Watch Dogs: Legion - Now With Heaps More Kiwi, Bro
Wednesday October 28, 2020
My first Ubisoft game, Watch Dogs: Legion, is finally out. It gives me immense pride to see this released to the world, and I hope it lives up to the overwhelmingly positive reception it got when we announced it at E3 in 2019.
Though I worked on many gameplay systems - the AR Cloak, player inventory, character customisation, some of the gadgets and hacking abilities - there is one particular aspect of the game that will forever hold my legacy and it is this one thing that I am most proud of.
This map.
This map is shown in the game start sequence as DedSec London comes online. Observe a screenshot of this map during development, around the end of September 2019.
Yes, even my own project had committed the ultimate New Zealand faux pas - they left us off the map. I was outraged. I wrote an impassioned email to the entire project team and spoke about the wonderful things New Zealand has given the world, like Lord of the Rings, Flight of the Conchords, Lorde and Taika Waititi (this resonated well with many people who thoroughly enjoyed What We Do in the Shadows, not to mention he won People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival that year). I mentioned that subreddit and that IKEA map. I got a bug report filed for the issue, which became the most upvoted issue on the project at 85 votes.
By the end of the day, the artist in charge had responded to say that she had updated the map, and the next day, the bug report was marked as fixed and verified. I pulled a build for myself to see, and sure enough, Aotearoa was there, all nine glorious hexagons. I had literally put New Zealand on the map. I had saved Watch Dogs: Legion from being another casualty on /r/mapswithoutnewzealand, and that is my greatest achievement on this project.
#GetNZOnTheMap. Chur!
Posted by Jeremy at 5:36pm on Wednesday October 28, 2020 :: 0 comments :: 