Watch Dogs players may not notice others in a multiplayer session right away
Watch Dogs' Jonathan Morin has explained how the multiplayer will work in the game, without giving too much away on it. Essentially, players will always be in their "own session," but it can be merged with others to where players will "intertwine."
Speaking with the PS Blog, the game's creative director said players may not even notice immediately that a character they see in the game is another human being instead of an NPC.
"You can play single player or multiplayer in the game. You’re always in your own session. If you’re playing alone, you’re playing alone. So it means there are millions of people alone in their own sessions. We’ve simply added the ability to merge those sessions together at the pacing of our choice," he explained.
"You can be free-roaming and naturally getting into some kind of activity that makes you intertwine with another player. You interact with them, then you’re done and it goes away. It’s not like you have someone in your game the whole time who can mess with your game, but it’s definitely the beginning of a solution to tackle those taboos.
"Players often worry that another player is going to come into their game and break their experience. That’s an old school statement. We need to fix that, and it’s a design problem, not a technical problem – how do you bring two players together and let them interact in a way that’s pleasing? One thing I can say is that when we watch people play together in Watch Dogs, most of the time they don’t even realize that it was another player. There are no signs.
"There is a great thing there that someone can be in the experience and naturally enter a situation. They become part of the story. But in Watch Dogs, players won’t notice that immediately. It’s a new form of emotion and it fits perfectly in the Watch Dogs universe where everybody watches everyone else."
Sounds cool.
Watch Dogs is out on PC, PS3, Wii U, Xbox 360 in North America on November 19, and in Europe November 22. It is also coming to PS4 and the next Xbox console.