GamesBeat: Your description of Aiden reminds me of a movie called The Conversation, where you have the surveillance expert who becomes intensely paranoid about being watched.
Morin: It’s an interesting comparison. The same could be said about Rear Window. Hitchcock explored the same kind of idea in a different way.
GamesBeat: There’s definitely a progression. Rear Window is a guy with a camera pointed out his window. The Conversation was microphones and CCTV. Now it’s the Internet and everything connected to it. It seems like you’re tapping into a fairly primal fear — that someone is watching you. Someone knows something about you.
Morin: Making games, you always stumble on a lead who’s at every meeting, then you end up moving that person into a position where they’re not in the room anymore. After a few weeks, they have those moments where they’re at their desk and they look through the window. “I used to be in there. I used to know what was going on.” So you’re right. There’s that fear of being watched. There’s that addiction to information that a lot of people have.
GamesBeat: So what had to happen to make Watch Dogs work as a game?
Morin: I’d say the profiling system. That has a huge impact on how people play the game. Being able to tap into the information of everybody around you changes the player’s perception, especially for people who pay close attention to it. The game might tell you that you can hack some person, but because of what that person represents, you might refuse to do it. Some players will do it – actually a lot more than we thought.
GamesBeat: We haven’t heard much about these people Aiden’s after. Can you talk a bit about them?
Morin: There are definitely different layers to his enemies. He’s going to interact with local crime figures and deal with how they’re changing based on the way that connectivity works today. Let’s just say that it starts with Aiden’s problems and escalates into something a lot bigger.
GamesBeat: Once you finish the campaign, presumably you can go back in and roam the open world.
Morin: Yeah, absolutely.
GamesBeat: The side missions and crime-fighting, things like that … will those be procedurally generated? Will we ever reach the “end” of Watch Dogs?
Morin: That would be hard. You can finish the campaign, but there are certain systemic elements in there that are endless. If you add online multiplayer to that – which we’ll talk about in the future in more detail – that’s even more true. You can end up continuing to invade other players, too. After the entire story’s finished, a lot of people will be able to use what they’ve consumed so far to come to a conclusion. Others might want to spend a lot more time before they settle on their own ideas. It doesn’t have 10 potential endings. We’re saying, let’s not reduce your perception to 10 possible outcomes. This story is finite, but open to interpretation.