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Watch Dogs 2: Game Director Danny Belanger on the franchise’s new tone

Matt Gosper, Stevivor: In comparison to the original Watch Dogs, what would you define as the key pillars of Watch Dogs 2

Danny Belanger, Watch Dogs 2 Game Director: We really focused this time on the themes of the narrative, and much more about hacking culture, Internet culture. The gameplay mechanics – so hacking itself, interacting with the world, the systems with the AI – were really fundamental to bring it to a new level.

Ah, driving.. [laughs] We wanted to improve the driving! It was a bit polarized [in Watch Dogs], some people liked it, some hated it. But for us we’re trying to make it still deep in the sense that there’s variety, but have more people enjoy it.

And we’re focusing on seamless online, pushing that boundary further. Removing the steps, the tedious steps to play with others like menus, finding someone, you know? It’s like… Just play the game and then online is there. There’s opportunities for you to play with others and there’s events, there’s invasions, all of that happens seamlessly – but we’re still action, it’s a shooting game if you want it to be, it’s a stealth game if you want it to be, or it’s a hacking game if you want it to be. So I’d say those are the key elements we focused on.

Stevivor: And in terms of the new functionality, especially expanded hacking, was that an independent decision or more reactionary compared to Watch Dogs’ reception? 

Belanger: The biggest challenge with a game like ours is to make hacking as efficient as shooting. Shooting is two inputs; it’s so efficient as a mechanic, and players naturally will tend to use what’s most efficient.

So what we have is the challenge of bringing a new mechanic into the game and then competing with something so easy to use that players know so much. We tried to keep the one-button hack but then add depth with multiple options, and actually connect hacking to everything we can like people, cars, infrastructure and all that. Then adding gadgets on top of it, so for us it was as much as we could push it. That’s what we wanted to do – and network hacking allows you to see the world as a hacker, see everything that’s connected so you can understand the opportunities to really push it. We tried so many things – “OK these things really fit what we wanna do”, that’s the step forward we wanted to take.

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Stevivor: Was the intent always to move to a new story, or was there the possibility of Aiden Pearce’s story being continued at one point? 

Belanger: We had a lot of discussion about it, but there’s a few things about that. If you do a sequel it’s great to bring something new so having a new city and new character, it’s very good for players. I don’t think Aiden would’ve necessarily been the right character for San Francisco.

So all of these discussions happened and then when you think about the feeling of the Bay Area, the culture, then what type of story do we want to talk about? Do you want to talk about hacking, the hacking culture, then we talk about DedSec and then for the lulz. All these things kinda come together because you have a world that you need these characters live in and it kind of drives a lot of the vibe and the feeling of the game.

Stevivor: It’s definitely a very different tone straight from the outset. I can understand Aiden Pearce maybenot… fitting in so well? 

Belanger: When you think about it, Chicago was perfect for Aiden Pearce! It was a vengeance story, he was torn, a dark character. Now Marcus is a more colourful character, he’s funny, he’s sociable. It brings a different vibe to the thing.

Stevivor: With Marcus, what is it that makes him a compelling protagonist moving on from Aiden? 

Belanger: The things we really like about Marcus, his qualities: he’s sociable, he enjoys humour, he wants to work with people and maybe more importantly he’s an idealist. He wants to make a difference. He was unjustly accused of a crime and that made him reflect on the world. Now he’s with like-minded people and they want to expose these crimes, these misuses of technology.

So in a sense that’s his goal, but in reality it’s the player’s decision. You have the controller and you create your own story with the systems, if you want to use any of the play styles – more action, more stealth, more hacker – it’s really up to you. But the story Marcus wants to tell is, we need people to know the risks with this tech, what’s going on in the shadows. If people are aware then they’ll make better decisions, and that will kind of modify the world we’re living in, in the future.

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Stevivor: With the overall aim being to build followers and gain processing power [to defeat ctOS], it puts a different spin on the mission design. Was that a fun breakaway to build more varied missions? 

Belanger: Yeah, it allowed us to do a really great things with the game experience in the sense that… Hackers do operations in real life. They want to make a change, make people aware so it was kind of natural for us to go there. In terms of pure gameplay mechanic, [the follower count] is like experience points. Your actions are driving you forward narratively, but also in terms of research and progression. For us it was a great mix. In that way we allow the player to be free to play the way they want. If you start judging the player on his actions it gets quite tricky. You want to play a certain way but the game is saying, maybe you should play this way?

We kind of removed all that and said OK, it’s the end result that’s important but the player decides the journey. That’s where he decides his narrative. In all of those things, it allowed us to create a different feeling and give freedom to player through followers in the end.

Stevivor: With San Francisco as the setting – not being a native myself – how accurate a representation of the city is it? 

Belanger: It’s not 1:1 obviously, but we have – we called it the ‘world first’ approach. When we pick a city we really want it to feel like a real place so we send a lot of people, and film, and we want to understand the architecture, the vibe. I didn’t build the world but I know there’s around 200 landmarks that were really important to hit – so people would recognise, OK, I’m here. And then obviously it’s the Bay, you’ve gotta expand [to Oakland and Silicon Valley].

And then there’s the discussions, what’s going on in this neighbourhood? So the writers decide, we want to talk about this subject, this is what’s going on. If you live here you go oh right, OK. So that’s what we wanted to achieve, we did it as accurately as we could in the end.

Watch Dogs 2 heads to Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4 later in the month.


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About the author

Matt Gosper

aka Ponk – a Melburnian gay gamer who works with snail mail. Enthusiastically keeping a finger in every pie of the games industry. I'll beat you at Mario Kart, and lose to you in any shooter you can name.