Lead Platform for Watch_Dogs is the PC

[Shawn Zipay]

Pick your jaws up off our floor, it's filthy. You did read that right though, the lead platform for Ubisoft's Watch_Dogs is the PC. Ubisoft's CEO, Yves Guillemot, dished the dirt on the game and says how the new architecture of the PlayStation 4 allows the company to develop the game with the PC as the lead platform.

My word, could we possibly expect the same thing to happen for all next-gen titles? Here's a bit of what he said translated thanks to Google.

If you look at the specifications of the PS4 look, you see that it looks pretty on a PC. Is porting games to PC and vice versa PS4 and therefore easier?

Yves: We have, in my opinion, but a game that had really had problems with a port and that's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. The PC project could be better managed. But with the other brands there is a lot of time and effort in which all platforms have the perfect game.

We also expect fewer problems with porting games to the PS4 than the PS3, which had a completely different infrastructure. It is now easier. Previously, we developed first games on the Xbox 360 and which were then translated into the PS3. It took a lot of time and money to make that port. Now we develop from the PC and which versions are translated into a console like the PlayStation 4.

Look, I don't want to get too hopeful here, but please let this be a rebirth of games developed first for the PC and then translated to consoles. If it's so easy to do for the PlayStation 4, it seems stupid to think this won't be the case. Then again, Microsoft could come in and ruin everything.

(via Inside Gamer)

[SgtMattBaker]

This are fantastic news, let's see if MS follows.

[K-16]

Ugh! I just put my jaw back in place, but it reeks of aged cheese and pickled durians! How did you make the floor smell like pickled durians?! Is that even a thing?

Anyways, the way I see this is PC games would benefit from not blowing up computers when running ported games. However, it would still suffer from "Battlefield 3 syndrome," where pressure to cater to consoles would still cause developers to focus on producing games natively for consoles (doesn't matter if the dev kits use a PC architecture if the core game designs involve console features).

I am guessing PC gamers would end up with games that doesn't exploit its full potential, but won't be hit with so many exclusives that prevent them from even having games at all. And we will continue to have the one or two bonus features as a way to make up for all shortcomings (free DLC, higher player count, one or two free patches, easier to use interface for microtransactions, a slap or two to the face, gouging out your eyeball and replacing it with a patch because PC gamers are all friggin pirates, etc.).

[Linux]

Considering what the PS4 is/could be packing this is good news for PC gamers. The fact that people dev Console > PC is because its cheaper to test on a single console of the same specs no matter what vs. 50+ different configurations of hardware. Although with the next-gen consoles in "some" sense turning more into mini-PCs with the type of hardware they are going to be packing from the random news I've read it would be true that designing for a PC then dumbing it down for a console would be the easier process to doing things. Rather than the current reverse of lets dumb down around the console which uses poop for specs and then attempt to crap out and shove in high end artwork/animations/graphics for the PC port part.

Again I may not be seeing things fully but from the way I would see it, if consoles are truly going to be next-gen boxes they are going to hopefully shove as much high-end technology into them that won't break the market price and make people cut their arms and legs off for them. In the end I am a bias person in computers and always will be because I grew up around computers for games not flimsy console things that break after some abuse and use.