Ubisoft 'forced' Watch Dogs dev into E3 2012 reveal

Watch Dogs developer Ubisoft Montreal was "forced" by the game's publisher, Ubisoft, into revealing the open-world title at E3 2012, according to an interview with the studio in the April 2014 issue of Edge magazine.

"They forced us to go at E3 2012," said Jonathan Morin, creative director on Watch Dogs, to Edge. "Yves [Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft] was the one who wanted us to go at that E3, even though we felt it was a bit early."

However, Morin now believes that Guillemot's intuition was spot-on — "in the end I think he was right," said Morin.

Dominic Guay, Watch Dogs' senior producer, told Polygon in a recent interview that Ubisoft Montreal began development on Windows PC because the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One didn't exist at the time.

"We kind of suspected, maybe, there might be other platforms eventually," he said, referring to the new consoles. "So, because we thought that would happen, we chose the PC as our first target to have when we started developing Watch Dogs, so that we [would] have the flexibility to adapt to a different platform," said Guay.

Ubisoft said last spring that it would release Watch Dogs in November on PlayStation 3, PS4, Wii U, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. About a month before the scheduled release date, the publisher announced that it was delaying the game into the second quarter of 2014.

"We could have cut corners to save time. We didn't want to and neither did Ubisoft, which was kind of a blessing," Guay told Polygon. Watch Dogs is now set for release May 27 on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, with a Wii U version scheduled to arrive at some point afterward, possibly this year.