With open world games, and Ubisoft open world games in particular, I’ve talked before about how there are stages of completion - you beat the single-player campaign, but then there are dozens of side missions, and hundreds of collectibles to satisfy even the most compulsive player. Watch_Dogs is somewhat interesting in the way that it shakes up this post-campaign play, where the most interesting content to be found is in the collectibles - side missions largely adhere to a format, and while there’s some variability they end up being a little predictable.
The collectibles, though. Some of these come in the form of hard-to-find audio logs, some are QR code puzzles, and some - arguably the most unusual - come in the form of hacking into building security to spy on unsuspecting citizens. Everything serves to flesh out the world, whether it’s leaked logs from the game’s proxy for Anonymous, or a small domestic drama in an apartment building.
After a while, though, this sort of thing begins to get invidious. There are hardly any NPC interactions in this game that aren’t predicated on angst or violence, and while some are ostensibly played for comedic effect - witness, for example, the man who believes he is in a reciprocal relationship with a store mannequin - most end up making the Chicago in Watch_Dogs a fairly sour place to live. The few positive interactions you witness seem to be winking at the player, usually playing out some BDSM-oriented scenario. When you see this for the first handful of times, it almost feels playful. When it becomes routine, though, it becomes apparent that deviant sexual behaviour is basically a stand-in for supposedly dark secrets.
That’s the thing - in a game where private data is the thing that the protagonist has exclusive and constant access to, the writers of this game have to create narratively interesting information that is supposedly private for a reason, and more often than not the assumed reason on the part of the writers is guilt or shame. Everyone is repressed in Watch_Dogs, and the ones that aren’t are ham-fisted stereotypes.
I’ll still say that I’m enjoying myself, and that’s mostly because the game is astoundingly pretty - the outer city limits are particularly vibrant, with the game’s recreation of Pawnee evoking Alan Wake in the way that it captures small-town America. Sometimes, you’ll be walking down the street, and the sun will start poking through the trees, casting a glow over everything that forces you to just stop and admire the view. And the rain in this game is rain - I have a thing about games that let you get caught in storms, and Watch_Dogs certainly allows for that.
Who knows - maybe by the time I’ve meandered around the lives of the foul little creatures that inhabit this world, someone will have released a mod that removes every human from the city. At this point, I can’t help but think that it’d improve things.