Ubisoft Left A Hidden E3 Trailer For Their Next New IP Inside 'Watch Dogs 2'

With the flurry of rumors surrounding both Far Cry 5 and Assassin's Creed Origins, it's easy to imagine that Ubisoft is trying their very best to keep as much under wraps about these two widely anticipated franchise additions. But what if - what if, Ubisoft had something even more devilishly clever reason for being uncharacteristically quiet about these rumors.

Since all eyes are keenly fixated on the two new additions along with the other anticipated titles like South Park: The Fractured But Whole, The Crew 2, For Honor or any other rumored game in the works - perhaps, it's a brilliant scheme on the part of Ubisoft to announce a new IP at this years #E3.

Ubisoft has been hiding clues about a new IP for a couple of years.

Yes, you read that correctly. I'll be honest, Ubisoft is my favorite developer and I try to keep as current with rumors and news surrounding any title of theirs. So with the sudden slew of information in the months before E3's grand opening, it makes me wonder if there is something else going on, and that reminded me of a story from back in November of last year when Watch Dogs 2 launched.

In Watch Dogs 2, Ubisoft playfully joked about their own inability to stop leaks from happening as both of the last two #AssassinsCreed games (Unity and Syndicate) were leaked nearly a year before they were released. In Watch Dogs 2 you could launch several side missions by hacking random people's phones. One mission specifically started by hacking the phone of an Ubisoft employee, Elliot Chen, who is out on the campus of Stanford University. In the mission you hear a conversation between Elliot and his boss that goes something like this:

"I assure you, there is NO WAY a trailer for the new game to get out" - Elliot"Can you? Can you assure me? After what happened with Unity, Syndicate, Osiris?" - the boss

The conversation continues with Elliot assuring her that security is even tighter, but the fact that Osiris was the third game in the list by Elliot's boss makes the premise that Ubisoft could have something in the works that is going to blow fans' minds. Osiris could have been an early name for the now-confirmed Assassin's Creed Origins; or Osiris could be the name of a new space game we'll see revealed at E3.

There is a secret IP that Ubisoft may reveal at E3

Going even deeper down the rabbit hole in #WatchDogs2, the side mission leads players toward breaking into Ubisoft's San Francisco office to hack the servers there only to reveal a watermarked trailer.

Below is the trailer, as seen in-game in Watch Dogs 2.

The trailer shows off scenes in space with spacecraft and space stations in orbit around a couple visually different planets. Now perhaps it's truly just a clever ploy of Ubisoft to create a fake game trailer to poke even more fun at themselves for the leak problems they've had before.

But - major grain of salt here people - what if Ubisoft placed that trailer in Watch Dogs 2, much like the name "Osiris" as an Easter egg of sorts for fans to find and ponder only to pass it off as just a meta way that the studio poked fun at themselves only for it to be a legitimate game in the pipeline.

Around the same time that this trailer was revealed on Youtube and fans started talking about it, a user on NeoGAF, TheHollowKnight, claimed to be an ex-Ubisoft employee and mentioned that this space game was real and had been in development for a while, but since the studios didn't regularly communicate between the various studios in the Ubi umbrella.

If the trailer from Watch Dogs 2 is legit, it could be one of two things:

1. A demo trailer for the recently announced Avatar games based on the James Cameron films.

Now, I don't think that the two are connected, but ultimately it's possible that the currently in-development game was rolled into the Avatar universe to utilize resources efficiently. The Avatar universe would fit well in Ubi's gaming model and could be the lift to the movie franchise that Cameron needs to get these 4 films the attention he wants.

2. An open-world space game

This is the most exciting possibility when you think of how well Ubisoft has rolled out their latest slate of open-world games: Assassin's Creed Origins, Watch Dogs 2, The Division and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Just imagine if Ubisoft were to meld the cinematic styling of Watch Dogs or Assassin's Creed with the exploratory gameplay of something like No Man's Sky or even ReCore and Horizon Zero Dawn.

Taking their gaming universe, and open world genre expertise, into space could be just the difference maker the studio needs to further cement their status as one of the best independent game studios in the business.