In 2012, a fallow year for the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles, Ubisoft revealed its latest open-world action adventure – and promptly stole the show. Watch Dogs, a cyberpunk thriller set in an astonishingly detailed recreation of Chicago, looked amazing, with its complex lighting effects, lifelike character animation and detailed weather simulation.

There was just one slight problem – when the game was released on PC and the next-gen consoles, the visuals did not quite match that early promise. For many gamers, the disparity symbolised a growing problem with games industry marketing: a reliance on “vertical slice” demos to build early hype. These pre-release presentations tend to be built on powerful PC hardware and are designed to give an impression of the performance levels that development teams are targeting. The problems come when the game is released months or even years later, and the reality fails to match the early promise, with the most ambitious and demanding effects often scaled down or missing.

Speaking to the Guardian at this year’s E3, Ubisoft CEO, Yves Guillemot, conceded that the company had been caught out by the complexity of the project.



Watch Dogs follows hacker vigilante Aiden Pearce as he gains control of the city’s mainframe computer system; it features a large open-city environment, the ability to hack into the phones of every passerby to open side-missions, and a multiplayer feature that lets players raid each other’s games. The dev team also introduced “second screen” functionality so players could interact with the game via smartphones and tablets.

“It’s a real challenge to create those types of games,” said Guillemot. “When they come out, especially the first iterations, they are not perfect on everything. We think we launched a good quality game for a first step in a new brand with a new technology. It’s just so complex – seamless multiplayer, connectivity with mobile and tablets, so many things – it was maybe a bit too much for a first iteration.”

Ubisoft was far from alone in presenting an overly ambitious graphical demo for a major new title. Few veteran gamers will ever forget the controversy surrounding the E3 2005 demo of Killzone 2, which Sony initially appeared to claim was running in real-time on PS3 hardware before it later became clear the footage was a “target render”. Furthermore, as a first generation release on the new PS4 and Xbox One console, Watch Dogs would have been largely developed on high-end PCs with only an approximation of the final machine specifications.

Nevertheless, Guillemot said that reactions to the Watch Dogs demo had re-shaped the company’s approach to showing off pre-release games. “With E3 2015 we said, OK, let’s make sure the games are playable, that they’re running on the target machines. When we show something, we ask the team, make sure it’s playable, make sure gamers can immediately see exactly what it is. That’s what we learned from the Watch Dogs experience – if it can’t be played on the target machine, it can be a risk.”

Speaking about Ubisoft’s approach to internal development, Guillemot said that the company would continue to accompany its triple A releases with experimental projects pitched to him and chief creative officer Serge Hascoet by small teams. The process has seen offbeat titles like Valiant Hearts and Child of Light come to fruition. Apparently, developers have even started skipping the official pitching procedure. Newcastle-based studio Ubisoft Reflections started creating its botanical platformer Grow Home in secret.



“[Managing director] Pauline Jacquey said ‘we’re going to do a game that’s so cheap we don’t need your approval – we have something that’s already good enough’. When I saw it for the first time it was 60% done. I like that approach. When a project costs more than $5m we need to look at it because it can go wrong. But when it’s €200,000 to €300,000, they can make all the decisions they need to to make it happen.”

As for the next Watch Dogs, which is surely in development, Guillemot was circumspect, but said the development team would be building on the foundations of the original title. “We are continuing to work on everything we created so we can get to the next level,” he said.