Watch Dogs 2 Turns San Francisco into a Playground

San Francisco is the setting of Watch Dogs 2, the upcoming sequel to Ubisoft’s 2014 open world game where players use hacking powers to expose large scale government corruption. It’s that change in setting—from gloomy Chicago to the picturesque Bay Area—that immediately differentiates it from its predecessor.

The attention to detail that developers paid to recreating one of America’s most idiosyncratic cities is painstaking, and required years of research. Because making an open world game based on San Francisco is ambitious: having been ruled variously by hippies, artists, poets, and—more recently—tech entrepreneurs, it’s far from your typical metropolis. As the locals will tell you, there’s more to their hometown than clam chowder on Fisherman’s Wharf. There's a lot for a bunch of Canadian game developers to get wrong, and the topography of the notoriously hilly city posed unique challenges for level designers too.

So the Watch Dogs creative team did their research, spending long stints in the Bay Area over a period of over two years. “We collected more than 200 hours of video just analysing the architecture,” Art Director Sidonie Weber tells The Creators Project at the press launch of the game, held in the hacker-friendly dungeons of The Old Mint in downtown San Francisco.

“For the concept art, we worked on analysing 33 iconic districts, and 36 architectural styles. From the oldest buildings in San Francisco to the Romanesque architecture of Stanford. We created 50 modelling kits with specific, unique textures.”

Made up of unique districts like the Mission and The Castro, each with their own quirks, San Francisco has to be one of the most fun cities in the world to visit. Which the Watch Dogs creative team did—many times. “We really wanted to get the flavour of San Francisco,” Audio Director Olivier Girard says. “We needed the sights and sounds, but we also needed to know what the people are about. And to do that, you need to live there. So we spent a fair bit of time going to local restaurants, trying to walk a ridiculous distance across the city going up and down those large hills.”

As Weber explains, the massive map of the game encompasses not only San Francisco proper but also Oakland and Silicon Valley. “In the world of Watch Dogs there is plenty of time for contemplation and exploring,” she says. “As well as the epic narrative missions. We created 77 acres to explore and we've got bikes, cars, trucks and forklifts which you can all drive in the game.”

Watch Dogs 2 is aiming for authenticity. Rather than taking vague inspiration from the Bay Area and its surrounds—as Grand Theft Auto did in creating San Fierro within San Andreas—the game is a painstakingly detailed in its recreation of one of the America’s best-loved and best-known cities. Each district features graffiti by local street artists, and gorgeous simulations of beloved landmarks like Coit Tower, Lombard Street, and Twin Peaks. There’s even a condensed version of the sprawling Golden Gate Park.

It’s not just the tourist spots that get attention—the city’s notorious Tenderloin district, populated by ex-cons and drug addicts, is grittily authentic. Right down to the “safe passage” marks on the sidewalk, which delineate where children are allowed to walk safely: the district is home to a large group of registered child sex offenders. Because the game focuses on underground spaces—you play as Marcus Holloway, a member of anarchist hacker group Dedsec—Weber and Girard visited private companies and homes, seeking out hacker enclaves and consulting with hacking experts too.

“Through scouting trips and recording trips around the Bay Area, we just kept recording the whole time,” Girard explains. “Then we’d come back to Montreal with all this harvested data from the city and we’d start listening, trying to figure out what's different about San Francisco—what can I hear here that I wouldn't in New York or Los Angeles?”

The result is that, throughout the game, Bay Area natives will feel totally at home. The cable car bell, the buskers, fire engines, and even the unique sound that pedestrian crossings make, were all recorded on site.

“We also made sure our city was populated by people from San Francisco,” Girard says. “All the civilians you come across on the street—they're all people who live here. They're all actors from San Francisco.”

Using local voice actors also gave the team an opportunity to check their scripts were up to scratch. “Actors who were able to raise flags if we were off about certain things,” Girard explains. “For example, let's say we had a line in the script that said ‘I'm going to get a coffee in The Castro’… then the actor would go wait no, here we'd say ‘I'm going to go to The Castro to get a coffee.’”

Many of the civilians that you interact with in the game tell stories that come from the voice actors themselves. “Which adds another layer of authenticity to the story and to the city that we built,” Girard explains. “When they were scouting, the animation team were looking at people and the things they were doing that were unique to San Francisco.”

That’s not to say that Ubisoft hasn’t put their own stamp on the city: the restaurants and billboards at Fisherman’s Wharf are replaced with tongue-in-cheek fake branding, the Google campus in Palo Alto is replaced with that of a similarly rainbow-hued company called Nudle.

The birthplace of the tech revolution is the perfect setting for a game about underground hacker culture—but you still might want to take some time out from bringing down the government and simply be a tourist for a while. Go on, take a selfie while standing under the Golden Gate Bridge using a drone camera. We won’t tell anybody.

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