Earlier this morning, Ubisoft announced May 27 as the date when Watch Dogs will reach gamers in North America, unless you happen to be waiting for the Wii U version. Earlier this year the Wii U version of the game was delayed behind the rest of the releases and since then, not much has been said about it.
Polygon contacted Ubisoft to ask what’s up with the Wii U version and whether it is still in development and received an interesting reply from Dominic Guay, the senior producer for the game. When asked if the Wii U version was still in development, “it’s still alive” was the answer.
“Yeah it’s still alive. We still haven’t defined a ship date for it, though. So it’s on hold, to a certain extent for shipping. We don’t have a specific ship date for it yet so it’s considered within the year. So we’re going to look at that and we’re going to let people know as soon as we figure out an exact date for it.”
According to Guay, the reason for the delay is the Wii U version is not being handled by the rest of the team at Ubisoft Montreal, but was handed off to Ubisoft’s Bucharest studio in order to give the developers more time to work on the GamePad specific features of the game.
“We have our studio in Bucharest working on it, and we wanted that team to have the time to explore the GamePad and be able to have fun with it and see how far they could push it. It’s also an interesting platform, because it has its own strength, which we want to take advantage of, and we didn’t want to delay all the other platforms for that one. So we’re going to take the time we need to make sure the game is good (technically) when we ship it and that it also, game design-wise, makes good use of the specifics of the Wii U.”
Since there’s no release date set in stone for the game, Ubisoft is still listing the Wii U version as a 2014 release date, but what if the game slips into 2015? Will you still be interested then?
