Watch Dogs

This time last year, Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs was busy gobsmacking gamers plugged into the E3 2012 conference. The open world action game seemed to come out of nowhere, quite a remarkable feat on Ubisoft’s behalf considering how rare a commodity secrecy is at the biggest video game expo of the year. Watch Dogs left the conference dripping with ribbons, the darling of 2012, unequivocally.

This year, without the luxury of a thrilling reveal trailer, or the excited, vague mutterings around ‘next-gen,’ Ubisoft had to follow up on Watch Dogs’ initial hype with hard evidence of its originality, stylishness, and indeed, ‘next-gen-ness.’

And, deliver it did.

Watch Dogs is something of an anomaly, insofar as it looks and feels next-gen native but is still being released on current generation consoles, part of what will presumably be a short-lived cross-gen era for such ambitious titles. How the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or Wii U will be able to cope with the sheer size of Watch Dogs, I’m not sure - one can only presume that Ubisoft Montreal has learned a few optimization tricks from working with next-generation hardware.

The feat will be an impressive one, because Watch Dogs’ most endearing quality is its scope. If one thing defined next-gen for me at E3 this year, it was the amount of stuff developers can now fit – or at least, are trying to fit - into a game. Linearity is out, open-world is in. Player choice is the quality every developer is striving for. Freedom is underlined, then bolded, then coated in candy sprinkles.

At its behind closed doors E3 demo, Ubisoft was keen to demonstrate how Watch Dogs ticks all these boxes, in a free-roaming slice of gameplay devoid of missions or objectives. While the demo was eyes-on only, it was a joy to watch, so anarchic was the Ubisoft rep’s loitering in the game’s version of Chicago. The sheer amount of options the game appears to present the player knocked me for six.

Before I outline a handful of these, it’s important to note that Watch Dogs’ foundations remain rooted in familiarity. This is a game which draws ideas from other games and wraps those ideas in a new context. Our protagonist’s broad goal in any given district, for example, was to hack into its tech via individual mainframes. Once ‘hacked,’ that district is essentially unlocked, akin to the conquerable maps of Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry. The shtick is new, but ultimately, the objectives are old.

The novelty in Watch Dogs lies, then, in deciding how you will approach these objectives. In the demo we saw, the Ubisoft rep had protagonist Aiden infiltrate a mainframe by distracting a guard by hacking open a loud automatic door, followed by a stealth kill, a couple of bullets to a couple of heads and eventually possession of a security camera, which revealed the codes he needed. While the section would have been rehearsed to the nth, it was a lithe, stylish approach, and reinforced that underlying sense of possibility the game teases.

Once a district is unlocked, Watch Dogs blossoms. The technology-based world is suddenly peppered with pop-up options Aiden can select with his phone, a hotbed of glorious, interactive stuff.  The world appeared to me, while watching this Ubisoft rep essentially play kick-the-can throughout this alternate Chicago, limitless. It asks you: what do you want to do? And then presents you with a crème de la crème of gameplay options plucked from years of worth of Ubisoft Montreal's experimentation in open worlds.

There’s the ‘crime precognition’ option, for example. NPCs can now be scanned to reveal top-line factoids (some of which are darkly humorous, such as ‘religious forums troll’.) The point is to reveal their ‘crime prediction’ meter: the higher the rating on said meter, the more likely they are to be a victim.

So when Aiden spots one woman's high rating, off he goes, tailing her at a safe distance so as to not be spotted, until she is accosted by a furious ex-lover who begins to throttle her. Aiden intervenes, the guy runs away, a chase ensues, a car blows up, and we move, with an air of cool nonchalance, onto something new.

Again, there’s nothing inherently new about this sort of objective, it’s merely ‘tail a guy’ with an interesting narrative wrapper, but it’s just one of many ways in which to spend time in Watch Dogs’ world. Want to steal money or just see how the better half lives? Hack into a wireless access point and infiltrate someone’s webcam. Want to perform stunts in your car? You can, and you’ll be rewarded for it. Want to change the song on the radio? Hack into a local radio station.

Players can even hack into other players’ games in Watch Dogs, a premise that was vaguely outlined (just how many people can hack into your game at one time? At what point will being hacked by your friends become horrendously annoying?) but extremely seductive in theory. You will want to mess with your buddies’ worlds during that critical point in their mission, you sadistic bastard.

There's a morality system at play here, too, one which seems a little more nuanced than the usual binary kind, at least within a narrative context. At one point the Ubi rep hacked into the Wi-fi connection of a random apartment, giving him full access to bank details and pin numbers. We hear a baby cry. "Will you steal from a young family?" poses the rep. While your decisions to these moral quandaries are attached to what sounds like a formulaic Reputation system, there's a sinister edge to them that could yield some truly sadistic results. It will be interesting to see how Ubisoft plays with Aiden's evolution if he does indeed decide to steal from the mouths of babes.

Ultimately, Watch Dogs is a promising example of how a publisher is ushering in the next generation by drawing, expertly, from the last. It’s a game that looks to offer something for everyone, a game that players can bend and twist to suit their own style. It also feels like a coda to Ubisoft's best work of the last ten or so years, handled by a studio that  knows by now what works and what doesn't in an open world. It's big, and it's mightily ambitious. For these reasons, it’s my game of show at E3 2013.

Phritz wrote:Well I've never heard the sandbox genre being described in that way...

Me 1 year ago: Watch Dogs will be the sh!t!
GL: lol no we'll keep fapping to GTAV

Think of it as the invasion system of Dark Souls: you're playing your game, and suddenly you are being hacked. Another player has infiltrated your game and is hacking you from an unknown position. You have to use the Profiler to root him out and kill him or otherwise make him abort the hack. This was shown in the first part.

Alternatively, you can enter other people's games and try to hack their phone. If they spot you, you escape. This was the second part.


Here's the kicker - you're both playing as Aiden Pierce. But since there can be only one Aiden, you as the player are always him. The other player is always displayed as an NPC. But in HIS game, HE is Aiden and you are displayed as an NPC.

IGN: Dominic, let’s talk about the upgrade system, first and foremost. From a high level, what is the upgrade system? Where will players access it? What can be upgraded? How extensive is this system?

Guay: Directly through Aiden's smartphone, players are able to access his skill tree, his tech tree. Through it, they can choose to customize how Aiden grows in his abilities. This covers his ability to hack the city, but also his abilities to drive, shoot and combine his various skills on the fly. Players can also even invest into Aiden’s focus ability which allows him to combine hacks with physical action.

As players execute various missions, contracts or activities within the game, they will acquire experience points, level up, and spend points to upgrade these abilities. Certain major feats will also allow them to directly gain some skill points.

IGN: Speaking of XP and points, how does Watch Dogs measure its XP system? Are there any branching paths within the upgrade system, and do you get locked into any specific upgrade paths?

Guay: Aiden's skills grow from performing missions, contracts and relevant activities. Feats of hacking primarily, but also of combat or driving will be recognized. Players can potentially unlock all possible skills if they perform enough of those, so they are never locked out of certain abilities. This said, as players perform some major steps to control the systems of our virtual Chicago, they will have more options.

Aiden starts with many skills and, as he explores the city, he will find new ways of using those skills. He will also be able to find equipment, or craft items, that will allow him to approach challenges in different ways.

IGN: Up until this point, I wondered why there would be a need to hack individuals unless they were relevant to the story. Is accessing the information of random strangers the primary way Aiden gains experience or access to new abilities?

Guay: It is one of many ways Aiden can gain experience. Players can acquire various rewards from hacking into citizens. We've already shown how [players] might find a lead into an interesting event occurring within the city, or car registration information they can trade for car on demand services or even bank account information they can exploit for profit if they choose to do so. Ultimately, I find that just eavesdropping into the city conversations, into citizens’ private lives, is a reason in itself.

IGN: We’ve seen several Ubisoft games tie world exploration with specific tasks (Eagle Points in Assassin’s Creed, Towers in Far Cry 3), but bridging actual ability and access to your world is something a bit different. Are these required hacking elements as simple as climbing a tower or are they more extensive tasks?

Guay: As we researched hacking we realized that it was just as much, if not more, about getting access to physical places and devices than about exploiting software or hardware vulnerabilities. Hooking up physically to a network, entering secured buildings and social engineering are a big part of hacking. And Aiden is very good at those things: he's in the field, he’s street smart.

As Aiden invests into further system hacks, he can also extend his reach within the city. Also, as Aiden infiltrates and hacks into ctOS secured server centers, or as he hooks up into major communication towers or relays, he will be able to extend his reach over the city, be even more aware of the events happening and the information flowing. This is something the player is free to do whenever he feels like it. As Aiden becomes more powerful in controlling the city, he also becomes more powerful and efficient in tackling those various areas or challenges.

elmystique wrote:Aiden looks like freaking Conte