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Forums - Gaming Discussion - WATCH_DOGS: A Disappointed Review

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There are so many points to cover so I may have missed a few that were originally intended. I've tried to break them up into relevant sections and keep spoilers to a minimum (and generalised when needed). The logophobic should skip to the end for a summary.

Hacking:
The main selling point of the game is hacking, and some concessions have been made to keep the shown-off announcement trailer features in the game when developers obviously hit a brick wall on how to implement them. The ability to scan civilians (and steal their cash) is great, but ultimately shallow. You must hack a small amount of money from many civilians, and then visit an atm to withdraw all of this stolen cash. Why not simply hack the ATM?

The biggest problem, however, is that you can only hack what is in your line of sight. You can hack a camera, and then everything in that camera's line of sight is hackable etc. allowing you to leapfrog cameras until you can see what you need to hack. Unless you go too far out of range from your character (Except for certain missions that contain almost solely camera-leaping). The rules of the game are too inconsistent, and sometimes illogical. Why not hack a camera behind a wall, half a metre away? Sometimes you must hack machines in person, yet the character still uses his phone from a distance, so the need for this is confusing. One mission requires an NPC to be close to a server for you to hack it. No consistency.

This is perhaps the worst design decision made during development and the entire game has suffered. "Puzzles" based on this camera-leaping method are the basis of nearly every mission, they are extremely linear and many times tedious, particularly when you must hack an enemy's personal camera and wait until they walk into a new area to give you access there. The free-roaming aspect of the game is hindered by the very linear approach required by each mission. Though you have a choice of hacking, stealth or assault (or any combination), there is only one hacking path to follow and usually the same for stealth or assault.

Shooting:
There is little auto-aim, so shooting is somewhat more difficult than GTAV (which I like). You also take damage and die very quickly (which I also like) which forces you to use your hacking skills to scan the area and take out as many enemies as possible before engaging, then stealthily kill as many remaining enemies before getting spotted. This is all good - so far. The issue is that there are too many missions that throw you into the middle of a gunfight, without letting you scout ahead. You're supposed to be Zero Cool, not Rambo.

Driving:
Driving is more difficult than GTAV (which I like). However, the AI drivers show almost zero response to your presence on the road, which is particularly jarring when you're doing something extremely stupid/illegal, such as driving on the wrong side of the road or being chased by a group of extremely aggressive enemies.

Enemies:
The enemy AI is mentally deficient. There's so much to list that I'm sure I've forgotten a few things. In no particular order, some of the issues I've encountered:

  • You can shoot an enemy with a silenced weapon, and if they don't spot you, they will carry on with their monotonous pacing.
  • Dead bodies cause little to no alarm when found. You can often use the same audio trap to attract an enemy to a location and stealth-kill them, leaving a pile of dead bodies.
  • Enemies can simply spawn in the base, mid-mission. Little effort has been made to make their entrances more realistic.
  • Enforcers (top tier enemy guards) take an unbelievable amount of damage. About 12 or more shots to the face with a shotgun should do it. Similarly, the next tier enemy guard will take stupid damage as well.
  • Driving enemies are ridiculously strong, paritcularly in the later game. There is little hope of pushing them around, they drive average cars, yet seem to have the properties of a fire-truck. You cannot shoot while driving, yet the enemies can, which means you need to jump out of the car and shoot them, or use the environment. However, this can be difficult for some missions, where the pre-determined enemy driving route does not cross any obstacles that you can hack to take them down.
  • Similarly, missions involving police chases are ridiculous. The police scans are almost impossible to escape, and the police zone in on you even when they're supposedly "randomly" scouting the area before you have been spotted. I had a police helicopter circling the covered carport I was hiding in, despite it not knowing where I was, effectively forcing me into instant failure.
  • Enemy camps are often in the middle of the city, either a housing complex or simply a generic business store. They are full of aggressive, heavily armed guards that will shoot upon detecting you, yet the general public will walk around (and sometimes through the enemy base) without a care in the world. Sometimes, even during gunfire.

Free-Running/Movement:
Very floaty. Climbing objects is awkward and points out the disconnect between the character model and game world. Disappointing coming from the developers of Assassins Creed. Despite being an open world game "puzzles" involving climbing are very linear. The environment is modified to accomodate the path you must take and often stands out, breaking immersion - for example, to get from one rooftop to another, you must use two large exhaust fan units which are stacked on top of each other and staggered so as to create a staircase. They just feel so odd and out of place.

Crafting:
Why was there crafting? You're able to accrue a sizeable bank account fairly early on. Scrounging for components and crafting items - which you can later on buy - doesn't fit.

Mission Design:
Far too many missions involve a sudden chase scene following a cutscene. The enemy is shown driving away in the cutscene, while the player is simply standing about, suddenly needing to scramble for a car before the enemy is too far away (resulting in instant failure). The worst part is that this is usually preceeded by you needing to personally hack a machine in an obscure location, on foot, in a fairly central location to the enemy base, making it even harder to get to a car in time. Couple that with the fact that you needed to stealth your way into the entire base on foot in the first place, so you must rely on finding a spawned car near the base. Similarly, there are several cases of being thrown into a situation straight after cutscenes, like a heavily outnumbered gunfight or pseudo-QTE, that result in death or instant failure if your powers of clairvoyance aren't up to scratch. Many missions are simply impossible to complete without dying on your first playthrough and it feels cheap.

Pure-stealth missions are just bad. One mission involves sneaking past two guard stations that were facing eachother. The guards inside paced back and forth but rarely looked away, so waiting for the opportune moment when they were both not looking was painful. A couple of stealth missions have you tail someone through a crowd of enemies or enemy base, often leading to being spotted by some random, causing instant failure. Car stelath missions are horrible, as the enemey detection range varies, and makes little sense.

Storyline:
Feels too attention-defecit. Consecutive missions rarely follow the same sub-plot, with the main character going on tangent after tangent, even if there are lives on the line, destroying any sense of urgency.  Acting was okay; nothing special nor horrible and characters range from boring to amusing.

Hope for the Wii U experience:
I had originally believed in the potential for WATCH_DOGS to showcase the gamepad. But after playing, not so much. Hacking is completed entirely with one button, and all automatic, so there's little that can be done to flesh this out on the gamepad to make it more engaging.

Summary:
An overambitious project. A brilliant idea moulded by unfortunate design choices; shoehorning ideas into the game for the sake of being there. The result: a half-baked implementation of both new and well-established gameplay elements, continuously breaking immersion and jarring the player out of the game world. Wait for the inevitable Steam sale if you must play.



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Too bad, and I was soo excited too back in its original trailer, steam sale it is



                  

PC Specs: CPU: 7800X3D || GPU: Strix 4090 || RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000 || Main SSD: WD 2TB SN850

Nice write up.

I watched the Giantbomb quick look earlier and thought it looked decent. As you said, some good ideas but they were kind of half-baked. It wasn't amazing graphically either, some poor textures and pop-in, a definite downgrade despite anything Ubi claims.

To me, this seems like the kind of game that has a good foundation for the future, but isn't amazing as the first entry into the series. Hopefully it can do what Assassin's Creed did, set the template in the first game and then significantly improve all aspects of the game in the second, and also add in some new features.



Great write up. Some good points as well.

But...we do already have a couple threads similar to this. Please repost it there and continue the discussion there please!

Locking



 

Here lies the dearly departed Nintendomination Thread.

Thanks, sounds bad indeed.

To think I was pretty excited when it was first revealed, every new piece of information after that made it look worse and worse. I'm going to wait for the bargain bin now.



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thank you. i was tempted to buy it, but now im definitely not doing it. looks like a half assed mix of AC and GTA elements with the added repetitive hacking routines.

big pass