The threat of Watch Dogs

[SuperBiasedMan]

I now have an amazing game in my head where you adopt adorable little gruff hackers with a dark past so you can take care of them, play with them and then start to enter them in having competitions for prizes like iconic caps.

[kaputt]

I redownloaded the game after learning how to properly lock frame rates on PC, and now the screen doesn't look too juddery and blurry when running around (however, it still looks a tad "judderier" - is that even a word? - than most console games at 30 fps).

I'm enjoying the game more now, the missions started to be more varied, instead of just "hack this, run away or kill everyone". There was even a little puzzle that I enjoyed, I hope there's more of this till the end of the game.

I still have to learn how to play the mini games, like the robotic spider one. Seems cool.

[juv3nal]

k so I couldn't find a watch dogs 2 thread, but this viral marketing is getting out of hand.

[Nappi]

How shooter-y is the latter part of the game? I just infiltrated the FBI and while I'm sure I could have somehow sneaked my way through it, I got the feeling that they are trying to raise the stakes by making quiet drone and RC based hacking less and less viable. This sucks if true because the shooter stuff is definitely not what makes this game interesting. 

[Roderick]

Watchdogs 2 has piqued my interest enough to give it a try at some point in my life. Apparently it is the game Watchdogs was always supposed to be.

[juv3nal]

13 hours ago, Nappi said:

How shooter-y is the latter part of the game? I just infiltrated the FBI and while I'm sure I could have somehow sneaked my way through it, I got the feeling that they are trying to raise the stakes by making quiet drone and RC based hacking less and less viable. This sucks if true because the shooter stuff is definitely not what makes this game interesting. 

 

If it helps any I didn't shoot anyone in a story mission after I got the bomb ability for the flying drone (which notably was pretty early on). I still melee killed & bombed the hell out of people, so if killing is what worries you, that's no improvement but shooting is 100% unnecessary. If I recall correctly, though, I didn't have to do either melee killing or bombing for the FBI mission.

 

 

edit: I went with the lethal bombs because I didn't want to bother worrying about people getting back up, but I supposed if you were quicker and cleverer than me you could make do with the stun bombs. The melee kills are still invaluable though. I guess you can pretend they're not dead? but they don't get up again like they do if they've been tasered or stun bombed.

[Henke]

I made it through the whole storymode without using guns. Mostly. During that one revenge mission it felt appropriate for shit to GET REAL and so the guns came out. But for the final missions I deffo went all stealth. I mean, I still hacked explosive barrels to explode people, and hacked cars to run them over, but I didn't shoot anyone.

[Nappi]

Ok.. Good to know. I'm fine with killing in this game because non-lethal route is made so difficult (enemies don't stay unconscious for long enough, someone always hears the explosions and wakes the affected guard, etc.), but hectic gunplay is just so boring when you know that you could be using your cool tools instead. I also hate how fast other guards are alerted to your presence if you don't one-shot a guard with your silenced weapon.

 

Yeah, FBI mission is totally doable without killing. It just seems to me that the design is heading to a direction where the nice tools you have accumulated are not going to be that useful.

[Nappi]

I finally got back to this and finished the game.

 

I expected to dislike the characters and the "let's pretend we know what teens like" attitude of the game, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. The characters were fine and some of their interaction was actually pretty nice, and the style and attitude of the game was mostly ok (and occasionally cringeworthy, though hilariously so).

 

The gameplay I expected to like, because there were really cool ideas already in the original Watch Dogs, and for most parts, I was not disappointed. The RC and drone were cool additions. I love scouting the surroudings in games before going in, and these made it more viable than the hopping-from-camera-to-camera method of the previous game. This part was maybe even too easy with the see-enemies-through-walls upgrade for the drone. I also appreciated that many of the physical hacks could be completed with the RC and was super delighted when I first saw it extend its arm and plug in the usb dongle in the target PC.

 

As for the action gameplay, holy shit there is some ludonarrative dissonance going on. I wish this game had done away with player character wielding (traditional) guns altogether, and, in addition, figured a better way for dealing with enemies than killing, even if it involved Arkham style "Oh no, he is definitely not dead, just very unconscious" bullshit. I know that you can avoid killing enemies, but that is made extremely hard by some of the design choices. For example, you can set up explosions that make the nearby enemies unconscious. However, other enemies from quite far away can hear that explosion, and will come to investigate, and wake up the guards. In addition, the unconscious guards also wake up after a while. As I'm not a dexterous speed runner type, so I did not find this method viable. The solution: set up lethal explosions, drive over the guards and policemen with remote controlled cars, and drop bombs at their feet from your drone. Super fun, but man it feels weird for a super hip teenage hacker like me to do.

 

I guess the third option would be to use stealth, but I never understood the logic enough for it to feel right for me. For example, if I shoot someone and he doesn't die or go unconscious immediately, it seems to take about a second for him and all the surrounding enemies to know exactly where the shot came from (even if you used a silenced pistol), and start to home in on you. Since, especially in the later missions, there is usually a shitload of strong enemies and you are really quite weak once you get into a firefight, and since you usually have to replay relatively large chunks of stealth again, I did not consider this a fun option in many missions.

 

Anyway, I liked the world (and the colors! This game features fucking colors!) and most of the gameplay a lot. In my opinion, Ubisoft did a pretty amazing course correction from the original to Watch Dogs 2. I hope that they focus on the strengths of the franchise even more with the inevitable Watch Dogs 3.

[Salacious Snake]

Yeah, I also wished it was easier to not kill hordes of people. I ended up just calling in gang hits and felony arrests over and over again until most places were cleared out. 

 

I agree about the stealth stuff. I often felt like I was going to pull it off at the start of a mission. I'd see my objectives, and I'd have a plan of how to do it sneakily, but then I'd be detected out of the blue and the shit would hit the fan, and the next thing you know everyone's dead. Watch Dogs 2 also suffers from a pretty common problem in games that give you multiple ways to approach things: it's easy to find a preferred method based on your unlocked abilities and play style, and things get really repetitive unless you make a conscious effort to switch things up. And mass murder is just by far the path of least resistance.

 

The thing that really drained my enthusiasm was the narrative. It starts out promising enough, but when the stakes are raised later in the game, it just loses all its identity. By the time it was over, I was basically playing out of spite.

 

As long as I'm complaining about things, the "hacker vision" thing is just so fucking ugly. That blue-gray static actually makes me slightly nauseated. It should look cool when you're ~seeing the matrix~ like that, but it's the worst.

 

A positive note after all this griping: the impromptu multiplayer shenanigans that can occur can actually be pretty hilarious and fun. If you invite someone to stick around and do a bunch of co-op missions and cause some mayhem together, it can be a real hoot.