For a really further interview, BBC reporter Mark Cieslak obtained all mo-cap suited as much as have a dialog inside Watch Dogs Legion‘s virtual city of London with the game’s artistic director, Clint Hocking (, as a substitute of utilizing Discord or some type of in-game chat operate). This isn’t the type of “oh look at our cool tech” interview that I anticipated nonetheless, because the pair talk about the tradition of a game set in dystopian Britain, and the duty of depicting real-life occasions like Brexit in games.
Watch Dogs Legion, for individuals who don’t know, is Ubisoft’s upcoming open world game set in post-Brexit England a while sooner or later. The game boasts you can play as fairly actually any NPC you cross, as your objective is to recruit individuals into your sneaky but resourceful group.
Not shying away from the very political theme Watch Dogs Legion is predicated round, Cieslak mentions the divisive nature of Brexit and the way “quite a lot of people are going to be angry that it’s been included in a video game”.
“I look at it as a creator of culture, as if we were creating films or movies or books, it’s the same with video games,” Hocking responded. “It’s our responsibility to look at the things that are happening in the world around us and have something to say about that, to create something that’s meaningful, that people can look at and engage with, and it speaks to the world that they live in.”
But after all, Brexit has been happening for a protracted, lengthy, lengthy, lengthy, lengthy… uh, time, and Hocking stated they’re all the time keeping track of what’s happening to allow them to resolve what to place within the game.
“We look at regulations for drones flying in the skies, or autonomous vehicles in traffic, and we have to think, are these things we want to include in our simulation and make playable for players in our game universe?”
We nonetheless have a short time till we’ll discover out what Brexit-related occasions really made it into the game, as Ubisoft delayed Watch Dogs Legion (together with Rainbow Six Quarantine and Gods & Monsters) till “later” in 2020 – initially it was meant to return out on March sixth.
Until that “later date” then, you’ll be able to stay vicariously via Alice Bee’s exploration of Watch Dogs Legion’s digital London, which she was pretty impressed at (and likewise completely takes as an opportunity to point out off what number of locations in London she is aware of).
If you’d prefer to see extra interviews with cool individuals performed inside games (with gamers, somewhat than for PR stunts), Brendan did a wonderful sequence known as Ridealong. An particularly good one is the place he introduces an actual comic to Comedy Night, and he does it with out all that foolish motion-capture swimsuit enterprise too.
