While Watch Dogs, the upcoming open-world hackathon from Ubisoft, still remains as one of the top games to look forward to in the coming year, it seems like the impressive in-game engine for Watch Dogs was not even originally intended for the game, but for a different one in the Driver franchise.
Speaking to IGN in a recent interview, Ubisoft North American president Laurent Detoc explained how the team working on the game later realized that an open-world game was a better fit for the engine rather than the original Driver game.
“Watch Dogs wasn’t started as Watch Dogs. They were working on a driving engine, working on something. We had the Driver license. This was years ago. Then we were thinking, ‘no, this is not the way we want to go with a driving game,’ so we cancelled that and restarted,” Detoc stated.
“It’s not like Watch Dogs started as Watch Dogs. The Watch Dogs project was initially another game. At some point it changed. That’s at least three years ago, and then the Watch Dogs project reused some of the work that had been done on this driving engine.”
He further convoluted: “It’s not that Driver became Watch Dogs, so much as the driving game we made was a driving game. The decision was made that there was another driving game being made and this one should be an open-world game where the guy comes out of the car and does other things. Then the team decides to reshuffle itself entirely. A few other people come in, a new creative director, and then they start a new game.”
“I wouldn’t say that Driver became Watch Dogs, because that’s not true. That’s not really what happens. What happens is that a game gets cancelled, and then you take pieces of that game to make a new one. We could have had another driving engine from another team in another place, and then it would have been used by the Watch Dogs team,” he added.
As of now, Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, which is to be played from a third-person perspective in an open world environment, is currently scheduled for launches on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii U, and PC in early 2014.
