Ubisoft finally announced the release date for Watch Dogs, and after the big delay, Ubisoft has explained why they decided to push it back.
Speaking with Polygon, senior producer Dominic Guay said the Wii U version is “on hold, to a certain extent for shipping,” and that a 2014 release is still possible; plus it’s not in development at Ubisoft Montreal, but at Ubisoft Romania.
“We don’t have a specific ship date for it yet so it’s considered within the year,” he said. “So we’re going to look at that and we’re going to let people know as soon as we figure out an exact date for it.
“We have our studio in Bucharest working on it, and we wanted that team to have the time to explore the GamePad and be able to have fun with it and see how far they could push it. It’s also an interesting platform, because it has its own strength, which we want to take advantage of, and we didn’t want to delay all the other platforms for that one.
Watch Dogs was originally set to release last year to coincide with the release of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One; however, four weeks before its November 19 release, Ubisoft announced it has been delayed into 2014.
Speaking to Eurogamer, creative director Jonathan Morin said while the game would have been “pretty good” and “fun to play” at the time, “important details” were missing – thus, the game was delayed.
“When you’re promising a player that they can hack everything and express themselves, they expect the result to be there,” he said. “A complicated game that is broken is no more acceptable than an easier one that works.”
Morin said a meeting with the higher ups at Ubisoft pointing out what the game needed more time gave the team the confidence to prolong development, with company boss Yves Guillemot making the final call.
“The person who had to have balls is Yves,” Morin said. “He’s the boss so he had to have the courage to say to the stockholders: ‘We think it’s best to do this’. I didn’t have to go to Yves and say ‘I need you to spend more money on Watch Dogs!’ Ubisoft isn’t that kind of company.
“I have to give credit to him. I don’t know many people who would have said that based on systemic gameplay stuff. A lot of people would have said ‘who cares? who will find that? nine players out of 10 won’t get there!’ even if it wasn’t true just to get the game made faster.”
Watch Dogs releases worldwide on May 27 for PC, PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
