The Therapist Gamer

I played Watch Dogs on the PS4, though it is available on PC, Xbox One, and last-generation consoles. The general gameplay is a "sandbox" game, meaning you can go anywhere in the city and do your thing.

The basic premise of Watch Dogs is that one city (Chicago) decided that it would be very efficient and safe to connect all electronics to the same system. Obviously this is a bad idea, and you are fortunate enough to play as the character who has hacked the entire system. Accordingly, you know everyone's personal details and have complete control over all video cameras (Chicago is a world front-runner in the realm of city-wide security cameras), street lights, bridges, and any number of other devices. This premise alone sold me on the game, and in this regard the game delivers. 

The story is sadly not that great, perhaps because the game designers spread themselves a bit thin (the publisher, Ubisoft, apparently really wanted this game to sell well and accordingly had something like 800 people make the game, which is like 4 times more people than make even the largest games). You play a fairly unlikable character named Aiden Pearce. It appears he was the target of an assassination because some people caused him to get into a car crash. He survived, but his niece died. He spends the game trying to solve what happened. The story is okay, but I found myself not really that invested in what was happening, story-wise. 

I thought the gameplay was pretty fun. You have guns and things, but if you even pull them out then you can expect one or more civilians to call the police. You gain a variety of hacking abilities - from being able to switch traffic lights to green, to setting off a blackout throughout huge chunks of the city. I enjoyed earning experience points and earning more hacking abilities. 

There is a lot do to in the game, but, true to recent sandbox game trends, there are dozens of just a few different types of missions. They were pretty good but somewhat bereft of creativity.

The game has a few online multiplayer modes, but the real fun with multiplayer is Online Hacking. Here's how it works: you invade another persons game without them knowing. You try to act like a normal AI civilian, but your goal is to hack data from your target. After you begin the download, your target will be apprised that their data is being stolen. There will appear a circular area on their radar indicating that you (the intruder) are within that circle. They then need to use their phone to profile all of the characters and try to discover who the hacker is. This causes you to try to blend in with the environment or hide in very clever places. If you succeed, you get lots of bonus points and items. If you fail, the character then needs to try to kill you before you escape. This dynamic leads to your own game being periodically invaded. This might sound a little confusing, but I've provided some videos of some of my Online Hacking exploits.

Despite the size of the city and the attention to detail, I thought there were some odd oversights in the game development. For example, there are only maybe 2 dozen different types of cars in the entire city. Other, older games, like Just Cause 2, have well over 100 unique vehicles. 

The game was the target of some conspiracy during it's development and soon after release. There were 2 main controversies. The first was with regard to the fact that it was supposed to be released at the launch of the PS4, but with less than a month to launch the game was delayed by several months. This type of thing happens, but it was very unusual to have such a big game delayed so close to launch because surely they knew months ahead of time that the game wouldn't be ready.

The second controversy is much more unusual. When the game was first shown, many were wowed by the level of graphical fidelity and attention to environmental detail shown in the gameplay demos. About a year later the game looked noticeably worse. Some suspected that the game shown earlier was faked by using super-PCs, and console versions, even the PS4, would not be able to look nearly as good as was first shown. Ubisoft claimed this was not the case. Well, the game was eventually launched and the graphics were not as good as originally shown. One PC player looked into the games code and discovered that the game actually does look as good as was originally shown, but oddly the graphical enhancements were turned off. Ubisoft felt pressured to respond to this extremely strange discovery but simply said that the graphical enhancements slowed the game down too much and interfered with gameplay. Those who hacked the PC version confirmed this was not the case. So, basically, Ubisoft made a great looking game but turned off the graphics for apparently no reason.

It's unknown why they did this. It might be so that their next game doesn't need to be innovative because it will simply look much better. It might be so that the Xbox 360, XboxOne, and PS3 versions didn't look noticeably worse by comparison to the PS4 version (the PS4 versions of games often run with about twice the resolution of XboxOne games). Whatever the reason, it's very odd - I personally have never heard of a huge studio spending millions of dollars to create a great looking game, and then turning the graphics way down for no apparent reason.

Well, enough with the controversy. Bottom line for me - though the game can be repetitive, the game can also be a lot of fun! My thoughts about this are proved by the fact that I have over 300 screenshots and made multiple videos!