Watch Dogs is now out; here’s our Watch Dogs review.
In an effort to add some much needed colour to Watch Dogs near-future Chicago, Ubisoft will be naming one of their NPCs in the AI population after one of their fans. They’re giving away the opportunity to have your name and occupation, as well as a few in-fiction details, applied to a chap or chappette walking around the game’s city in a new competition that runs till the 7 June.
To enter the competition you need to visit the game’s Facebook profiler app (a process which had me dogged at every turn to allow Ubisoft to access my friends list and email address – which seems appropriate to the game’s Orwellian themes). At which point you sit back and wait, the developer will be deciding a winner soon after the contest closes on 7 June.
It’s a little disappointing that Ubisoft are only allowing a single person to have their details added to the game. If they’d opened the gates a little more, created something of an open database that allowed you to add names and character details, they could have created an AI population that reflected the fans in their community. Might need to run it through a couple of passes to weed out spelling mistakes and names of the Hugh Jass variety, mind.
Other games, like Prison Architect, have let players name the general NPC populace, often to great effect. I remember in the original Black and White that the game could access the names in your email client’s address book and apply them to your villagers. Makes hurling someone into the sea so much more satisfying if you’ve known them since primary school.
Here’s the absolutely-not-product-placement example of what the winner’s profile may look like.