In a world where tech-savvy skulduggery is king, Watch Dogs is poised to intensify the gaming experience via a mobile companion app. The program will allow players to participate in their friends’ in-game worlds and manipulate their illicit adventures using an eye-in-the-sky styled map. It’s a feature with impetus to make gamers feel ‘attached’ to the gaming world, according to senior producer Dominic Guay.
“We wanted the player to be able to connect to Watch Dogs even through his mobile. Be able to play directly with people who are on their console, who are on their PlayStation 4, even if he’s on the bus. Basically to be attached to our game world even when he steps out of the living room.”
In essence, the application is tethered to a friend’s world on a particular console or PC, which subsequently allows the person controlling the tablet to pose challenges to the player, such as directing police vehicles and erecting the city’s barriers, for example. The tablet app will run at real time and has been constructed with heightening the Watch Dogs experience in mind. Plus, gamers who use the app on-the-go will even accumulate experience points. However, the level of engagement for portable players starts and ends with the bird’s-eye map, so it’ll be interesting to see how Ubisoft sustain the cross-platform integration after the game is out in the wild for a couple of months.
While the tech was demonstrated on iOS, surely the key for success is to ensure the companion app is compatible with Android and Windows Phone, too. The companion app for console games has become a growing trend from E3, given that EA has also planned to implement mobile iterations of Battlefield 4.
What are your opinions on this push toward mobile integration? Can you see yourself playing the Watch Dogs companion app whilst commuting? Presuming you have 3G or access to Wi-Fi, of course.
Watch Dogs will be released on Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Wii U on November 19th (November 22nd in Europe) and will also be available for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One upon release.