It starts with reality.

With Watch Dogs, it always starts with reality.

It doesn't mean we cannot be imaginative or all that,

but in reality, hacking and people who break systems are

pretty creative naturally.

So we want to inspire ourselves from them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is a big moment for us in production.

Basically all the parts of the game

are colliding together for the first time.

And for the past months, we've been

able to play the game from beginning to end.

So now, we see how things are coming together,

and you could almost say the game has a life of its own

at this point.

When you finish a game after almost five years,

you need to sleep on it a little bit.

Then afterwards, what's exciting is

when you start really understanding what you tried

to do with the first game.

What went well, what went less good,

and also what the players have said.

So Watch Dogs was, first of all, a new IP,

which is a big deal.

It means that you start from almost nothing.

I think the new idea in Watch Dogs

one was to talk about an hyper-connected society,

something that was becoming very important

in our day-to-day lives.

Chicago was one of the most surveilled cities in North

America, so we talked a lot about cameras and surveillance

and being watched.

When you played "Watch Dogs," you probably played

something you'd never played before,

because the city was sort of alive.

People were not just people walking around the street,

but you could hack into their lives

and you could exploit them, you could see their secrets.

You could manipulate the city, the bridges and the steam

pipes and the traffic lights.

[TIRES SQUEALING]

What we basically created with Watch Dogs one

was a playground where everything was connected.

So, finally shipping the game.

Well, a lot of people were happy and excited.

We also got a lot of feedback, and we

listened to that feedback.

I personally spent months reading forums and reading

all the player feedbacks I could see on the web.

We wanted to know what people felt

and what they wanted to get from the game,

and what we could improve in the future.

At that point, we knew we were going to make a Watch Dogs 2.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We felt like we really did a big milestone

with the original Watch Dogs, but with Watch Dogs 2

we could really deliver on the fantasy of being a hacker.

This time around, we're in San Francisco.

For us, San Francisco striked a chord

because it meant the very birth of the attitude of a hacker.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

-- San Francisco caused 350--

-- smart houses are calibrated to anticipate

your every need.

You're listening to "Rock the Grid."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

For the setting of Watch Dogs 2,

we wanted to have a different vibe.

So our San Francisco keeps all the important parts

of the Bay Area.

And there's a different feel, different vibe,

a different look to all the areas of our world.

We wanted to kind of represent all these different areas

and the different collections of people

that live in these areas, and what

their lifestyles and their personalities are like.

So we're building a game where basically it's

almost a simulation.

You're in that world, and if you stop moving

and you look around, you feel the world is alive, right.

This is the promise of what an open world game is.

We broke the feeling that the world

is centered on you, the player.

So characters shouldn't only react to you,

they should react to each other.

You know, maybe people start fights.

Maybe someone calls the cops on someone else than you.

Maybe a dog barks after someone else,

and chases them down the street.

You need to feel as if this city is alive

even if you do nothing.

And then if you start doing things,

if you start playing in the world,

the city should react to what you're doing.

It should feel normal.

It should surprise you, also, how it reacts.

We were really interested in the city itself.

It almost feels like the Wild West of technology,

and how can you set something in the Wild West of technology.

It's a world that has a lot of potential for gameplay.

I mean, if you're a hacker and you go in Silicon Valley

and you have the head office of some of the biggest tech

companies in the world, what will you do?

Can you hack into those places?

What will you find?

So it's a very intriguing setting

for a hacker who's exploring the world.

So as we're crafting this world, we're

putting in it all of the factions that should be in it.

So for example, we have various criminal groups

trying to fight over the underground of the city.

We also have corporations trying to make money, and potentially

even manipulate people in society.

And we also have other groups of hackers

trying to tap into the technology that

has been set up in the city.

Once again, ctOS, the smart city system

that was in the first Watch Dogs,

is installed in San Francisco.

And various people are trying to tap

into it to exercise control or power, or to try to make money.

In creating a hero for Watch Dogs 2,

we wanted somebody new, somebody that

could embody the spirit of California

and the spirit of San Francisco.

But we needed somebody who was going

to be really worthy of all the cool stuff

that we wanted to do in the game.

So our hero in Watch Dogs 2 is Marcus Holloway.

He's a young actor, very brilliant in what

he does because of the injustices that he's seen,

both being from Oakland and also having been profiled

the wrong way and being accused of a crime he actually

didn't commit.

That sort of made him go against the system.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In terms of visual, we always tried

to create iconic attributes to the character

so that he can be memorable and people wants to play him,

but still feels credible inside our world.

He's a perfect blend between somebody

that's tech savvy, that represent

a little bit the internet culture,

but also has that athletic and rebellious feeling to him.

So we had to decide from the beginning

what things were comparable between Aiden and Marcus,

and what things would be different.

We focused on parkour.

We wanted Marcus to be a lot better at parkour than Aiden.

And we're not talking about just like climbing on things,

but being able to flow and chain moves together.

So he's a pretty good fighter, but he's got

some interesting quirks, too.

He's a more expressive guy.

[GRUNTING]

We've really tried hard to figure out

what kind of melee weapon Marcus would have.

And we tried a whole bunch of things.

And some things were pretty cool,

and some things just didn't work at all.

We did a lot of research, and we basically

did what Marcus would have done.

We went onto the internet and we started watching videos

and we started reading websites, and tried

to figure out what kind of stuff we could make.

Pretty much all the stuff that you probably

shouldn't search at work.

In the end, what we stumbled across

was this idea of taking a billiard ball

and attaching it to a paracord lanyard.

And we took this, and we handed this to the stunt team.

And the first thing that we saw was it was fast.

It was so fast that we couldn't believe

how fast they were spinning this around their body.

And then as soon as I saw this video, I'm like, this is crazy.

We got it.

[GRUNTING]

Citizens of the world, may we have your attention.

When we say we want to make a game about hacking, really

a hacker, it's a culture.

But you can have various motivations.

The motivation we're excited about

was what we call hacktivism, people

who want to impact society and have ideals to defend.

So just in the background and in the fantasy of it,

you're not a hacker in Watch Dogs 2,

you're a DedSec hacker.

You're a member of a community.

And you're doing grand stuff, and big exposure

of important informations to society

because you're not alone and you're

working with other people.

The first thing you have to do when you're

talking about hackers is you kind of

have to respect where they came from originally.

Their messages sound very serious,

but there's also a lulzy element to it,

the way they have fun with what they're saying.

We took that and we said OK, so what

if this is sort of the spirit of DedSec and of our heroes?

What if their spirit is still rooted in the trolling,

it's a joke, we're going to have fun with it,

but they still have something important to say?

The DedSec visual was really important for me,

because it represent everything that's cool about Watch Dogs.

It's stylized, it's edgy, and it's raw

and it's underground, tapping into the origin,

tapping into the internet culture, with all the memes

and also all the visual language of the internet.

So there are various characters, various people

inside of DedSec.

Some are a bit more violent, some have more ideals,

some are maybe more intellectual,

but they all have in common that they want to fight

to preserve a sense of freedom.

They don't want people to abuse tech

to take control over people.

But you know, I'm not saying they are knights, you know.

They are rebellious.

They do their own things their own way.

And they want to have fun.

That's also one thing, is a sense of freedom

and also a sense of fun through that group.

We are DedSec.

Join us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The new idea for hacking in Watch Dogs 2

is to let the player create his own solutions.

We're adding a lot more depth to hacking.

So you have a lot more control, a lot more flexibility

in how you hack the world.

So one big category of hacking in Watch Dogs 2

is the entire branch of pushing remote controls to its limit.

One of the big things on Watch Dogs is hacking vehicles.

[TIRES SQUEALING]

I think this is a real game-changer, because vehicles

are everywhere in the world.

And if you can hack into the drive system of a car,

you can pretty much drive it wherever you want.

[SHOUTING]

So making sure, if you see a forklift in the world,

it shouldn't be a forklift and just like move the box up,

down.

You should, just like a camera, press a button,

become that thing.

One of the core things that we're doing