Watch Dogs 2 will launch before April 2017. We know because Ubisoft just said that the game would be out before the end of its current financial year as part of their third-quarter financial report. And for now, that’s all we know.

Ubisoft have also confirmed that there would be no Assassin’s Creed game released in 2016. That had previously been rumoured, and was reported by Kotaku last month alongside another rumour that Watch Dogs 2 could take the games place and would be set in San Francisco.

The first Watch_Dogs was a disappointment to many – myself included – but we’ve known almost since its release that there would be a sequel. Most of the talk about it so far has been vague and mostly concerned with what will change. For example, Yves Guillemot told CVG (since closed) in 2014 that he couldn’t say if protagonist and uncle Aiden Pearce would return because he didn’t know, but that the studio was working to diversify their roster of lead characters. Ubisoft Montreal’s Lionel Raynaud also told CG that the game had “had a lot of flaws in the replayability of gameplay loops,” and that the sequel would see “radical” changes that the development of new technology.

Presumably that means an updated engine. One of the reasons the game was a let-down was that early trailers looked better than the eventual game that was released. Ubisoft say they’ve learned lessons from that, and that future presentations of all their games will use actual footage rather than potentially unachievable ‘target renders’.

If Watch Dogs 2 is returning, my main hope would be that it expands on the first game’s multiplayer. Invading other player’s singleplayer sessions without them knowing was the best thing about the game. Everything else can change but that, as far as I’m concerned.

What do you hope for from Watch Dogs 2? And is it an underscore?