Ubisoft is responsible for a lot of memorable moments in gaming’s history, but one players still won’t forget is how great the original Watch Dogs game looked when Ubisoft first showed it off at E3 2012.
The game looked amazing, almost unbelievably so – because it was. The final game that launched in 2014 didn’t look nearly as good as the 2012 advertisement, with the saving grace being that the first Watch Dogs is a more than capable sandbox game.
It was a world that players were able to really enjoy and dig into, so much that Ubisoft kept making Watch Dogs games, the most recent being Watch Dogs: Legion, which released on PS5 and PS4 in 2020.
However, according to a leaker who has previously been right about Ubisoft properties before, Watch Dogs as a series is no more, including the next game we were meant to get from the universe.
Leaker xj0nathan made the claim that Watch Dogs is “dead and buried” along with what they call a “fairly original” battle royale game that was set to take place within its universe, in response to someone asking for an update on the franchise.
xj0nathan pins the blame on the lack of success of Watch Dogs Legion, which could very well be the case. Since Legion launched however, Ubisoft has made it clear that it will focus more on only its biggest franchises, which more than anything means it’ll focus on Assassin’s Creed.
There’s also the fact that Legion was developed by Ubisoft Toronto, which is now hard at work on the Splinter Cell Remake. With the return of Sam Fisher and likely some work on the next Assassin’s Creed game thrown their way, the team at Ubisoft Toronto might not have the bandwidth for anything else.
So yes, Watch Dogs could be dead and buried for now, but it could also just be that Ubisoft will return to it when it feels the time is right.
For years it remained one of the publishers bigger franchises, so there’s no exact date of death we can put on the series until Ubisoft comes out and says it won’t ever make another Watch Dogs game.
Source – [xj0nathan on Twitter via Wccftech]