At this year’s Eurogamer Expo, Jonathan Morin, creative director of Watch Dogs talked about how much freedom the main character, Aiden Pearce, has within the world.

According to Morin, the world is “open right at the start. You can go anywhere you want. We are not restricting the player.” While you’ll be able to travel everywhere right from the start, players will have to use Aiden’s hacking skills to expand his area of influence.

“Within the free-roaming the player will have to progressively invade certain strategic points from the city OS system that’s going to make it possible for him [Aiden] to get connected in a district. It’s going to grow and we call this “monitoring grid”. It’s like its own network to listen to what’s going on in the city. That unlocks tons of different side activities and events that the system can detect so we can actually go and intervene into them.”

“We really wanted the player, through the free-roaming, to feel that he is building his own hacking system,” continued Morin. “It would have been a bit weird and magical to just have it.” The team used this limitation to ground the game in reality, making sure that the players put in some effort to gain control of the city around them.

Watch the full video interview with Morin here.

Watch Dogs is released for PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Wii U on 22nd Nov 2013. The PS4 version follows a week later on the 29th Nov 2013.