By Jim Rossignol on May 13th, 2013.
UPDATE: New video of just gameplay, without someone wittering over the top of it.
IGN, as it happens. And you can see footage of some GTA-type wandering about in Watch Dogs below. The handsome corporate gaming site was the first to get to grips with Ubisoft’s action-hacking game about the timeless love affair between phones, surveillance, guns and explosions in urban areas, and it looks quite good. Like the tennis.
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By Jim Rossignol on April 29th, 2013.
Ubisoft’s impressive-looking hacker-with-superphone action game, Watch Dogs, will appear on November 22nd. There’s a big fancy new trailer below, which you should definitely watch.
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By Nathan Grayson on February 21st, 2013.
Ubisoft’s vaguely cyberpunk open-world thriller Watch Dogs has the worst minimap in history. It’s so amorphous and blobby, like someone sneezed on the screen, and it miraculously oozed into a fully functioning UI element. I’m sorry. I know that’s not really the main issue at hand here, but it had to be said. But yes, Watch Dogs! It looked rather promising – though somewhat upsettingly action-focused – during E3, and new footage only adds fuel to the electrical fire. Which is rather the opposite of how you’re supposed to deal with those things, but this is a rare case where that’s a good thing. Well, if you like Assassin’s-Creed-style chases and magical cell phone techno-magic, anyway.
Who Watches The Watch Dogs?
By Nathan Grayson on June 7th, 2012.
Much like the news that your house is being repossessed after a particularly brutal bout of identity theft, Watch Dogs came out of nowhere. Hot on the heels of a Ubisoft press conference that could charitably be described as “at least probably not offensive to some breeds of orangutan,” Watch Dogs mopped up that particular mess and then some. Main character Pearce hacked everything from cell phones to traffic lights as naturally as most of us draw breath. He stalked, he talked, and then, well, he shot some dudes. Lots of them, actually.
So Ubisoft’s spilled quite a gooey glob of GTA into our Deus Ex, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Do we really need a rather large helping of lead to spice up our near-future cyberpunk intrigue? I spoke with producer Dominic Guay about that concern, Jedi hacker powers, how discovering someone’s sexual history can lead to a side mission, and more. Hack your way past the break to read on. Or just click on it like a normal person.
E3 2012 Diary
By Nathan Grayson on June 7th, 2012.
It’s a bit odd to cover E3 with a PC-focused slant. Initially, I felt horrifically out of place roaming the LA Convention Center’s banner-plastered halls. The Kratoses and Master Chiefs of the world leered at me from their billowing sky perches, and I longed for the warm embrace of, say, a game about embracing people – as Rambo. Xbox controllers and PlayStation pads contorted showgoers’ hands into unnatural, vice-like claws, and I could only grasp feebly for a mouse that failed to materialize.
But, after the initial explosion of senses-overwhelming glitz and glamour, I started taking stock of the show’s inner workings. And you know what? Turns out, this is a PC gaming event – perhaps moreso than anything else.
By Alec Meer on June 5th, 2012.
Tcch, everyone knows you don’t reveal new game IPs at E3. It’s all about companies trying to out-sequel each other. Or, if you’re Microsoft, being insane enough to believe that anyone on Earth is interested that they’ve spilt more Bing onto their Xbox dashboard. Ubisoft have elected to buck the safe-bet trend with the mighty promising Watch Dogs – an apparently semi-open world game of grand-scale hacking. Includes bringing up a frightening amount of embarrassingly personal information about passers-by at the touch of a button, stealthing into buildings by making everyone’s mobile phones play up, screwing up traffic lights remotely to cause dramatic pile-ups and, somewhat sadly after all that bravura tech-twisting stuff, some trad. shooty-bang-bang. Also, graphicasability which appears to fall firmly into the ‘ultra’ bracket. Though whispers are this is a couple of years off, so salt may need some pinching for now.
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