Ubisoft's upcoming third-person open-world action-adventure game, Watch Dog, was originally intended to be a racing game.
"They were working on a driving engine, working on something. We had the Driver license. This was years ago," said Ubisoft North America President Laurent Detoc. "Then we were thinking, 'no, this is not the way we want to go with a driving game,' so we canceled that and restarted. It's not like Watch Dogs started as Watch Dogs. The Watch Dogs project was initially another game."
At that time, Ubisoft was working on Driver: San Francisco, so cancelling the driving game made sense. The team appointed a new creative director and reused some of the cancelled game's code and graphics engine to build Watch Dogs.
Watch Dog was intended to be a PlayStation 4 launch title but it was pushed back to Spring 2014 as "the team needed additional time to realize the game's full potential."