Feature
a technology that generates all these people’s lives – their kids, their story, their revenue… the programme is creating all these people using a certain logic, so every district has its own set of rules. We then have banks of information that is applied. I would be interested to see if anyone could find two identical people in the whole city. I would be amazed by that, because there is so much variety here. You can even listen to all of their phone calls, so there’s a lot of recording, a lot of text messages written… bringing the city to life. GM: With the game being an open world, how linear is the
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main plot line going to be? DB: That’s an interesting challenge because we believe in strong writing and dialogue and story. Personally I think that brings meaning to it. So when you get a narrative moment, you get a problem to solve. We’re not trying to put you on a rail, but you have to play it as designed. You can use any of the tools and play styles in the game, like stealth, combat or hacking. Sometimes hacking would be enough. But that’s where your story as a player comes in. We don’t want to put you in a corridor and say “this has to happen”. Obviously, though, where there is narrative you have to follow that gamecca53
story. But that’s for the main quests. The open world is free for you to explore as you want. GM: There are games out there that give you the option of any approach, but give better rewards for the ‘preferred’ approach – like Splinter Cell: Blacklist, which gave greater rewards for stealth. Are we going to see that kind of thing in Watch_ Dogs? DM: We try to reward you for difficulty, not play style. So if you take an enemy down using stealth, you’ll get extra experience points. If you just shoot him, you’ll get less,