change from previous titles, which were mainly developed for consoles and later ported to Windows.

Guillemot believes that developing Watch Dogs on the PC will allow its developers greater flexibility to port the game to the next-gen consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's unannounced platform. He explained that previous titles had to be developed first on the Xbox 360 and ported to the PlayStation 3 due to the differences in core architecture.

"We expect fewer problems with porting games to the PS4 than the PS3, which had a completely different infrastructure," Guillemot said. "Previously, we developed games first on the Xbox 360 and then translated them onto the PS3. It took a lot of time and money to port."

The PlayStation 4 has been confirmed to be an X86 platform, and there's little reason for the next Xbox to be any different from its predecessor. Given this fact, developing the game on the PC as its lead platform makes a whole lot of sense given the malleability of its hardware. Just as Guillemot suggests, this means that ports in the future will have far fewer problems and run better for everyone on every platform.

Ubisoft is aiming for a 'Holiday 2013' release for Watch Dogs on the PC, 360, PS3, Wii U, and PS4.

Coyote wrote:The thing that sucks is that I believe they don't want to make something that isn't available on consoles, it's always the other way around. I mean even with DSF, there's stuff we don't have like the split screen multiplayer for example. Point is, their consoles are too weak. My Mac could run everything, including games that will come out on the Playstation 9. They could just make the *perfect* game and then adapt it to every platform / or have settings to make it playable for everyone, for example if your computer isn't that powerful, you'd have settings for less traffic, or no weather etc. The consoles are the problem.

Fab2cent wrote:@ Olanov Sorry im new to the site and did not think before i did it

Coyote wrote:You don't need to be sorry, it's just a double post. Nobody cares.

Welcome to Driver Madness, hope you won't run away too quickly

If you ask me, games should always be based on computers

Coyote wrote:You don't need to be sorry, it's just a double post. Nobody cares.

Welcome to Driver Madness, hope you won't run away too quickly

If you ask me, games should always be based on computers

Coyote wrote:You don't need to be sorry, it's just a double post. Nobody cares.

Welcome to Driver Madness, hope you won't run away too quickly

If you ask me, games should always be based on computers

Fab2cent wrote:WHOOPS, my pc stuffed up how do i delete posts?