Graham suggest that with the new-gen of consoles, animators will take an even greater role in the design, architecture and behaviors found in games – and in some cases will be more hands-on than ever before. “Gameplay animators touch the data and make the hard choices about the lowest level of what the characters are going to do.”

It helps, of course, that the new-gen consoles have considerably more memory. “The animation is always a bottleneck on memory, so we can have a lot more diversity and variety now,” he explains. But even more important: In Watch Dogs the civilian simulation is fully integrated with the open-world gameplay. “You’re hacking people. You’re responding to crimes. You can rescue people if they’re trapped in their cars in gunfights. You can cause people to panic and they will see your face on TV and recognize you and call the cops. You can take their phone and smash it. All this is fully integrated into the system so they’re not just cardboard cutouts or mannequins. They interact with you.”