Watch Dogs’ Multiplayer

Today, Revision 3’s Adam Sessler had a chance to sit down and talk to Dominic Guay, senior producer on Watch Dogs. They showed the footage from Sony’s press conference last night but explained more about what was going on. Towards the end of the video they talked about some multiplayer that wasn’t mentioned at the press conference as well. Here’s a little bit of why the multiplayer is an interesting concept to me.

Mobile Multiplayer

During the demo at Sony’s press event yesterday you saw the player search for mobile help. This allows someone playing on a mobile device to hop into your game and help out via a topdown view of the city. It lets you to send out a message and hope you have a friend available to help you through whatever situation you need help with. 

This is really cool to me because it allows for a unique way to have friends help you with a game. They may have beaten the story and know how difficult a specific mission could be and would love to get the cops off of your back so you can escape. 

Mobile vs Console

If you want a break from the stories and side quests then you can ask for friends to try and stop you from reaching certain goals. By initiating this “challenge mode” you let people on mobile devices access your game and try and send cops after you and hack things to stop you from achieving your goal, whatever that is. 

I think that this will be an interesting way to integrate the mobile “app” into other peoples’ games. By allowing mobile players and console players to challenge one another, it will help in keeping the game from becoming stagnant. It’s always more fun to fight a living person and not just AI.

Is that an AI?

At the end of the video they spoke about a mode where you can enter someone’s console game through your console game and effect everything they do. You can accept contracts to kill or trail or do other things to hinder your friend’s game. This is an optional mode as well, similar to the challenge concept of the mobile multiplayer. If you complete contracts on other players you are also more likely to be put within the radar and gain more contracts on your head. But if you don’t want people to stop you from getting through the story or at any other point, you can block them as well.

This adds some really cool gameplay because as Dominic states you might not know if the player hacking you is there or not. You aren’t looking because, while you have the option open for people to take contracts within your game, you never know when they’re trying to hack you or if it’s just normal AI. This is just going to be a cool implementation of a different view on multiplayer.

Watch Dogs continues to impress the more that I see about it and I can’t wait to play later this year. It comes out November 19th on PS3, Wii U, and Xbox 360 and they aren’t sure on when it will ship for the PS4 and Xbox One.