Nicole’s rambling: The Watch Dogs Problem
Hey, welcome to my TedX talk about one of the most ambitious games Ubisoft had ever released... And which, for most of the parts, flopped majestically - yet still has players who love it. One such player am I as well. (And I’m not coming back to the game because Raymond Kenney is my first VG crush, shut the hell up.)
I won't be dipping into the side activities (digital trips) and online mode, because I never clicked with it and I don't know much about these parts. And I don't wanna throw shit at the game because of something I don't know a single thing about. Here are my three biggest negatives in the game and the three biggest positives you should play it for.
Also: remember, this is my opinion and my opinion only. It's sure biased, non-professional, but I've played WD more than five times. FIVE. So it's not just blatant nitpicking, because, in its core, WD Is a game I love dearly.
@march-moon, here you go! :)
Let’s sort out the negatives first so we can later praise the game for what it did well:
1. Predictable and dull AI of enemies (aka going John Wick mode).
Sure, the variety of said enemies is impressive, but... When you get a grenade launcher and some good shotgun, which you can do in the first hour of gameplay if you already know your way with the ctOS bank account system (LOOP IS WHERE THE MONEY'S AT), you're more or less untouchable for the rest of the game. Most conveniently, you're starting with a silenced gun and when you know around your way with the stealth system and focus, which slows time big time for those who might not know, you can clear out Rossi Fremont under two minutes. Why? Because the AI is just dumb and stupid most of the time.
Like, sure, the big-armed guys can be a pain in the ass for the first few encounters, but when you realize all you have to do is throw two grenades at them and fire as many bullets as you have at your disposal, they are dead immediately. And the same goes for the car chases. Until you unlock the almighty power of raising the bridges and blowing up the steampipes, these are just pain in the ass.
The first few ctOS scans and police chases, as well as the enemy chases, are fun. But when ctOS finds you after ten minutes of driving around like a mad man to dodge the shit, sending you off on a ten-minutes lasting chase which simply repeats itself. Let alone that you kill half of the city's population because you fuck up to turn your car.
To close this point, it gets repetitive, especially with the gang hideouts fuckery.
2. Ubisoft lying not only about the game features, but also about the overall graphics.
This point kinda explains itself, doesn't it? It's a known fact that studios have tendencies to change their games/movies for marketing purposes - for example, Disney and Infinity War or Naughty Dog's 'The Last of Us (Part 2)'. But this being a usual marketing tactic doesn't mean that the consumer should keep their mouth shut when they don't agree with it.
Most noticeable Watch Dogs' fuck-up was an overall graphic downgrade, which, sure, is completely understandable when you have such a huge open-world game, but... Ubisoft showed you a potato mash and all you got was the potato (The biggest point that is made fun of are the trees - those who played the games know what I'm talking about.).
Also, the enhanced graphics ARE coded in the game, but are not used due to something signed off as ‘playable compatibility’ as far as I can understand, so??
But... They did lie about the in-game features too. They promised a lot more than they delivered, like the bounty hunts and stuff... Where did that go, Ubisoft?
3. The side missions and the story.
Don't take it as such... In my opinion, some of the side missions are fun - at the start. We've talked about gang hideouts, but you have fixer-car-related gigs as well and the first ten of them is very immersive since you don't already know which type of the mission you're up to. Will you be pressured by the time limit? Will you have to race through the city in a car that you can't destroy too much, otherwise it can't be sold on the black market? Will you be a decoy for some other bad people doing bad things? But when you get through this phase... It's the same game system again and again, for 46 times, I think? And the villain convoys... Well. These are fun and refreshing each time, I have to say.
Every time, you can choose a different tactic to toy around with - will you catch up with the baddies sooner, turning this mission into an intense, tight chase experience? Or will you wait for them further on the road, toying around with explosives and guns? Sometimes, they slip past you, which leads to a chase around the city, sometimes you blow up all of the cars perfectly on time, A+. But... You mastered 1/3 types of side mission content.
As for the story, it's not the worst, but it isn't something super-memorable, lifechanging. I am not talking about the idea behind the story (the utopia of having the whole city lead by a system, which enables the corporation to control people's lives without them even knowing), I am talking about the Damien-Aiden-Lena revenge story. It's your daily revenge plot based on Aiden's niece dying in a car crashed after the car being shot at because of a failed job.
The first story mission is mind-blowing. You're thrown into the game and the first thing you have to do is to infiltrate a whole-ass stadium, which feels good, not gonna lie. And the 'prison-break sequence' is also memorable as well. But other than that, it gets real repetitive real fast. 'Follow this person', 'hack this thingy', 'kill this guy', 'tilly that person' and so on is present in every act of the story, which makes things kinda come across as boring after some time. It is what it is.
There are exciting in-game moments, like when Defalt is introduced to the bunch and hacks into the Bunker base, stealing all of your data. But sadly, these story masterpieces tend to be overlooked and not acted on, which takes off some of the immersion potentials. (I know that Defalt's story was saved for the DLC, so it's not the best proof.)
! BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT THE STORY DOESN'T HAVE GOOD BEATS !
Now, the well-made things for which you should DEFINITELY play this game:
1. Chicago being a videogame city that is alive and the 'collectibles' are extra fun.
Okay, okay, let me explain. Sure, Watch Dogs' Chicago isn't the best area ever constructed in an open-world game. But... The city feels alive, it is changing around you, it never stops. You can find people making out, talking bad about their friend who is not there, you can look into their day-to-day life via something called 'privacy invasion', where you just hack into a camera and... You hear mommy calming down her kid who is crying, you can watch two girls playing Wii, presumably, and many other every day encounters.
NPCs are answering to you being into the city - asking questions on the range from 'Is that the guy from the news?' to straightaway call the cops because you are a mass murderer probably. When you stand in the middle of a road, they honk at you; when you accidentally bump into them, they call you names. It's amazing... And profiling them is even more fun. You can find profiles ranging from 'author of poetry' to 'clinically confirmed pyromaniac' and 'searches for 'feet' on the internet'. This shit is just ridiculous.
But... It's the smallest details you'll fall in love with. You can get on the "L" and it takes you on a ride. You can ride in it for the whole day, or you can get off on the next stop. When you're in the Wards or near Rossi Fremont, you can find dudes just listening to rap, chatting. Some guys force flyers into other people's hands. You can have coffee. The rain somehow feels real, and the nighttime just steals your breath away - and so do the sunsets. There's a part of the city called 'Hobotown', where the local hobos live, there are secret poker tournaments.
Chicago in Watch Dogs is a city with so many minor details that you cant find each of them in one gameplay. In each gameplay, you'll find something new, something that just makes you chuckle - but it's so thoughtful of the developers to even put it in their game. These small details are the ones that make you feel as if you were inside the game, convincing you that the Chicago you're looking at is, indeed, alive.
Then, there are the 'collectibles'. I didn't know how to call it other than that, so bear with me for a minute. There are minor 'side-missions' - for example, you're going after a killer, who is leaving you audios on the places he left one of his victims. There are QR coded which unlock audios that talk about the DedSec hacktivists. In the small 'hack 5 routers in a time limit' quests, you are unlocking one of the Blume's employees audios (Angela Balik's), talking about the files Raymond Kenney had hidden in the code back in the day, talking about the uprising of the Bellwether 'crime' prediction system.
The collectibles aren't everyone's thing, of course, and it won't take any of the Chicago experience when you don't listen to the voicemails or if you simply don't collect them. But, they can immerse you in the game world even more. And to be honest, this is one of the few games that had my ass shook about collecting the additional thingies.
2. The character cast.
Let's be honest, Aiden Pearce on his own isn't the best protagonist in the world. Don't get me bad, I like this game a lot, but he can come across as boring at times. And that's exactly when the character cast comes in to balance Aiden's character. Most of the cast has some sort of an attribute which compels to Aiden's personality very well, completes him in some way.
You have Raymond Kenney, who is a paranoid, rowdy, alcoholic genius who helped with creating ctOS - but has remorse about his history, because he caused the Northeast blackout 2003, killing eleven people. Which can show Aiden how bad can the power over the ctOS system be.
There's Jordi Chin, a prestigious assassin/fixer, who uses the game's darkest humor. Every fucking second Jordi is on screen, it's captivating, immersive and you'll find yourself chuckling at Jordi's jokes, which are definitely out of place. But he still keeps reminding you that he's in for the money, which, in the end, turns against Aiden in a way.
Clara Lille, otherwise known as BadBoy17, is a hacktivist working for the rebellious DedSec who are rebelling against Blume, the company behind ctOS. She seems to be innocent of the violence of getting revenge, but later in the game, Aiden discovers how deeply she was invested in the whole story about Lena.
Each of the characters has a personal connection to Aiden, widening his personality in various ways. Which is funny to watch throughout the story - and there's a ton of other characters I didn't even get into, like Lucky Quinn, Nicky, Jackson, Bed Bug... The characters are simply terrific.
3. The overall soundtrack.
Hear me out, this point is kinda tricky, yeah? I am not talking about the official soundtrack. The radio has some blasts I fell in love throughout playing the game - whether it introduced me to song 'Ms. Crumby' by the Audition, or made me fall in love with the Vampire Weekend, Kid Cudi, or The Vindictives. Yet, in the case of the radio, I tend to sort out a playlist consisting of 4-6 songs (YES? YOU CAN MAKE PLAYLIST INSIDE THE GAME???) which I play on repeat throughout the game.
There's also this masterful thing about the soundtrack sometimes 'forcing' itself into your gameplay, maybe more like 'self-inserting' into the game if you will. The two most memorable encounters of this are when: a) when you're helping Ray Kenney leave the junkyard and Pawnee behind and the 'ring ding piety pow' hardcore metal song plays throughout the final encounter (Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry) and b) when you enter Rossi Fremont, the whole time you're going through the building, the rap/hip-hop is playing, making you feel gangsta. (I think it's a song by Wu-Tang Clan, not sure tho).
But... Then it hits you. The in-game hidden soundtrack that sadly wasn't released. At least not officially. It has a reason, worry not - this in-game soundtrack reacts to the player's progress throughout the missions, so it basically plays on a loop. Which is understandable.
The most standing out instance I can talk about is when you enter the small island where the old Blume secret place is hidden on. You and Clara are on a mission searching for legendary sacred place (at least for the hackers) called 'The Bunker'. And my friends... This is when it hits you. The soundtrack feels familiar even when you're playing the game for the first time. This piece just hits differently than any other soundtrack I've heard. Not even Time by Hanz Zimmer has this effect on me, and I LOVE the Inception.
And there's more - the piece of the soundtrack which plays when you're going after Jackson is probably another great example.
BONUS ROUND: 4. The Bad Blood (DLC)
Okay, this had a lot to do with my love for Raymond Kenney and I am not worried to say it out loud. But this DLC is truly a DLC. It only uses the WD world, which was set up in the OG game, as its base - but it isn't its main focus at all. This DLC introduces us to new characters as well as to some we knew already we knew.
In the OG game, Tobias is the mad hobo who sells us cool thingies to play with - and in they managed to show Tobias' full potential, showing us how smart and hilarious, as well as paranoid, this guy is in reality. It deepened Ray's character, revealed Defalt's motivations and the history that tied both of them to the Northeast blackout.
There are also new areas to explore, new things to play with and even if the DLC doesn't do anything too revolutionary with the game's world, it's the best DLC I've played. And I may have enjoyed it more than Aiden's story. But again, I'm pro-Kenney biased, so that's kinda expected of me, ain't it?
PS: I hate Sitara or whatever her name is.
