With that other thread falling into the hype category, I figured a more general one would be in order.

After the first game left a sour taste in my mouth, I had little interest for the sequel. Even more so, when the first reveal happened and it seemed to have this really off-putting "Hello there, fellow hackers!" tone to it, which basically made me ignore the whole game 'till closer to it's release. But once those positive reviews started rolling in, it did start to prod my interest...and after O'Dwyer provided a very enthusiastic virtual tour around San Fransisco (admittedly most of that came from him being surprised how accurately they had manage to put in some parts), I decided to jump in myself yesterday.

..and I'm glad that I did! It's not the next GTA, but it's still a very enjoyable open-world game with a really great vibe to it, that maybe works even better right now when it's constantly dark and wet out there in the real world. For me personally, it's the perfect alternative to the grey setting of the first game. By all that I mean just the general feel of the virtual San Fransisco, but luckily the story and characters are fun too. There's still plenty of dialogue and quests that cause me to roll my eyes, but as a whole, I'm sorta getting some good Sunset Overdrive. flashbacks. That game also seemed all sorts of terrible to a lot of people (yours truly included) before coming out, but the final product was way less obnoxious and ended up being one of my favourite games of the current gen.

So yeah, I'm having some good times with this game! Well, except for the fact that the AI still kinda sucks. In the sense that when I stun gun some poor sod, every other guy in the area seems to know what's up and comes gunning me down. I don't know if there's an update for that, but I seem to recall that things used to go down south fast in the first game as well if you made even a tiny mistake during stealthing around.

@glots: Glad to see you weren't terribly disappointed after your poor impressions of the first game! I'll be picking it up down the road as well as I'm quite excited to dive into a fun open world game after the awful taste Mafia 3 left in my mouth..

The game is a massive improvement over the first game in almost every single way. Its got some pretty great mission design so far and the feeling of just sending in your RC car to fuck things up while you just sit in the car is oddly empowering for some reason. Its probably the closest to a living world I've seen in an open world game and its absolutely gorgeous at times (I'm addicted to taking selfies). There are still some tonal issues though, like the game is pretty silly most of the time but they occasionally drop some heavy stuff in your lap with gang violence, serial killers and some weird story beats and those just feel totally out of place. And yeah like Jeff said on the podcast, being able to 3D print guns as a fun-loving robin-hooded hacker crew is just completely off the mark but I understand from a game design perspective why they did it.

Anyone playing this on PS4? Curious as to how the performance is after reports of low FPS, or if there's a patch forthcoming.

@stryker1121: The frame rate problems were because of the issues they were having with the online stuff so thats why they have taken it down. I'm playing on PS4 and performance is totally fine withe the exception of some pretty ugly screen tearing occasionally when driving fast.

I am really enjoying the game, possible exception being the driving which is atrocious. The tools at your disposal to handle things in your own way depending on your chosen upgrades have been interesting to explore and makes every mission so far feel fresh. Overall I just get the sense that they put more thought and effort into how and why to hack certain in-world objects rather than just being able to hack a forklift for no reason. Also, taking out your foes by just hacking a car to drive around is pretty great. Characters are really likeable and I appreciate the range of styles in clothing available, as a customization dude myself. Having my version of Marcus be a biker hacker driving around on a chopper is priceless.

@pezen: So there IS a way to make the main character not wear lady pants? Ubisoft should write you a check, you may have just sold me on buying this

Cool, thank you for the info. May have to pick this one up- the QL made the non-lethal route look quite fun.

I'm really liking this so far. The story and characters aren't great but the game is really cheesy and fun so far. This game has some heart unlike the first game.

I'm so close to just cracking and buying this on PS4 or XB1 rather than wait for the PC version.

Quick question from someone who just started. Does the yo yo sleath attack kill or is it non lethal? I'm not entirely sure, and if it does kill people, how do you non lethally take someone down? Marcus doesn't seem like the type to kill folks to me! :D

its non lethal i believe. he also has a stun gun and later you can get some shock mines

@mems1224: Oh okay, I see. I just wasn't sure because when you stun gun someone, on detective vision they're still red, but when you yo yo them they turn white and there isn't any indicator that shows you whether a person is dead or not.

I've just ordered the Gold Edition for a few different reasons:

• played a few hours of the first one just last month, and had a surprisingly positive experience
• good word of mouth response, broadly speaking (horrible pun, sorry not sorry)
• distinct lack of stupid physical swag to clutter up my place with
• I hate money :(

Really enjoying this second one so much, the game got so much more an identity this time around, and I really like the cast, very diverse in their attitudes, and the freedom you have is so great, there was one mission where you needed to tag a wall and you were faced with a area with bad guys that the game I think wanted you to stealth through, but there was a huge Crane on the construction site so I just remote control that to lower down it's basket in the middle of the street climb aboard and just lower myself down right where the target was without alerting anyone :)

Btw. putting out APB's on people is great fun, and creating trafic chaos by making people's car go nuts :)

Btw. I seem to remember Dan told something about him putting out ABP's on the police when they came to arrest someone in I belive it was there unfinished look, were they looked at his footage, is that a late game thing, or only in the beta ? It does not seem to work in the retail version, so I was just wondering?

Just got done climbing the Golden Gate Bridge and oh boy I felt the height the higher up I went, but not bad feeling just surprise I could feel the Height, reminded me about my first time with Crackdown, climbing the tall towers.

I just started playing the first one (because it was dirt cheap and thought, "Why the hell not?") and I've got to ask: does Watch Dogs 2 control better? There's something about how this first one plays...the camera/controls just feels floaty and sloppy in a way that I'm having a hard time coming to terms with. It's kinda pissing me off, because the driving feels like it has the worst handling of any open world game ever.

So...does Watch Dogs 2 play exactly like the first one, or did they refine and tighten up the controls? If it handles the same I'm probably going to skip it.

Like already mentioned in my first post, I'm now definitely starting to remember that I hated the aggressive AI in the first game and it's very much the same thing here. Riddling you with bullets no matter the case, which combined with the crappy checkpointing is starting to get to me on some missions. Going to push through the campaign, but it's pretty likely now that I'm not coming back to this after finishing the story. Granted, that has rarely been the case for me with modern open world games.

Maybe Watch Dogs 3 will finally have better driving, a setting at least as good as this one, bit less insane AI, a better story with characters you mainly like and something else as a cherry on top.

So Titanfall 2 needed to patch and we all know how blazing fast PSN is so I finally got around to playing Watch_Dogs 2.

I dunno guys, I guess I'm mentally unhinged or something because not only did I really enjoy Watch_Dogs 1, thus far I think I even prefer it to the sequel. That first game seemed focused in a way that this second iteration isn't. Now I haven't played all that much, only a few hours, but very little about it is pulling me in. Everything kind of feels really trite and goofy and not in a good way. I dislike having to constantly pilot my little robots instead of walking around and doing things myself, and when I do have to walk somewhere it feels really clunky in a way that a game coming from the Assassins Creed people shouldn't. The stealth seems worse than the first game too and the cops, man the cops are insane in this one to the point where it's faster to just die than try to outrun them.

That first game had a clear theme that for whatever reason I enjoyed. You are this guy that fucks up in a big way, and now consumed by remorse you get completely lost in a tale of revenge. You're not a hero you're just a guy that knows how to hack systems and you won't let anything stand between you and the people that wronged your family. Aiden had these mobile bases which I thought were a perfect representation of his obsession - cargo containers where all he did was eat, sleep and plan his next moves. You took down mobsters and kidnapping rings, you didn't mess around. I dunno, I felt cool, I felt like Denzel Washington from Man on Fire. The tone was somber and so were the side quests but it all had this gravitas that quite frankly I enjoyed as a nice change of pace from the wise-cracking guys we usually play.

Here I'm this kid that is all about getting even with the system but it's all so trite. The stakes seem incredibly low and the early goings instead of launching me into a really cool narrative, already feel like basic filler. I'm messing with people through ATM machines, I'm stealing things from movie sets and stuff. I'm doing a whole bunch of pointless busy work meant to underscore that hey were hackers look at us hack stuff, in service of a nebulous "mess with THE MAN" end goal. That whole ball on a rope melee tool is so ridiculous.. I just don't feel cool the same way I did in the first game when I pulled off some meaningful break-in and outran the cops. There also appear to be a TON of guards everywhere.

I'll keep playing because ultimately I like open world games and this is definitely a lot more fun than the awful Mafia 3 I literally suffered through to the very end. Hopefully the story picks up as well as the gameplay because so far I don't really like the way they changed the hacking - basically forcing you to use the bots to unlock linked terminals - and while I don't mind the cast of hacker strays, none of them really speak to me one way or another.

After finishing the story of Watch Dogs 2 i feel like the ending was a little flat. After the mission where you hack all the satellites and then do the mega hack on Blume's server farm the story kinda goes downhill from there. That one moment felt like it should have been the final mission of the game.

Also i wish there were more stealth challenges. Right when i started to feel confident with my stealth hacking abilities, the missions ceased to be a challenge. One thing that really annoyed me though, as @glots said, once an enemy sees you the whole place goes on alert. I understand ctOS has everything connected to each other but it's not like i'm fighting the Borg. If i take a single guard out quickly he shouldn't have time to notify his buddies.

I played Watch Dogs 2 up until the main character gave a sex tape to the paparazzi because he wanted the location of a talking car. The reason why the character did this? Because he didn't like a movie trailer. Fuck this game. Shit is vile.

Watch_Dogs 2 made me legitimately laugh out loud during one of its missions so I definitely got a good impression. I keep telling myself I should play it but I'm just not too into the GTA style sandbox worlds anymore. Gonna try and go back to it for another session or two at some point and see how I continue to feel about it.