Watch Dogs goes gold, on track for release later this month

After more than five years in development, work on Ubisoft's open-world game Watch Dogs is complete, the publisher announced today.

"Watch Dogs has gone gold, and is right on track for worldwide release on May 27, 2014," reads a post on Ubisoft's blog by communications manager Gary Steinman. The post goes on to state that the game entered development in 2009, making this a development cycle of roughly five-and-a-half years.

"It's exciting to be gold," said creative director Jonathan Morin. "But it'll be more exciting when people are playing. For the fans it means that it's true. It means there will be no such thing as another delay. But for us, it's not done until they actually have it in their hands."

Watch Dogs had been slated to arrive last November before being delayed until this spring. This decision was later described as a "very intense one" by Ubisoft, which felt the game would be best served by giving developer Ubisoft Montreal the additional development time.

We learned this week that neither the Xbox One nor the PlayStation 4 version of Watch Dogs will run at 1080p or 60 frames per second, despite indications to the contrary. Instead, the PlayStation 4 version runs at 900p and the Xbox One version runs at 792p; both run at 30fps.

"Resolution is a number, just like framerate is a number. All those numbers are valid aspects of making games," Morin said of that announcement. "But you make choices about the experience you want to deliver. In our case, dynamism is everything. Exploration and expression are everything. You want to have a steady framerate, but you want to have dynamism at the core of the experience. The same goes with resolution."

When it releases later this month, Watch Dogs will be available on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, with a Wii U version coming sometime later.