Quick Look: Watch Dogs 2

Punch deck, break the blackest ice

woo thank you been waiting for dishonored 2 quick look and almost forgot about this. I want to like this game but man the characters are all terrible, and not in a likeable way

FSOCIETY Y'ALL

This game looks fun.

Hi cool teens!

I'm so old...

Just had to say after seeing the first few minutes that after playing Forza Horizon 3 all day this feels incredibly larger already....that drive to their office was really looking like a town more than any game I've played. Forza Horizon 3 "seems" like a big game, but it is pretty small not to say there isn't a lot to do and it isn't a good game but this already seems to scale it. I really wish Forza was this large despite them claiming it is. That city skyline is beautiful in this game!

What is this running on? Framerate looks good.

Open-world Ubisoft games have never done it for me, so I doubt this one will be much different. I kind of like how clean this looks though.

EDIT: Oohh, I just heard an Aphex Twin track. This game is alright.

Looking at this screenshot afar, I thought they added Austin Walker in the game.

On topic: I'm enjoying the game so far. I'm only a few missions in though.

This game seems really strange to me and makes me kind of uncomfortable, especially because I live in the bay area. It's so strange that they have this like... punk-rock-kids-fighting-against-the-squares goofy style and attitude... and then they whip out the guns and start murdering people.

Like... I am no fan of the SFPD. But I don't want to shoot them? You know? It's one thing when it's fake GTA satire cops... but like when they are supposed to be real cops, it just feels different.

And see them walk around in recreations of the places I see every day IS cool. But then whipping out a handgun and seeing people running away in fear kinda isn't. Am I crazy here? It just feels different.

EDIT: Also I love that Dan has lived here for years and barely knows the city.

Wow - am I far away from the demographic for this game and this lifestyle .... the 580's being a game can never be good for an area. And if you are following the orders of the police that would be how you are supposed to live ... sigh. And I mean there seems to be a contingent of video game websites Aus *cough* that think wrongly they should be about making grand social statements so being considered journalism isn't that far off really...

I might get this, like its style.

Once bitten...

@koolaid: I think you just need to realize it's only a game. I mean if you're ok with killing cops in a "fictional" setting then you're not doing anything different here.

At the end of the day though if this will make you really uncomfortable then simply don't play it.

...twice shy.

As a decade-long resident of LA, I enjoyed driving around in GTA V's San Andreas.

I've been a resident of the Bay Area for 13 years total, and this game looks like it does an even better job of re-creating the area.

So I guess I need to play this.

This game feels like it would fall to pieces, revealing the suits behind the curtain, the moment I so much as touch it. Saying it has "heart" is totally the opposite vibe I get from something so apparently soulless.

This IS coming from someone who hasn't played this game, but this feels like marketing took form and decided to make a video game without human help.

Jeff is 100% wrong. Map should always be on the touchpad since it's way more convenient to press than the tiny ass options buttons (I'm tall and have big hands).

"Sounds like wrestler theme music playing."

It was, actually.

Crash Holly's.

42:15 "There was a bit in this game where..." and now that story is lost forever. :(

As a Bay Area native I never though I'd see an accurately modeled Dumbarton Bridge in a major video game.

I am excited

This game is the best kind of dumb.

All of the text messages and calls you can intercept from civilians- they are hilarious to find. I am SERIOUSLY enjoying this game and slightly enjoyed WD1 (didn't beat it, liked the hacking mechanic, was disappointed at the lack of scope of hacking). I feel like this game knows what it is much more than the first and it's a great time.

DAN. Scritchies? Scritchy scratch? Come on man, never?

@zaldar: I'm not sure that I understood a single sentence that you wrote.

-What lifestyle?

-What are the 580s?

-You're supposed to blindly follow the orders of police? What if the police are corrupt and they tell you to do something that is wrong?

-What's wrong with video game websites that make "social statements"? Are you taking shots at waypoint?

-"So being considered journalism isn't that far off really" What are you trying to say here? Video game journalism is journalism.

The game is worth playing just so I can drive around San Francisco like a maniac and go down one way streets and park where ever I want to and not have to worry about being a decent human being.

This is also why I'm seriously loving this game - the city seems well crafted and well represented. I like just being in the world of this game.

@nevergameover: Yeah, woof, that little nugget slipped past me. I second your questions.

Well it sure as hell isn't on a PC since that won't be out until the 29th. Though maybe that gives Ubisoft time to clean up the framerate mess and multiplayer problems.

Funny how the graphics in this game really run the gamut. One minute it looks like a last-gen launch title, the next minute it's gorgeous. Really strange.

I'm actually going to argue with that. Killing police (or government officials or whatever) who exist in, for example, a cartoony GTA: Vice-City-land where people's heads disappear when shot off and their arms flail in a Three-Stooges "whoop whoop whoop" sort of way is much different than killing characters that look like, act like, and live like your next-door neighbors. The latter should have MUCH more gravitas and lead the player to seriously weigh the consequences of the protagonists' actions on themselves and the world around them.

Problem is, it looks like Watch_Dogs 2 completely missed the ball on the latter point.

Huh, it might be between this and Mafia 3 for my one open world game a year I play.

@koolaid: I kind of get what you're saying and felt a little of the same while watching people play this here and on Twitch yesterday and today.

If you actually invest in the story there's definitely a sort of incongruity to it. Slightly beyond your typical 'ludonarrative dissonance' common to games like these where the chippy tone of your characters just doesn't really line up with some of your tasks or your actions.

Are you supposed to be gray hats or black hats? They constantly portray you as lighthearted jokesters stickin' it to the man and what have you. Hackin' the planet for the greater good and/or the luls. But then you're calling hits on pedestrians and gunning down cops in the same gleeful, jokey manner it portrays the whole overly edgy, often cringe-inducing, maybe tongue-in-cheek maybe Ubisoft is just cheesy as hell, "1337 h4x0r" vibe and it just comes off as...well, weird, as Jeff pointed out himself.

I don't take issue with the actions themselves, don't get me wrong. As another pointed out, it's just a game, and I'm about as far from the anti-violent-game camp as it gets. The tone just seems kind of all over.

All that said, maybe at some point beyond what I've seen your role becomes more clear. Or hell, perhaps playing it myself rather than merely spectating, I could get over that weirdness for the sheer dumb fun of it all. Seems to have plenty of that going for it.

Looks cool but ill wait for a sale.

I would've thought @danryckert was a big enough fan of The Rock to know that it was a Ferrari / Humvee chase, not a Lamborghini / Humvee chase. "You just fucked up your Lamborghini" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Also it's cool that they went to the trouble of getting the feel of San Francisco right, because the first Watch_Dogs' rendition of Chicago was a load of fucking dogshit.

I currently go to Rutgers for CS and we have a room called the HackR Space where we have a bunch of hardware and tools for people to use to make stuff. I couldn't not think of that when Jeff talked about the hacker space in game.

Also, any hackathon run by MLH this year had this Watch Dogs 2 sponsored event where everyone has to try to hack a (obviously fake) ctOS email account. It's actually pretty neat. The first stage involved knowing about the particular file webcrawlers look for to ignore websites, then recognizing and decrypting a 64-bit encoded message. Then the second stage had you do a simple SQL injection to break the login page. The third, which was supposedly only figured out by 25 people WORLDWIDE as of HackPrinceton on the 12th (this is among tens of thousands of people) I'm pretty sure involves PHP email injection of some sort in order to fuck with the ctOS guy's email account.

The prize for the fastest completion of stage 1 is, you guessed it, a free copy of the game. The prize for best security related "hack" (it's what hackathon projects are called) is a Collector's Edition of the game. And the prize for fastest completion of all 3 stages is a trip to Montreal to hang out with the lead developers of the game for a weekend, and probably get a free game.

Honestly, as a person who was born and raised in the Bay Area, I would buy this game just for that. I was having weird tingly feelings seeing everything rendered so accurately.

This game looks cool!

Good to see Sombra in this

I'm glad that Ubisoft is good at recovering from their big misses like but it sure does create a sense of uneasiness for whatever their NEXT game is.

Game looks great and am looking forward to the PC release on a couple weeks.

@dasakamov: I'd argue that killing realistic people CAN have gravitas, but it doesn't need to, and that's clearly not what this game is going for. You can criticize the fact that they didn't go for it, but criticizing it for not hitting it when they obviously weren't trying is missing the point. Sometimes you just wanna kill cops, it's a videogame it's not a church sermon. If you're trying to make the "save the children" argument and remind us of our lost humanity, you're about 20 years late.

This looks great I look forward to the pc release on the 29th

I sure do love hacking in Frisco.

Thanks for showing this game! This plus the podcast discussion has me excited to own a copy.

This game is deeply, profundly stupid.

I kind of love it.

You unleash havoc on the streets of San Francisco, so basically what this game needs to be absolutely perfect is some kind of "Megaton" like quest scenario. ;)

What I really need to know is if Aisha Tyler is in this one.

@dasakamov:Yeah it's kinda like that. The pedestrians downtown in this game are the same people I walk to work with. They represent me and people like me. So even like, hitting one with a car during a chase is like... yikes.

@robo: Yeah totally I think I'm also feeling the ludonarrative dissonance. The characters in the game are very much the young activists you see in SF. A strong sense of justice and a dumb sense of fashion. They fight for what they believe in. Only the ones in Watch-dogs fight with assault rifles.... At least with GTA the game was aware the main characters were psychopaths. But in this game, it's like you are playing happy go lucky terrorists. It's very Nathan Drake

I feel there is part of a light hearthed game in here were you pet dogs, take selfies and hack the planet. Just like... without the murder?

Honestly ear things like that from the screenshot gross me out.