Ubisoft chief: 'We learned from the mistakes we made with Watch Dogs'

Yves Guillemot admits company raised expectations too high with its 2012 ambitious graphical demo of cyberpunk thriller

In 2012, a fallow year for the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles, Ubisoft revealed its latest open-world action adventure - and promptly stole the show. Watch Dogs, a cyberpunk thriller set in an astonishingly detailed recreation of Chicago, looked amazing, with its complex lighting effects, lifelike character animation and detailed weather simulation.

There was just one slight problem - when the game was released on PC and the next-gen consoles, the visuals did not quite match that early promise. For many gamers, the disparity symbolised a growing problem with games industry marketing: a reliance on "vertical slice" demos to build early hype. These pre-release presentations tend to be built on powerful PC hardware and are designed to give an impression of the performance levels that development teams are targeting. The problems come when the game is released months or even years later, and the reality fails to match the early promise, with the most ambitious and demanding effects often scaled down or missing.