While Ubisoft hasn’t announced a sequel to its open world action game Watch Dogs, the fact that it made the publisher a ton of money means that a sequel is now an inevitability.
In an interview with CVG, Ubisoft Montreal Vice President of Creative Lionel Raynaud admits that there are “flaws” in Watch Dogs, but also that there are things it took out since it didn’t fit, and is adding those in Watch Dogs 2.
We had a lot of flaws in the replayability of gameplay loops and you could feel that the game was a first iteration. At the time, there was clear potential but it was not easy to know it was going to become the franchise that it is today.
It’s the same thing with Watch Dogs: it was difficult to do everything at the right level, which is why we took more time. The time we took was definitely useful – it allowed us to release the game without compromises and do everything that we wanted. We also kept parts of the game we felt didn’t fit with the original for the sequel.
Raynaud then says that the studio needs to tackle these flaws in the sequel, and that they’ll be “quite radical.”
There are flaws, obviously. We absolutely want to tackle these flaws and surprise players, and the way to tackle some of those flaws is going to be quite radical. There are parts of the game that will need to change.
Finally, Raynaud mentions that for Watch Dogs 2, it will require tech that it didn’t have for the first game, and that refining what “worked” for Aiden’s maiden journey will be the way to go for the sequel.
This is quite a high ambition and will require us to develop technologies that we didn’t have for Watch Dogs 1, but this combined with fixing and refining what worked well is probably the way to go for Watch Dogs 2.
Do you want a sequel to Watch Dogs at all? Our review of the game does mention that Ubisoft seems to be setting the game up as a franchise, though at the game’s expense.
