Watch Dogs 3 Will Be Set In London
It’s become tradition for Ubisoft’s E3 game lineup to completely leak out at least one week before their actual presentation. It’s almost like Ubisoft lets these leaks happen on purpose, but….naaah, that couldn’t be it.
As of today, we know one of Ubisoft’s next big games is Watch Dogs 3. A product listing for the game briefly appeared on Amazon UK and was scooped up by all the big news outlets before it could be deleted. Ironic that the leak came out of the UK, for this time, the city you’ll be hacking is London, England.
Any particular reason? If you’ve been following the news, you know of at least one. The product description on the deleted page said Watch Dogs 3 takes place in a “post-Brexit world in which society, politics and technology have changed and altered London’s fortunes.” It’s quite risky of Ubisoft to set their game within a hypothetical event that’s about to actually happen — depending on how Brexit goes down, or even IF it goes down, the game could become dated very fast.
But the datedness won’t matter as long as the game is fun. We have to admit the dev team is cooking up a new mechanic that has our interest piqued: you will be able to control any NPC in the game. Not just gather their information, but outright step into their bodies and walk them around. ANY NPC. Watch Dogs games have a lot of NPCs!
Given the sheer volume of hypotheticals and if-then-else decisions that will have to be processed, this sounds like a programming nightmare, assuming they aren’t just cheating by copy-pasting the same NPC all over the place. “From what I’ve heard,” says Kotaku’s Jason Schreier in a confirmation of the leak, “this system is so ambitious that it’s been causing the developers a lot of headaches (and may have led to at least one delay).”
Ubisoft’s E3 press conference happens this coming Monday at 1 PM Pacific / 4 PM Eastern. We’ll learn more about Watch Dogs 3 there.