Ubisoft Revisits Watch Dogs 2 Discussion

Ubisoft is set to release Watch Dogs’ first DLC, Bad Blood, Sept. 23 for Season Pass holders and publicly on Sept. 30, but plans are being discussed openly for the future of their vigilante title.  Lionel Raynaud, Ubisoft Montreal’s vice president of creative, is sharing glimpses into how the game development company will approach the Watch Dogs sequel.

“The reception (of Watch Dogs) has actually been pretty close to Assassin’s Creed,” Raynaud said to CVG. “With the first one we didn’t have such a good reception, and it was fair.”

Raynaud noted that Assassin’s Creed, which grew to be Ubisoft’s best selling series with over 70 million copies sold as of April 2014, was initially criticized for the replay value of gameplay loop.  Now, Ubisoft looks to capitalize on the delayed release of Watch Dogs by revisiting the initial title.

“We also kept parts of the game we felt didn’t fit with the original for the sequel,” Raynaud said.  The other changes to be made will be “radical,” focusing on how players engage in the open-world. Content will be unlocked as gamers play the game based on creativity instead of narratives or characters.

This conversation by Ubisoft about the potential Watch Dogs sequel is not new. The company’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, discussed the criticism involving the game’s characters and the impact on development at E3 2014.

“We knew (the characters) would be polarizing; some people loved the characters and some didn’t,” Guillemot said to CVG. “It was difficult to please everybody with that character. Now, having seen the reaction, we know what we will do next to improve that.”

Other than interviews, Ubisoft mysteriously tweeted about New Jersey from the Watch Dogs Twitter account. It is still unconfirmed if the U.S. state will be the sequel’s location.