Watch Dogs was supposed to be out last November! Now, it won’t be out until May . Allow Ubisoft to explain, at least in Ubisoft’s public words, why that is.
Senior Producer Dominic Guay sat down with the company’s official blog and gave his version of events. Those looking for catastrophic tales of mmismanagement or technical disasters can look elsewhere. Guay puts it all down to the same reason most games get delayed: issues with planning and testing.
He says that while the game was for all intents complete on time, playable from “front-to-back”, getting everything together and working like it needed to for launch “takes time”, and “it’s really hard to predict how much time that’s going to take.”
In Watch Dogs’ case, it took too long, and they were given the extra six months to get everything in tip-top shape. We hope.
WHY WAS WATCH DOGS DELAYED? [Ubisoft]
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13 responses to “Why Watch Dogs Was Delayed (According To The Guys Who Made It)”
Will be hilarious if there is a day 1 patch.
if? you mean when surely 😉
After these delays I think you can guarantee that if there’s even one small bug in it someone will call for blood.
All in all, I’m still keen to give this game a shot.
I’ll never give a company a hard time for fixing issues before release, even if it means moving the release date back. It’s not like there’s nothing else to do in the mean time, and too many companies stick to schedules when they know the game won’t be 100% ready for release.
Often the reason they stick to the schedule is due to investor or financial pressure though. For every day you delay a release, that’s one more day you have to pay to run the company without anything coming in (from the game). This also tends to make investors nervous and more inclined to say “Let’s just get it out there and earning us money. We’ll deal with the issues later.”
Exactly. Why is this even a thing? Good on them for wanting to actually release a finished product.
Absolutely.
I 100% prefer when developers (or in many cases publishers) are prepared to delay a game in order to ensure that the product is done right. No matter how keen I am for a game, I’d rather they finish it properly and make sure everything is working rather than push it out the door and start charging people for a buggy mess.
Ubisoft said they want this to be a big new franchise for them, so it’s understandable they want to start on the right foot. I think they deserve a nod for putting the quality of the game first, even though it meant missing the Christmas window.
That said, if the game is crap on release even after the delays, we’ll need to have words.
Exactly what I think too. To use one of my favourite quotes (apparently from Nintendo), “a late game is late until it’s released, but a bad game is bad forever”.
Companies should be applauded for holding a game back rather than using day one patches.
The thing I hate is trying to build up the hype again after it being so close to its original launch. I’ve got the game pre-ordered on PS4 yet I don’t think I’m excited for it as I once was
I’m not blaming the delay, just the timing when it happened
I don’t have the same level of hype either. I spent time thinking whether to play Watch Dogs or Assassin’s Creed IV first (since 1 was the first game I played on PS3) but eventually came to the decision to play Watch Dogs first, then it got delayed. I had a lot of hype building up to the launch. I think I’ll be hyped up for it a few weeks before it’s release, but all my hype right now is focused on Infamous Second Son.
I honestly thought they saw the quality that is GTA V & Online and went back to testing to get close to that level of polish…
I thought the initial word was to “bring the game up to scratch to make it truly next gen and graphically look it”.
They seem to have done the exact opposite going off the latest trailer. looks like its an early PS3/360 release…