Like many others at Ubisoft, company boss Yves Guillemot has a lot to say about Watch Dogs. In an interview yesterday, the game was touted as a competitor to the Grand Theft Auto series of games by the game's director Alain Corre. Speaking to Inside Gamer (via VG247), Guillemot explained how the PC would serve a the lead development platform for the game, which marks a change from previous titles, which were mainly developed for consoles and later ported to Windows.
Guillemot believes that developing Watch Dogs on the PC will allow its developers greater flexibility to port the game to the next-gen consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's unannounced platform. He explained that previous titles had to be developed first on the Xbox 360 and ported to the PlayStation 3 due to the differences in core architecture.
"We expect fewer problems with porting games to the PS4 than the PS3, which had a completely different infrastructure," Guillemot said. "Previously, we developed games first on the Xbox 360 and then translated them onto the PS3. It took a lot of time and money to port."
The PlayStation 4 has been confirmed to be an X86 platform, and there's little reason for the next Xbox to be any different from its predecessor. Given this fact, developing the game on the PC as its lead platform makes a whole lot of sense given the malleability of its hardware. Just as Guillemot suggests, this means that ports in the future will have far fewer problems and run better for everyone on every platform.
Ubisoft is aiming for a 'Holiday 2013' release for Watch Dogs on the PC, 360, PS3, Wii U, and PS4.
