As a (sort of) Chicagoan, I'm a little disappointed.

I've lived in the Chicagoland area my whole life. Never lived in the city itself, but I've spent a whole lotta time there and I love so many things about it. I'm moderately enjoying Watch Dogs and finding it becoming more fun as I go along. One thing I can't let go of, though, is how shoddy the game's representation of the city is.

I'll admit, it definitely has the Chicago feel; they really nailed the general look of the architecture and basic layout of certain areas. However, the omission of basically every major landmark is baffling. There's no north side to explore, no Chinatown (that I've seen). No Soldier Field, no Shedd Aquarium, no Wrigley, no Navy Pier ferris wheel, no Museum of Natural History...seriously, what the hell? I guess the "May Stadium" is supposed to be both Solider and Wrigley combined. While I'm not intimately familiar with every historical or significant point of interest in the city, it seems like they've renamed a number of the ones they have decided to include. For instance, I'm assuming the Ambrose Theater is supposed to be the Chicago Theater. Others, like the Chicago Water Tower, are placed in seemingly random locations, or least the in-game surroundings don't really reflect those of the real thing.

They also took a lot of liberties with the actual layout of the city. There's a hell of a lot more going on in the Loop in reality. Now, I didn't really expect Ubisoft to recreate everything, road for road, building for building, but would asking for a bit more care and attention to detail be asking for too much? Never mind the fact that the city in the game is surrounded by fucking mountains. That's too silly for words.

It's still cool to have Chicago, a city I have great love for, finally represented in an open-world game, even if it is some French guys' weird, slipshod take on it. I mean, it still kinda feels like I'm there when I'm playing, so that's something, I guess.

Actually, if there's one thing that bothers me more, it's that the crimes committed on an hourly basis in the game don't come close to how many people are being shot, stabbed, mugged, or raped there right now.

Fellow Chicagoans, how do you feel about Watch Dogs' version of this great city?

Hey, show some respect for the developers. This is some Canadian guys' slipshod take on it!

And if they did change so much of it, it makes me wonder why they made it actually Chicago, instead of a fake city, like in the GTA games.

Yeah, but they are in the predominantly French part of Canada, so it's almost just as bad. And since they are from Canada, it wouldn't have been so hard to send some 'em down here to actually see what they were supposed to make!

I've been wondering the same thing, though. At least with GTA, Rockstar doesn't try to hide the fact that their cities are just "inspired by" or "based on" their real-world counterparts. With Watch Dogs, Ubisoft was just like "Hey, we're gonna make this game set in Chicago, but not include any of the things Chicago is known for". It would've been better off having a fictionalized name in the end.

@onekillwonder_: I should thank you for this thread, because whenever games like this get made, I wonder how realistic (or not) they are to the cities they're based on. I've never been to Chicago, so everything I know about it comes from movies like The Dark Knight.

This is what I found so jarring about The Dark Knight Rises...the other movies were very Chicago but Dark Knight Rises is COMPLETELY New York City. As a New Yorker I found it very jarring seeing the incomplete new World Trade Center in every other shot while they were trying to say it was Gotham.

Anyways I feel like the developers probably were trying to do that but didnt have the time/budget to make that city you wanted. It was probably like, do we put in these landmarks or do we ship in 2015 and lose money?

... The Dark Knight Rises was filmed in Pittsburgh.

EDIT: Wikipedia does say that filming was done in cities other than Pittsburgh as well, but the impression I got in reading about it a couple years ago was that it was primarily filmed in Pittsburgh. The Steelers are in the movie, after all.

That's a shame to here. I've lived in the Chicago suburbs my whole life. I was really hoping they'd have mock representations of some of the major museums and buildings downtown.

Important question: Do they have the big chrome jelly bean?

@cerberus3dog: No.

Well they nailed the part about everything South of I-80 not mattering at all. :-/

@bwheeeler said:

@cerberus3dog: No.

Oh God, you just know some Ubisoft art director spent an entire day patting him/herself on the back for this. "So I was thinking, wouldn't the Bean be totally cooler if it glowed turquoise and looked like a Mobius strip? It totally would, right?"

Believe me there's tons of stuff from New York City in that movie, I should know I've only lived here my whole life. My point is things like the World Trade Center and Wall Street are so recognizable its hard to imagine it as "Gotham" you know?

@counterclockwork87: Gotham is basically Dark New York. Metropolis is Light New York.

Well I live in Chicago, I think that they did a pretty good job of the city considering how large and spread it is I wasn't surprised that it wasn't a one to one scale of the city just look at the cta map which shows the L lines alot of the L runs underground too http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/maps/ctatrainmap_2013oct.pdf. Parker Square is the north/northwest side of the city the just smashed neighborhoods like logan square, irving park, rodger park, etc. into one area. The Wards are Engle Wood, Chatham, pretty much the southside as far as looks go, although the Robert Taylor projects like tower the Iraq character live in have been torn down for some years now. The most realist parts are the loop and gold coast or mad mile in game. stuff like lower wacker dr & upper wacker dr. where kinda there, most of grant park with the bean and buckingham fountain was there. I'd say for the amount they got in its looks and feels like the city.... The voice work is where the game is kinda off to me, the people in the game don't sound like they are from here...

Chicago is the only city in the world that I'm aware of that has a tunneled multilevel street system, and Dark Knight staged an entire action set piece down there. A sequence, I might add, that ends on LaSalle Street with the Board of Trade building in the background of nearly every shot. There's way, way more Chicago in The Dark Knight than there is New York in Dark Knight Rises.

@kevin_cogneto said:

@bwheeeler said:

@cerberus3dog: No.

Oh God, you just know some Ubisoft art director spent an entire day patting him/herself on the back for this. "So I was thinking, wouldn't the Bean be totally cooler if it glowed turquoise and looked like a Mobius strip? It totally would, right?"

Well, look at that. I also don't see 20 people laying down under it making out and putting there feet up against it, so I think that's an improvement. I guess having it be reflective would have drained performance.

It's possible, but I dunno...I don't really buy that. I would think that if you're creating an open world game, wouldn't the layout of your game world be one of the first things to try and finalize? Especially when you're trying to recreate an actual real life city. Ah, what the hell do I know...

Ha, yeah, that's pretty much true. It's amazing how little south you have to travel to get to what is essentially "The South". Just go a bit south of Joliet and you're already starting to get into hickville.

Another thing I need to complain about...the NPC civilians obey traffic laws way too often. Where's all the honking the split second the light turns green? Where's everyone constantly cutting each other off? One of the things I was looking forward to most about playing this was living out my fantasy of driving like a truly uninhibited lunatic asshole in the city. I mostly get to do that here, but it's not the same when the NPCs don't react appropriately. I enjoy driving in the city in real life because it allows me to be way more aggressive than I normally am and not feel bad about it.

@cerberus3dog said:

@kevin_cogneto said:

@bwheeeler said:

@cerberus3dog: No.

Oh God, you just know some Ubisoft art director spent an entire day patting him/herself on the back for this. "So I was thinking, wouldn't the Bean be totally cooler if it glowed turquoise and looked like a Mobius strip? It totally would, right?"

Well, look at that. I also don't see 20 people laying down under it making out and putting there feet up against it, so I think that's an improvement. I guess having it be reflective would have drained performance.

If the bean isn't crowded with people taking pictures of themselves in it at all times during the day time then this game is seriously flawed.

They really should have just said, "Inspired by Chicago."

If you changed the bridges and the lightposts, the Chicago of Watchdogs could be Anywhere USA. The mountain areas are a giant WTF. The only time I've seen anything like that is when I went to Starved Rock. Over 90 minutes from the city.

Even though Sleeping Dogs had a condensed version of Hong Kong, it still felt like the Hong Kong I've been to.

I don't know if it's a satisfactory answer or not, but Joystiq ran an article about the Ubisoft Chicago and the reason the producer gave for the lack of real landmarks was essentially, "It is very difficult and expensive to license things". It's an interesting article.

http://www.joystiq.com/2014/05/28/why-you-cant-visit-soldier-field-in-watch-dogs/

@cerberus3dog: The Bean is copyrighted. If Ubisoft wanted to put it in their game, they'd have had to pay fairly exorbitant royalties for it.

Eh, cities in video games are never right and its crazy to expect perfect accuracy.

But yeah, it is a bit silly on their part to try and do a real modern day city, Assassins creed can get away with it since well, its old times, but yeah. Shoulda done the GTA thing and had a city based on chicago and call it shicago instead or something

@clonedzero: Shicago is waaaay better

With all the violence going on in Chicago, I could easily see the media headlines: "Ubisoft releases Chicago murder simulator; experience a fully rendered 1:1 Chicago and commit violent crime. This is ruining the America's youth! This is exacerbating the murder problem in Chicago!" etc.

Or maybe I'm just reaching here, who knows....

@nals: @spacerunaway: It hadn't occurred to me that landmarks would be copyrighted like that, or be so restrictive. That's a shame.

This exactly how I felt about the setting as well. It didn't capture Chicago enough especially the landscape around it. It's like if you wanted to add mountains to a city without mountains and barely anything you would call hills, then choose a different city, because it's definitely not Chicago.

Yay, I'm north of I-80!

I kinda felt that way but then again I wasn't expecting a street by street redoing of Chicago anyway. I wonder if this is what people who live in cities more frequently depicted by video games feel like.

I knew we were never gonna get a one-to-one recreation of the city, but I wasn't expecting what we got. Entire northside apparently flooded and doesn't exist. We apparently have mountains on the west side that are as tall as the city skyline. There's a Chicago dam?

As I said in the other thread, I would be fine with them just recreating the downtown area and just winging the rest if they added more landmark places. Them putting a faux neon bean meant they could probably have gotten away with adding places like the Museum Campus if they changed just enough to be different. And considering that open world games usually have airports, I was expecting them to bring down O'hare. But I guess that would only draw attention to the fact that there are no pilotable air vehicles in Watch Dogs.

There are definitely parts that look and feel like Chicago. Like driving by Millenium Park down Michigan Ave. It was awesome doing a convoy ambush in lower Wacker and having a firefight in the Marina City parking lot and seeing the river outside.

I'm pretty disappointed with how much liberty they took and how much they weren't willing to recreate, but it's still a cool world to explore. I kinda wish we did have a mountainous Alan Wake like town like Pawnee close to Chicago.

I usually give the developers some slack because recreating a city faithfully it extremely time-consuming and sometimes not even worth all the effort. Developers like Rockstar have all the time in the world to meticulously fine tune their cities but when you're talking about development cycles around three years it's kinda hard to put in every landmark or get every road right until you throw your hands up and just approximate everything (although I have no idea how long Watch_Dogs has been in development for so pardon me). I think anyone who expects a 1:1 accurate depiction in a video game world is asking a little too much from developers, as long as they capture the feel of the city, does it really matter?

If no one told me it was supposed to be Chicago, I wouldn't have known. I would have thought "Oh a bad facsimile of New York, how original."

As a person who spent maybe an hour in a Chicago bus station during a Greyhound layover 18 years ago, I too am disappointed. Not in Watch Dogs, as I haven't played it, just in general.

Chicago is the poor mans new york. Everyone knows that. They even tried making their own style pizza and ended up with some half aborted pizza abomination that they call "chicago style pizza". Savages.

Join the club. As a resident of Seattle, I'm disappointed with a number of aspects regarding Seattle as depicted in Second Son. And Sucker Punch is a Seattle studio!

I kinda figured that would be the case, but I wasn't sure if something as broad of a concept as a specific building would have to be licensed or not. I get that some of these places probably have "brands" of some sort associated with them, but I still think it's pretty strange, especially when many of them are such a huge part of the city. At least they got the Sears Tower. Never going to call it the Willis Tower. Unless Bruce Willis buys it, of course.

I think this has been in development for something like 5 years, if I'm not mistaken. I definitely wasn't expecting a 1:1 recreation, but it honestly feels half-assed. I don't really consider it a knock on the game itself, because it's still pretty cool, but they could've been way more faithful to the source material. And to answer your question: Yes...yes, it does really matter.

I always thought Metropolis was supposed to be DC's Chicago equivalent? Since it's nearer to Kansas and all.

Anyway, sounds like Watch_Dogs has the opposite problem of Fallout 3, where it was only the famous landmarks, but not in any coherent or recognizable layout.

Get. The fuck. Out. Don't be startin' no location beef up in here! Besides, Chicago pizza destroys that paper-thin grease napkin that passes for pizza in NY.

Oh please. New york pizza is just an American interpretation of the classic Italian dish.

The fuck is Chicago pizza? a two inch think mess of ingredients in improper proportions. It's like someone dumped sauce on a loaf of bread, put it in a pan, sprinkled some cheese and other toppings on and called it a pizza. It's disgusting. You people should be ashamed of yourselves.

At least your city is in a game at all however imperfectly. That's more than most of us can say.

Can you tell me which open world city in a video game that has been faithfully recreated to a level of detail which has satisfied you?

@markwahlberg said:

Metropolis is New York and Gotham is somewhere in New Jersey. Nobody really knows because nobody really cares. About New Jersey, I mean. Plenty of people care about Gotham City.

I don't remember where I saw it, but there was a map of the east coast in DC and NYC was north of Metropolis which was north of Gotham. I don't think New Jersey exists in DC Comics.

@sgtsphynx: Going by this website, Gotham is in Jersey and Metropolis is in Delaware. I always thought Metropolis would be close to Kansas since the two was always interconnected. Funny that bats and superman are so damn close to each other.

C'mon now, those aren't nearly as recognized around the world as the world trade center and wall street though...the financial capital of the world and the site of one the most infamous acts ever commited...It just took me out of it a bit.

I think they really nailed the part where every Chicago native is some form of the 7 deadly sins personified.

Yup, that's what I came here to post.

What I have learned about Chicago from Watch Dogs is that there are apparently no animals there at all. Not a cat, dog, pigeon, squirrel, robin, rabbit or anything else have I noticed in probably the 25+ hours I have played so far.

@hailinel: You mean Seattle isn't made up of nothing but the same chain of bubble tea, book and coffee shops? That was the worst thing I found about that game. There are only a handful of store fronts. There's actually one location in SS, I think in the north, which has a closed down comic shop, a bubble tea shop and a book shop next to each other, and then if you go right around the corner, the very same layout is about 50 feet away.

I've never been to Chicago, but the city of Watchdogs feels super dull and sterile. I don't feel like I have any reason to explore it though that's mostly Ubi's fault for marking everything on the map already.

But for both this, SS and maybe Sleeping Dogs (no idea how accurate it is to the real Hong Kong but I know it was modified anyway for video games) I don't get why they say it's the city as opposed to just doing what Rockstar do and make up a city based off a real life one. Then they get away with it not being accurate and can just let it be an approximation of it and it just works out better because of it.

@jesus_phish: Most cities are boring and sterile. I enjoyed GTA V but can't say that the downtown grid layout was doing much for me. Although I agree that by making a fictional city they have much more leeway in creating exciting paths and city planning. The grid plan most American cities are built on works really well in real life, but is a terrible bore to navigate in a game.