Ubisoft's upcoming open-world action-adventure game, Watch Dogs, plays on society's voyeuristic tendencies, the nuanced moral choices we make and our desire to affect game worlds, according to senior producer Dominic Guay.

In a recent demo of the game shown at a preview event in San Francisco, Guay and members of the Watch Dogs development team highlighted three areas that they believe players will find engaging. The first is voyeurism, which features heavily in the game. According to Guay, the theme of surveillance is particularly interesting to explore, especially when we consider the increasing number of security cameras that are being installed in cities and how everything — from traffic lights to power networks — is now connected and managed by computers.

"The question we asked ourselves was, 'What if we had control over all these things? What could we do with it? What are the flaws of having such a connected system? How could it be used?'" Guay said. "We're giving that control to the player and we're letting them answer it for themselves."

The game, which is scheduled to launch in North America on Windows PC, PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 on Nov. 19 and is due to launch on the PlayStation 4 in Q4, takes place in the "present day." But it's a present day that is a bit more futuristic, a bit more connected than today's reality. In the Chicago of Watch Dogs, a central operating system manages the entire city. "A computer controls a major city, but who controls the computers?" Guay asked. The answer is private companies. And personal data collection is the key commodity. Everyone in Watch Dogs casts a digital shadow, a collection of personal information that includes purchases, medical records, reading habits. The game's protagonist can hack smartphones, laptops and the computers that run the city, allowing players to invade any character's privacy at will. Guay said there's a voyeuristic tendency in all of us, and Watch Dogs plays on that desire to snoop into people's private lives. In the demo shown to Polygon, the player could hack a security camera, which allowed them to see from the camera's point of view. From this viewpoint, the player could see into a person's apartment, identify a laptop sitting on the person's desk, hack into the laptop's camera and subsequently "enter" the person's house to eavesdrop on their conversation. While walking down a street, the player can scan the data of every person they encounter. There is an overwhelming amount of information on every character — not all of it will be immediately useful, but Guay said it can help the player make certain decisions. In an example shown in the demo, the main character, Aiden Pearce, hacks a phone to reveal a text message conversation about a man plotting to murder a drug dealer who allegedly raped his wife. Using this information, Pearce tracks down the rapist, hacks his data and learns that he has a criminal record for sexual assault. From here, players can decide whether they want to intervene by killing the man who wants to kill the dealer, knocking the man out and calling the police or doing nothing and allowing the murder to take place. "You're going to have the tools to act in nuanced ways," Guay said. "So for example, you don't only have to kill people. You can knock them out and let the cops deal with them.

"A lot of games give us extreme answers to very nuanced questions, and that's easy to do, but we're trying to give more balanced answers to those situations, which, I think, is closer to what people actually think. I think we can relate to a character that is flawed a lot better than we can relate to someone who is either ultimately evil or absolutely good." The third main feature of the game shown during the demo was the systemic AI that, according to Guay, will allow players to be the authors of the "best moments" in the game. Guay said that in most games, there's a balance between a scripted AI and one that has its own brain that can make its own decisions. In Watch Dogs, the AI leans heavily toward the latter. "For example, imagine a car chase," Guay said. "For a lot of games, car chases are fully scripted — some games even script the traffic along the way, so it's always going to be the same. But if we do that in our game, it doesn't work. What if the player hacks a traffic light and causes an accident? Then the whole thing would break down. So we need all those cars to have the smarts to try to steer away, and the guy we're trying to chase has to have a new plan of action and change his course."



The worst crime in the Chicago of Watch Dogs happens in its wards.