Last week, we learned that the multiplayer in Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world title, Watch Dogs, will “seamlessly” overlap with the single player, featuring elements of ‘player invasion.’
Speaking to the official PS Blog, the game’s creative director, Jonathan Morin, detailed the multiplayer even further, saying that though players will always be in their “own session,” players can “intertwine” with one another, merging sessions.
Players might not even notice immediately, mistaking another player for an NPC.
“You can play single player or multiplayer in the game. You’re always in your own session” Morin said. “If you’re playing alone, you’re playing alone. So it means there are millions of people alone in their own sessions. We’ve simply added the ability to merge those sessions together at the pacing of our choice.
“You can be free-roaming and naturally getting into some kind of activity that makes you intertwine with another player. You interact with them, then you’re done and it goes away. It’s not like you have someone in your game the whole time who can mess with your game, but it’s definitely the beginning of a solution to tackle those taboos.
“Players often worry that another player is going to come into their game and break their experience. That’s an old school statement. We need to fix that, and it’s a design problem, not a technical problem – how do you bring two players together and let them interact in a way that’s pleasing? One thing I can say is that when we watch people play together in Watch Dogs, most of the time they don’t even realize that it was another player. There are no signs.
“There is a great thing there that someone can be in the experience and naturally enter a situation. They become part of the story. But in Watch Dogs, players won’t notice that immediately. It’s a new form of emotion and it fits perfectly in the Watch Dogs universe where everybody watches everyone else.”
Ubisoft seems to be blurring the line between more traditional competitive and co-op multiplayer experiences with Watch Dogs, hitting the Xbox 360, Next Xbox, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PC on November 19 in North America and November 22 in Europe.
What do you guys think of the idea so far? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments!
Thanks, VG247