Game Review
Mike Strong, Arts & Living Editor
There are essentially two ways to look at Watch Dogs. Upon first glance, one might see the game as a Grand Theft Auto clone with hacking elements. But a deeper analysis brings out a magical liveliness to the game that is unparalleled in today’s open world games. Unfortunately, a crisis of identity keeps Watch Dogs from ever directly showing the player what it truly has to offer.
The story of Watch Dog’s production is a fascinating one. Upon its reveal in 2012, it was the first “next generation” game the world had seen. Its vision for creating a bustling virtual Chicago cityscape was a truly impressive one. Originally set for release in November of last year, the game suffered a major last minute delay to May 2014. Many say that the game went downhill visually since the delay. I believe the truth is that the delay served to create the living, breathing city that we saw two years ago. The five or six months extra development time that the delay provided was necessary to create the bustling Chicago city life that the game strangely hides behind a mediocre single player story.
While playing as Aiden Pierce on a revenge mission, I never really got a good sense for what the game wanted me to do. Ludonarrative dissonance is rife during the course of the story. The fairly repetitive mission structure sees Aiden constantly infiltrating gang hideouts, killing the potentially innocent gang lackeys, and then ensuring that he only “knocks down” the leader. This is a problem that nearly every action game experiences, but I was forced to do these missions so often that I constantly found myself questioning why I am not penalized for killing the minions.
But that is just about my only problem with the structure of the narrative. Despite the ridiculousness that the entire city runs on a single operating system, it never became a problem. It really helped that the game never apologized for this. There was no point in the story that blatantly said “This is why ctOS exists, I promise it is not weird.” Watch Dogs goes all in on what makes it unique and provided that the player explores enough of the side activities, it becomes an incredibly engrossing open world.
I actually found walking around the city to be the ideal way to experience Watch Dog’s Chicago. Every single citizen has a profile including name, occupation, salary and hobby. Surprisingly, a majority of the time these profiles did not repeat. It really felt like the city had a large population of unique NPCs. Not only do the profiles bring the world to life, but the citizens can also be seen going about their daily activities in the various landmarks of the city. Perhaps my favorite moment out of all my time with the game was when I spent nearly two hours walking around the Jay Pritzker Pavilion amphitheater watching people fly RC helicopters, couples picknick, friends kick around a soccer ball, and (as can only be done in Watch Dogs) listen in on private phone calls and text messages. There is simply no other game out there with Watch Dog’s level of detail regarding the citizens of an open world.
Where a game like Grand Theft Auto provides a massive city with a huge golf course you can buy, Watch Dogs would rather compress that same golf course and pack it full of friends playing a round of golf together.
It is a shame that the main game never really points you in the direction of these simple, yet astounding moments. Aiden’s supporting cast might be an entertaining crowd, but the group’s story never reaches any narrative heights. I would have preferred the game to use the narrative to guide me to the detailed city landmarks. Instead of including missions that say “explore this park and profile people to find a criminal, then use his info to track him down and take him out,”Watch Dogs constantly has you break into a highly guarded facility and kill guards until you hack something, and then get out. The game just does not use its unique qualities to its advantage during the story.
Watch Dogs interesting hacking mechanics are used well in the multiplayer features of the game. My favorite of which was a passive feature that never included a lobby or player searching. At some point you might accidentally hack a citizen that is also involved in a hacking group. They will then place a bounty on your head and, provided you allow this in the settings, another player can invade your game disguised as a citizen and will hack you to claim the bounty. I had a blast tracking down this player, and chasing them as they try to escape Aiden’s wealth of lethal hacking abilities. I was glad that Watch Dogs did not copy other open world multiplayer ideas and instead used hacking in an interesting way. The ideas are not revolutionary in any major way, but they do show that developers are looking at unique ways to bring players together without compromising immersion.
Watch Dogs is a strong step in the right direction for what the next generation of games needs to be. It is built around a strong core idea, but does not bring that idea to the forefront nearly enough. There is just too much last generation DNA in the game for it to be considered anything really special. But if enough time is spent digging deeper than the dull story, a beautiful, living and breathing city can be explored for hours on end.
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