Ubisoft has confirmed that Watch Dogs is being built from the ground up with a new engine.
The level of detail showcased in the title’s debut gameplay footage during the publisher’s E3 presser led many to speculate on the game’s engine. It won’t be utilizing any existing technology, but rather a whole new engine, which will feature ‘awesome tech, detail and density’. Producer Dominic Guay told VG247:
We’re building a new IP. For us, there’s three ingredients that are required to achieve that. That’s what we did with Splinter Cell in Montreal; that’s what we did with Assassin’s Creed. The first thing is you need a talented team. We got that. We need time. We’ve had that; we’ve been working on this for a good two years and we’re not shipping this year for sure. So we have a lot of time where we’re able to put a lot of details in the game.
The third thing you need is awesome tech, a great engine. Because when you build a new IP you want to bring in new experiences. To create a new type of experience your designers need new tools, a new engine, and we did just that.
Guay continued to explain why they chose to create a new engine for the IP:
We have a very strong engineering team, and we built the new engine to give the designers new abilities [and] new things that they could do. That’s how we could have so much detail and so much density in our Chicago. We’re going to be supporting multiple platforms when we come out.
One of said platforms will be the PlayStation 3, and possibly even the console’s successor. A new engine fuels speculation that the game could be arriving on next-gen platforms. As for when Watch Dogs releases during the current-gen, Guay confirmed it won’t be “shipping this year for sure.”
