Ubisoft Montreal creative director Jonathan Morin has said that the team working on open world crime thriller Watch Dogs doesn’t feel any pressure to emulate entertainment blockbuster Grand Theft Auto V.

In an excerpt from an upcoming VG247 interview, Morin said, “When you do a game you always want to make sure that what you put in is to the service of the game.”

“What you don’t to do is start copying or start feeling the pressure of your neighbour like, ‘Oh my god we need a chopper.’”

Morin said that hacking into and controlling an always-on city was Watch Dog’s core fantasy, and that the gameplay elements must reinforce that.

“You do need those obvious things, but afterwards it was all about hacking, and it’s constantly got to be about that,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we couldn’t have put in a chopper or something else in, but it would have always have been – if we had done it – because it fits or there’s one cool thing about hacking we could do with it.”

“It’s funny. People talk about what they know, so instead of saying, ‘What else is in Watch Dogs, that is not possible in other games?’ they go [points at water bottle], ‘Oh I tasted that water, it was great. Do you have water in your game? It’s funny. I just find it funny.”

Watch Dogs is due out for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and Windows PC on November 21, with Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions also coming in the final quarter of this year.