Watch Dogs Creative Director Says Ubisoft Forced E3 Reveal

While it may have been a surprise announcement, following E3 2012, the one game on everybody's mind was Ubisoft Montreal’s Watch Dogs. Along with all the buzz the game created, it also garnered an absurd amount of critical praise in the form of 'Best of E3 Nominations' - including receiving a 'Best Original Game” nomination' from Game Rant in particular.

What Ubisoft Montreal showed in Watch Dogs was a visually stunning, open-world action game set in Chicago with the city’s central operating system used to track its citizens’ every move. Aside from the game’s gorgeous environments and atmosphere, what captured everyone’s attention was protagonist Aiden Pierce’s ability to hack into the CtOS to obtain people’s personal information, or use his access to shape the world around him. So who would have guessed that the game's own developers didn't want to show off the game that early?

When it was first revealed with lofty promises of the game's massive world (populated by other real-world players), it became popular opinion that Watch Dogs was all but confirmed as a next-gen title, with Ubisoft having a better sense of what to expect from the new consoles than anyone. But if Watch Dog’s Creative Director Jonathan Morin would have had his way, we wouldn’t have laid eyes on the game during the show.

In an interview with Edge, Morin revealed that his team was anything but excited to unveil the experience, ultimately being "forced" into it by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot:

"They forced us to go at E3 2012. We didn't know what the hell those new consoles would be, so Watch Dogs really has worked on [seventh]-gen systems since the start. But we always pushed the ideas, the design, the core of Watch Dogs in such a way that we felt it would fit well with what we thought would be the future of games.

"Yves was the one who wanted us to go at that E3, even though we felt it was a bit early, and in the end I think he was right."

It's hard to disagree that Ubisoft ended up making the right movie; showing Watch Dogs at E3 all but stole the conference's attention, and even if it may have been seen as a bit too early by some, the game has remained one of the most anticipated releases to this day. The situation could have ended up far worse, as the results of showing off a game before it's ready can be nearly irreparable (look at Volition's Red Faction: Guerrilla for evidence).

Of course, this latest news isn’t the first bit of controversy surrounding Watch Dogs. The game was delayed from its original November 2013 release date and slipped into the first quarter of 2014. To make matters worse, the game's Wii U version has been delayed even further, with an exact release date still unconfirmed. More recently, new gameplay footage showing how much the game has changed since it was first reveal upset some fans - yet the game's planned release grows closer by the day.

In other news, the PC version's minimum requirements were recently revealed:

  • Processor: IntelCore 2 Quad Q8400 2.66Ghz or AMDPhenom II X4 940 3.0Ghz
  • Memory: 6GB RAM
  • Video card: 1024 VRAM DirectX 11 Shader 5.0
  • Sound Card: DirectX9
  • Harddrive: 25 GB

Keep in mind, this is just the minimum requirements, and the recommended requirements have yet to be released, but they're not too unreasonable for most modern PCs.

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Watch Dogs releases May 27 for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. The Wii U version currently does not have a release date.

Sources: Edge (via Videogamer), MP1ST