Open world games of this nature simultaneously thrill me and make me despair. They’re powerfully-realised when it comes to detail, right down to the expression on someone’s face when you bump into them, or the rays of a sunset peeking through skyscrapers, or the skyline at night as you stand on the deck of a water taxi on the outskirts of the city. Everywhere you turn, there are moments of still beauty in this, in Liberty City, in any of the sprawling settings of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
And yet.
These games are impossibly expensive, and yet filled with plots that are endlessly repetitive, often juvenile, and sometimes outright offensive. I’m almost inclined to give Grand Theft Auto a wider berth than I am with this game - not because Grand Theft Auto is any more impressive, narratively speaking, but there’s at least a (shaky) argument to be made that its distaste for earnestness, women and nuance is somehow related to the hyperbolic way that it presents masculinity.
Watch_Dogs is initially a game about hacking, and corporate surveillance, and yet it eventually just boils down to the same old story about criminal gangs that we’ve heard a hundred times before. There are the ethnically-defined kingpins, and a smattering of eccentric outsiders. There is, as you might expect from a story concerning criminal gangs, an attitude towards women that is hopelessly primitive.
There’s no reason why this game needs to be that way. The argument, I assume, is that Aiden needs to be the antihero, and for that to wash it needs to be out-and-out criminals that he’s routinely slaughtering rather than corrupt cops. Or, to make a more prescient point, if he were killing any other group than a gang of thugs, he’d probably have to kill some women. There’s something about waves of men that allows the player first right of refusal when it comes to the emotional effect of mass slaughter.
All this aside, mechanically, it’s a pretty decent game. There’s no real innovation here - manipulating the world around you eventually comes down to stopping cars, distracting guards, stealing money and painting memes on road signs - but the missions in Open World Crime Simulator 2014’s missions are very well-executed. It’s not that the missions themselves are stupid, even if they do recycle tropes - it’s that you could still rely on these tropes if you absolutely needed to and not have a recycled story propping the whole thing up.
I wish there was a game with the ambling, meandering nature of Proteus, but with a budget of this scale. Take Aiden Pearce away from the hopelessly juvenile bedroom warriors that populate Watch_Dogs, and instead make him an amateur guerrilla photographer let loose on the streets of Chicago, or a thrillseeker journalist, or - fuck it - anything other than a straight white gruff vigilante with a sad past.
Make it so that he has to race to the harbour to take pictures of boats, before they sail off with no guaranteed return date, for no other reason than he really fucking loves boats. Make a game with boundless opportunities, including a life of crime, but the promise of permadeath or - worse - a life sentence in prison if you’re apprehended. Disincentivise mindless destruction in a world this absurdly gorgeous.
And maybe consider hiring a voice actor who isn’t channelling Batman for once.