On the surface, Watch Dogs Legion sounds like nothing short of a herculean effort to develop. Technically, there exists no main character in this installment of the hacking-centric series. Instead, players will assume the role of any NPC they come across in the game world, from super secret agents to elderly former assassins, and literally everything in between. If it sounds overwhelmingly complex, that’s because it is. In fact, there were so many moving parts that about 20 scripts were written for the game in total.
In an interview with EDGE Magazine, Watch Dogs Legion’s Creative Director, Clint Hocking, explained just how deep the systems go to make everything work. No two characters will sound the same, according to Hocking, even if there are two characters on-screen at once that share the same voice actor. He elaborated further with the following,
There’s no dude on the box who’s there to start all the cinematics and the people you recruit are just the supporting cast. There are 20 different versions of Legion’s script and I don’t just mean people saying the same lines. We’re talking different characters, different personas, different voices, different acting.
We’re using technology to alter all the voices so that even if you happen to recruit Joe and John and they have the same actor and the same personality when they talk to each other, you won’t know it’s the same actor because we modulate the voices. We used photogrammetry to capture dozens of different faces, which have been combined using innovative animation techniques to produce literally thousands of unique heads.
Whether you choose some suave, sophisticated secret agent dude, or some 80-year-old lady that you saw feeding pigeons in the park, your story is going to be uniquely yours.
In short, the technology powering this particular venture in the Ubisoft stable is incredible beyond reason. Of course, now the question shifts to whether or not such an ambitious feat will be accomplished. Can developer Ubisoft Toronto pull this off, with that many characters, and on the current generation of console hardware? We will find out for sure soon enough.
Watch Dogs Legion is slated to come to the PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One platforms early next year on March 6, 2020. Preorders for the title and its Collector’s Edition are currently live online and at various brick and mortar retailers.
[Source: EDGE Magazine via Wccftech]
