Ubisoft's North American president Laurent Detoc has told IGN that he believes Watch_Dogs would have been one of the highest rated PS4 and Xbox One launch titles had the game been released alongside those systems in November but that the quality displayed by Rockstar in Grand Theft Auto 5 convinced them that the best decision was to delay.
Explaining the decision to delay Watch_Dogs' release he said:
“It’s a very intense decision. I think one of the fascinating things about this industry is that you can go from genius to idiot in an extremely short time frame.
“These are some of those moments, where you’re riding sky high on Watch_Dogs or Rayman, and then suddenly you have to break it to the outside world, and sometimes even convince the inside people. Not everybody agrees. You have to say, ‘this is in the best interest of the product, to do this,’ because at the end of the day we’re going to be able to do this extra fine tuning.”
However, Detoc stressed that at gamescom in August Ubisoft believed it was possible to make a November launch.
“I’ll tell you, at gamescom, everybody was looking each other in the eye thinking we would be there at launch. There were already some lingering doubts, but we were plowing through it. There were more than a thousand people touching that game.
“Then eventually, a month later, we said, ‘this is not gonna fly.’ Then it takes a few more weeks to decide how we’re going to package that news for everyone. It’s not just about delaying for the sake of delaying it. No matter how hard we try, we also put out games that are not good quality, unfortunately.
“It’s not because we go out and say, ‘great, let’s make a piece of junk and put it out there.’ It’s really painful to us. But some games, you just can’t make them that much better because of how they’ve been progressing. Part of the decision to delay Watch_Dogs is also that. We know it’s not where we want it to be. Can it get there? What will it take to get there? That’s why it takes a longer process. But in August we really thought we were going to have that game at launch.”
Despite the quality issues Ubisoft saw in the game's development Detoc still believes that Watch_Dogs could have been one of the best-rated games for the new consoles at launch.
“I actually believe that Watch_Dogs could have ended up being the best-rated game on next gen if it came out at launch.
“We wanted it to be even higher. The whole package is there already. But without sending them too many flowers, the guys at Rockstar have showed us again that if you make a 96-percent game, people will come.
“[With] Watch_Dogs, I can only hope we get to that level. There’s an attachment to the brand, in the case of GTA, that makes people really want to give it that 100-percent review. We’ll be missing that on Watch_Dogs until we go further, potentially. That’s what we’re after.”
Watch_Dogs is set to release on consoles and PC in Spring, 2014.
