The original Watch Dogs, released in 2014, was at one point meant to be a sequel in the GTA-like Driver series but was instead spun off into its own franchise, a new report indicates. With a newfound emphasis on hacking, the project was supposedly deemed too different to make sense under the Driver name.
The Driver series began in 1999 and has always focused around driving around an open world, inspired by car chase movies like Bullitt and The Driver. Sequels introduced more complexity, including the ability to go on foot or hijack other vehicles. That drew comparisons to the Grand Theft Auto games, although the series fizzled out after the failure of Driv3r during the sixth console generation. Its last major title was 2011's Driver: San Francisco.
"The game that was released as Watch Dogs started life as a sequel in the Driver franchise, but was always largely what you see in the final product," an anonymous Ubisoft source tells VG247. This contradicts a 2013 interview with the company's North American president, who said that Watch Dogs simply "reused some of the work" that had been done on a vehicular engine for a Driver game. The anonymous source elaborates that the product was "always modern day, it had on foot, parkour, combat as well as driving, all set in a large open-world city, and the main hook was always modern technology and hacking." It's alleged that only after Ubisoft was unable to slot this project into the Driver universe that it became its own property: Watch Dogs.
This last point is disputed by another anonymous Ubisoft person, who says that Ubisoft Montreal refocused a demo of the Driver project on hacking after Driver: San Francisco's loss to the GTA series in sales. "They just did their own thing and convinced Yves [Guillemot, Ubisoft's CEO] he could have 'his own GTA' instead of the low selling Driver." Both sources agree that hacking was the difference that forced Ubisoft to turn the game into new IP, much like a scrapped Prince of Persia sequel eventually became Assassin's Creed. One source argues that this is "really the only way to get a new AAA IP" at Ubisoft - meaning a team will secure a budget under an established brand, but then make enough changes that executives can be persuaded to allow a spinoff.
Watch Dogs does share much in common with Driver. The first game's protagonist, Aiden Pearce, has a reputation as a wheelman, and car chases are common during gameplay, and it even borrowed the idea of vehicular stealth. Even more telling, in Watch Dogs 2, there's a taxi mission app labeled "Driver SF." While there are no signs that Ubisoft will return to the Driver series in the near future, it clearly still lives on in Watch Dogs.
Source: VG247