Revenge? There's an app for that! (A review of Watch_Dogs)

This review of Ubisoft's Watch_Dogs was originally written and posted on NeoGAF on the 20th of September, 2015. (Original thread URL)




STORY SPOILERS AHEAD!

I'm not sure if I could say I really enjoyed the 50 or so hours I spent playing Watch_Dogs. But I'll try to describe the feeling of playing it through: Watch_Dogs is a video game that does an adequate job of being a video game. But that's all it excels at. The problem is that it never feels like the best version of what an open world game about a playable character that has nearly complete access to a city-wide surveillance apparatus is. In fact, I might go as far as to say the game is very incongruous with itself, and at the worst, it actively works against itself.

Let's start with what I liked though. The open world/interpretation of Chicago was interesting and varied, although I can only assume the way they captured the city and its biomes were somewhat representative, as I was very, very young the last time I visited Chicago, and only for a day or so. There's a good identity to each 'biome' or district and the game seeks a more straightforward representation of an urban metropolitan area than other games - most notably something like the Grand Theft Autos or Saints Rows where the open world environment is usually played for laughs somehow in the design of it in some fashion.
The 'hacking' puzzles were probably the more interesting element in the game, if only because those seemed fairly straightforward and only ever existed on a really elemental level as a very mechanical part of the game. But they had enough nuance to some of the puzzles that made you untangle the mess of lines to get past them. This also includes the camera hopping/platforming sections, though those sometimes were momentarily frustrating during optional collectible searches more so than during missions.




A fancy spin on allowing verisimilitude but allowing the player to sow chaos or play a little more freeform, anyway

I think one thing that might have gone unnoticed playing the game are the augmented reality and digital trip features found in the phone/menu interface. They're easily skipped because they're not inherently part of the main game - the digital trips especially - but they function in an interesting way to take advantage of the open world environment and allowing the player to play with the classic "wreck havoc" thing open world games are (sort of) known for. Especially seeing as how punishing Watch_Dogs likes to be when it calls the cops to rain on your parade and punishing you for it. There's not a lot to say about the "shooter" or the "obstacle course" AR mini-games, as they're fairly straightforward. The digital trips are interesting though. A few of them seem like they were early prototypes for certain game mechanics - stealth, profiling, combat - which were interesting and something I wish were more extensive, or are later expanded upon (because how they were implemented, if they were prototypes at one point, I didn't like their integration into Watch_Dogs proper). The others included a weird flower bouncing game that was just mostly odd and score-attack focused, a pedestrian murdering simulator, and an excuse to use a (spider)tank to just go to town on everyone. Altogether, these were for the most part enjoyable, but a distraction nonetheless.

But ultimately, I think the real issue underlying Watch_Dogs is that I feel that the game is at odds with itself in many ways. I don't think simply being a competent video game is a laudable thing these days, especially when there's more that could be done, especially in the space in the industry a game like Watch_Dogs occupies. The entire experience feels like the mechanics, narrative, theme, story, and characters were all designed in a vacuum and then stitched together with very little care, and they never seemed to fit together cohesively. Especially when there are a few other competitors that have executed it much better than Watch_Dogs.


Person of Disinterest

During the lead up to the release, I remembered that there were a few comparisons made of Watch_Dogs to the CBS drama Person of Interest (also one of my favourite shows). The game is about a vigilante, and he has access to a mass surveillance apparatus, you can even shoot people in the knees and they'll react, and you can stop crimes before they happen! That's so alike, right!?

Unfortunately, that's where the similarities end, and where Watch_Dogs starts to spiral into mediocrity or worse. I won't go into a drawn out comparison between how Watch_Dogs the game and Person of Interest the TV show handles certain topics, although it's fairly safe to say one handles it much better than another, because I really dislike Watch_Dogs' execution of many of the game's setting and themes.


Welcome to the Chicago of Watch_Dogs, where a person is distilled into a single factoid that's made up and doesn't really matter.

 Despite the fact that the game touts the ability to manipulate security systems found throughout the city of Chicago and that you embark on such actions like vigilantism through the use of taking advantage of a mass surveillance apparatus... those really only exist to set up the systems and mechanics of Watch_Dogs, and the game never really embarks on really positing questions to the player about the very things the game seems to engage in, such as asking if vigilantism is ever justified, or the price it exacts from someone (the game only does this in the most perfunctory manner, ever, more on that later), what is the price people pay for privacy and security, or can we trust governments or corporations with either of those? I don't think the game deserves to be given any slack in that area, because those are fairly important questions that are important to us today; if anything, Watch_Dogs at least very much implicitly encourages or glorifies vigilantism or at least always paints it in a positive light - it produces good results and absolves the player/viewer from any of the consequences by making them fairly inconsequential.

At the centre of Watch_Dogs' story is all-around cypher but fairly competent jack-of-all-trades video game man, Aiden Pearce. If anything, Aiden Pearce himself might be even more unremarkable than the game that he stars in. And so is his tale of revenge, because, well, everyone can appreciate a little revenge, right? In an intro sequence that is unforgettable - by both the player and later by the game - Aiden and his partner have to hack a bunch of rich people by standing in the lobby of a high-end hotel. Because. And for some reason they get caught because his partner is way too greedy and wants more of that 1%'er money. Well, not caught, but someone finds out it's these two jokers and they put hits on them and their families. And in what I suppose is intentionally oddly edited intro cutscene, Aiden Pearce is attacked by two men while driving with his niece and nephew and the niece dies as a result.

What follows from there are a whole bunch of tired storytelling conventions which I assume were put in place to facilitate the gameplay. Because the story in Watch_Dogs is really, really silly at best, boring and bad at worst. The story includes but is not limited to: sexy hacker lady joins Aiden so he can sound less boring (didn't work), Aiden's former partner kidnaps Aiden's sister (probably the worst offense of them all) to get him to join in on the same revenge crusade, finding the creator of the surveillance apparatus (ctOS, as the game calls it) to help you hack into it (and the only character in the game with some actual personality), a whole lotta blackmail involving inner city youth, sexy lady hacker reveals she double- or triple- or quadruple-crossed Aiden earlier and feels sorry so she decides to go out in a hail of gunfire right next to Aiden (to absolve the player or Aiden of any responsibility in her death), Aiden's partner tries to double-cross you, you find out the man ultimately responsible for everything gets no character development and was just the moustache curling villain you see for 10 seconds very early at the game, and Aiden has to send his family away because he's Chicago's Batman now. Oh and something with a lighthouse, because it's always about a city and a lighthouse. Or is that Bioshock?

Sidenote: Kidnapping stories seem to work really poorly in open-world games. I won't go bandy about the dreaded term ludonarrative dissonance, but taking the urgency out of something like "hey, I kidnapped your sister", followed by the main character deciding to go cruising around the city and then jumping around collecting virtual coins seems awfully silly and, well, dissonant to what the game's story is trying to do. Which again is not a lot. It doesn't also help that the few times the sister is put on the phone, she and Aiden start quipping. You're sitting in a dank corner of a shipping container, not the spa.




I got bad news for you dude. I mean, the next line writes itself.

 Watch_Dogs just flat out poorly integrates the "hacker" and "vigilante" angles in its gameplay. The more egregious examples come in the form of those "Crimes in Progress" popups. They're more or less wholly random, mostly involves very little involvement in fact, and is more of a facilitator of experience points and reputation points more than anything. Add to the fact they're not very dynamic, there's not much except just random busywork you can choose to do for very good rewards. A victim and a perpetrator exchange maybe a few lines, then you have to intervene either before something happens, or you can chase after them after the crime happens (for a smaller reward).

Although I promised not to make any more comparisons to the TV series Person of Interest, the contrast between the how the two handle similar acts of vigilantism is just so stark, I have to say something. In the show, the lead characters spend a great deal of time investigating either a potential victim or perpetrator (one of the differences in the show is that its surveillance apparatus never outright tells the protagonists if their 'person of interest' will be the victim of an upcoming crime or the one perpetrating it), allowing both the characters and the viewer to see what drives this person of interest, and provides a sympathetic angle to them, even if they occasionally are a perpetrators or antagonists. The same goes for another TV series, Flashpoint, which spends a great deal of time in the mindspace of someone committing a crime that's worthy of having to call in SWAT to de-escalate them. Watch_Dogs barely spends time in Aiden's headspace, despite the fact that he spends most of the game talking to himself.

But in Watch_Dogs, these are all just random events for the sake of gameplay and bar filling (for experience, reputation, whatever). If one of the themes of Person of Interest is, "everyone is relevant (important) to someone", then, Watch_Dogs probably doesn't even have any themes, despite dressing their game in this surveillance state setting. These random encounters are also just flat out shallow in a gameplay sense. It would've been more interesting if they were bespoke content (like other sidequest stuff) where you had to actually investigate people and either have the player, or the character come to certain conclusions about these victims or perpetrators. Just a thought.





I just noticed something disturbing: "Hack through security to satisfy your curiosity."

 The other weird side content found in Watch_Dogs are "Privacy Invasions" where you go through a puzzle hack sequence to unlock a vignette where you are intruding on someone's privacy, usually in the safety of their own homes. Some of them include: Aisha Tyler talking about her farts, a man being friendzoned, a man complaining he was delivered the wrong anime figure, women chatting about the size of a man's penis just as aforementioned man is about to knock on the door, or a couple re-enacting the lamest porn storyline involving a plumber. Some of these are played for laughs.





It really was like watching a train crash in slow motion.

 


The soulpatch really sells the douchebag look.

 


A few times the profiler popup works, but it's all bespoke, so of course it should.

But then there are those that feel like they should hit you deeper. And sometimes they do. Like one where a couple sits at a table, and the woman texts her friend about how they've fallen out of love; a couple dealing and coming to terms with the other slowly dying due to cancer; a single mother who's at the end of her rope and clearly isn't prepared to rear children; or hearing a voicemail of a son wondering if he should visit his father as his father's dead body lies on the floor. Those are the moments I felt like the game should let me do something appropriate, or that Aiden Pearce should at least react. Except he doesn't and just hacks a nearby smartphone or tablet and funnels some money out of a bank account. In this case, it seems like these either fell out of the scope of the project or just were never considered, or some combination of the two, and that really brings down the whole game as a result. Or that it reinforces the fact that in a world where everyone is entirely connected through technology, empathy slowly slips away from all of us. That is probably the more depressing thought, but the game doesn't even bother to engage with those themes and only ever really stumbles into them by virtue of not having anything to say on the matter.

Other than revenge, of course.

____________________________




'Cause, baby, now we got bad blood
You know it used to be mad love
So take a look what you've done
'Cause, baby, now we got bad blood

 If Bad Blood is supposed to act as an epilogue to Watch_Dogs proper, or as a side story, I actually preferred this to the main game. It's pretty obvious some lessons were learned between the two, even though they basically inhabit the same world, playable space, systems and mechanics. I'm still not entirely a fan of all the gameplay tenets of Watch_Dogs - not even on a mechanical level - but I see the refinements made anyway. Adding additional challenges and benchmarks for some of the basic gameplay pieces of Watch_Dogs might shake things up, but I only appreciated their presence more than anything else. But that shows promise.



Well, if he's buying all those anime figures I guess he won't mind if I funnel away some of his money into mine.

There's still a lot of things missing in Bad Blood that weren't all there in Aiden Pearce's Watch_Dogs, but thankfully this side story does a lot of other things right. The first of which is that Raymond Kenny (T-Bone) is infinitely more enjoyable a protagonist, has more personality and surprisingly reacts to events in the game. Even audiologs! It's nothing entirely original but T-Bone and Tobias Frewer are forced back together as Ray is trying to make himself disappear, and there's where the story actually starts to feel entertaining. Maybe it's because Aiden Pearce doesn't have top billing here, or because there are less story missions (though the game feels content with finding ways to fill up your minimap anyway), or there's an actual dynamic between Ray and Tobias that ends up in a better place by the end of it.

Or maybe it's that Bad Blood tries to do something slightly interesting with the "revenge" throughline that apparently Watch_Dogs keeps latching onto. But at least this time, T-Bone is on the other end of someone seeking revenge on him. It crept up on me, but it really shines through when you realize (and the game hammers it home a few times) that the eastern seaboard blackout the game often refers to comes back in a real way, and T-Bone is forced to confront it very directly when one of the victims' family takes it upon them to do so. In something of a surprise to me, there was actually an interesting sequence where you go through dioramas of these people who died, and at the same time the realization hits T-Bone - and presumably, so does the player. Those certain missions were certainly enjoyable to me than the vast endless variations on tailing on foot/car, combat encounter, or car chase which inhabited a large portion of Watch_Dogs mission design (and to an extent, some of Bad Blood too, but less of it).

All-in-all there's an actual degree of sympathy that you create with T-Bone and Tobias that I don't feel that was ever existent with Aiden Pearce. His story felt completely all paint-by-numbers with little variation or emotional depth. Whereas many of the inter-cutscenes between Ray and Tobias - and very much the epilogue that plays during the credits - oozes chemistry between the two characters and is actually enjoyable to watch. Hopefully they harness some of that potential into something down the line.

Some other points:

• For a game with very uninteresting side content, it had one of the things other open world games I wish had: a reset button without having to start a new game.
• For posterity, here is my completion progress. I think I more or less saw everything the game had to offer.
• I really don't understand the need for a shop UI for coffee shops and news-stands if there is only ever one option, and they both do exactly the same thing.
• I honestly don't know what to say about this. So just read it.
• I have to believe this one was actually intentional. And really disturbing once you think about it.
• I wasn't lying about Aisha Tyler's farts.