I think you're missing the point. I didn't play Mafia 2 so I can't speak to that but Kratos just seemed like a power fantasy. They had moments explaining why he was the way he was but nothing to excuse anything he did.

Gabriel Belmont was supposed to be a character who fell from grace. We were with him before he became a monster and then we saw him lose his humanity. In Lords of Shadow to I assume people are rotting for his redemption. I don't know because I didn't play LoS 2.

Batman is largely consistent. His one mantra is justice at any cost except for life. There's also the fact that the parallel between his sanity and the sanity of his enemies is brought up quite a lot. Batman can be an asshole but he also tries to save as many people as he can.

Aiden is an apathetic asshole that the game desperately wants me to side with. He tortures people to get what he wants, he tries to wrestle power from people and acts high and mighty about it while wielding that power himself, he kills indiscriminately as long as he thinks it gets the job done, his actions killed his niece and he continues to do what he does, and he's bland. He's a boring person. There really isn't anything about his character that would be seen as a positive. Take a character like Trevor from GTA5. He is even worse than Aiden but he is over the top, fun, and interesting. I can play a despicable character and I can play a character I don't like but when that character is boring I will hate him. I won't love to hate him. I will just hate him. Playing Aiden like he was a monster made the game fun and it felt consistent.

For most open world game like GTA I would follow the rules of the road like stop at the red lights, look both ways, etc. basically just trying to act like it's real life and not act like a sociopath. When i play this game to experience singleplayer part, i would try not to use my gun and be stealthy as possible unless there are parts in the game where it forces you into a gunfight.

When I do random stuff like free roaming or doing random shit like finding collectibles, I would usually drive like an asshole just in case i get invaded and have to use some heavy firepower weapons like a grenade launcher to kill the invaders forcing my to break my open world habits.

It just needs to me less Watchy and more Sleepy

@pottsynz: That would've made the game better I think. Someone else said it, if you only had a silence pistol and a limited supply of ammo for it, and you could pick up weapons from guards temporarily (until the bullets ran out) I think the game would've been better. Instead, you can literiarly carry the entire gunshop in your jacket. Where as even GTA would have single slots for weapons (one SMG, one assault rifle, one shotgun), you can just cycle through every weapon once you unlock it from buy it or picking it up in this.

As I mentioned, I don't trying to defend Aiden because I haven't played watch dogs, but from what I heard I just said that there were characters way worse than he is, but yeah, i guess you do have a point.

Oh, and my examples weren't brought so I can take a go at the characters, I love Kratos, I love batman, and I think Gabriel Belmont is one of the best representations of dracula ever. I was just making a parallel.

I wouldn't mind that change, maybe even going further and not let him carry the big guns with him at all. So picking up and carrying a AK in his hands or dropping it again, not let him put the AK in his magical coat. So only the baton and a single handgun as equipment. That would probably improve the online interactions as well (not AK spraying the fleeing invader).

@dussck: Oh yeah that's what I meant, probably didn't make it clear.

I laughed pretty hard at this. Good job, duder.

On topic though, I have no idea, mostly because I don't know what that initial trailer made me think that game was going to be. The shooting mechanics are competent, but not great. *voice raises in pitch as next sentence is spoken* Maybe if it was like open world Dishonored with computers?

Yes I'd like if there were no guns. If you were a parkour hacker who knew kung fu and didn't care for driving that'd be way cooler than being generic GTA man with a phone.

The world also should've been characterized different. Less people in public spaces, more armed guards & thugs openly wearing colors. Make the world a repressive police state rather than just the present with more cameras. It should've taken more queues from Assassin's Creed and less from GTA.

Another thing, I think more of the world should've responded to hacking. It's pretty shocking how basically all the things you can interact with in the world are things that you can interact with today. Circuit breakers, explosive steam vents, blockers and forklifts and so forth. There's nothing unheard of that you can interact with in this city. For instance how about cars? It's pretty stupid that in this future world we still drive cars. If cars were self driving think about what could be done with them. Hack them to go where you want! Maybe if you were on top of one they could fling you in the direction you want to jump inFamous style. Maybe you could have Titanfall type wall running too. It's pretty stupid that the only way to interact with cars is to drive them and the only means of transportation is driving. The game is set in a dense city. Who in their right minds wants to drive in a dense city?

Aiden should have a car and put all the big ass weapons he has in the trunk. That way you can have all the badass weapons but you need to choose what you need before you start a mission.

I wish you could upgrade the guns. I find myself using the silenced pistol most of the time because it is pretty much the only silenced weapon.

Was having a ton of difficulty with the driving missions where you have to chase and take down an enemy car. I almost quit the game due to one mission. Switched the difficulty from Normal to Easy and finished the mission on my first try for that day. Those car missions have been a lot better since. They're still annoying overall and I would rather do other things, but the drop in difficulty level did really help.

Combat hasn't been that hard. I try to kill people with the environment or head shot them with my silenced pistol as much as possible before having to bust out the highest level assault rifle that I have. The focus mode/bullet time does help a fair bit with combat.

I found that a lot of missions required gun play and it felt completely strange to be shooting dudes for no reason other than to get close to a computer terminal to hack it. It made Aiden a complete psychopath in my mind. The game doesn't have enough satire like GTA to dehumanize the shooting. So it was me pulling the trigger on random security guys who were just doing their job. I didn't care for it at all, especially the levels where Aiden goes to low income housing (where apparently everyone living in low income housing districts are angry gang members.)

I think the gunplay is fine. Honestly, I think the traversal and gunplay is better than GTAV. Coming off of Red Dead and Sleeping Dogs, going into GTAV was just jarring. The shooting felt like a step down from Red Dead and the vaulting and climbing inferior and stiff compared to Sleeping Dogs. Watch Dogs was a good mix that I expected from GTAV.

I don't know if it'd be a better game without guns though. If there are no guns, they'd have to add a lot more hackable stuff to take out enemies and I think that's tough to do in an open world game where you end up driving around and seeing all these toggles popping up. Honestly, I'm someone who adamantly plays stealth whenever given the option, Fallout, Skyrim, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, anything. But after playing The Last of Us by reloading every single time I get caught, playing like that is exhausting. Sometimes it's fun to just say "fuck it" and and go guns blazing. Or tossing an IED onto a truck and driving headlong into enemy territory.

I think it would be a better game if they went for a neo-noir tone instead of a TRON-cyber hacker tone. Chasing a target across the smoky nighttime rooftops in the fedora and trenchcoat outfit was awesome. The whole revenge story angle does nothing for me. I think it'd be cooler if you were some private eye or freelance mercenary hired by Blume to hunt down criminals and investigate conspiracies and the give you access to their CTos system to do so. They hire you to prove that CTos helps lower crime and that benefits them.

I'm fine with the guns, but Sleeping Dogs spoiled a lot of us with its combat system. If Watch Dogs implemented something similar, the game would probably be amazing instead of just pretty good. I do try to take down enemies stealthily more than just gun my way through wherever I can, but there are few instances where that's ideal.

The fact that "Realistic" actually forces you to adapt by NOT using guns and avoiding gunfights as the most viable strategy sounds really appealing to me (albeit probably even more rage-inducing :P). Makes it more believable if you're relying on hacking and stealth since Aiden is a super hacker and not necessarily some sort of super agent or soldier.

The fact that they went with a open-world game might have fudged those plans but then again they probably might have thought about it at some point and came to the conclusion that the game wasn't as fun to a lot of people. I don't know, that's just my theory but it would have been at least incredibly interesting how they would've handled it if they went through that route.

I don't feel that the inclusion of guns is necessarily the problem, it's how their used when compared to hacking. Nine times out of ten they are not just a viable alternative to the hacking, they are the clearly superior choice. To wit:

1. I can aim my guns, hacking takedowns are hampered by the borked targeting system which always manages to choose everything except my target.
2. Enemy patrol patterns don't seem designed to take them near hacking takedown opportunities without a lot of coaxing by the player. With guns, I can achieve a headshot in about two seconds.
3. There is almost never any incentive to hack unless it's a condition of the mission and there is almost never any penalty for using guns.

Given that, why should I spend a stupid amount of time lining up enemies for a takedown via hacking when I can spend three seconds achieving the same result with a silenced pistol? I also think it's ridiculous that Aiden is this crack-shot with seemingly every gun every invented.

Really I think that the fact that the hacking kind of sucks is more of an issue than guns being included.

@lawgamer: True. Guns are too easy, even on Realistic. If they would remove the silencer and just give him a handgun with very limited ammo then it could've been better. Like you would only use it to get out of a nasty situation where you need to escape and you'r cornered.
I also do not understand the FOCUS mode, are we still thinking 'bullet time' is too cool to be left out? Why can this guy stop time? He's not a super soldier or some mutant, there's no backstory to this ability at all and it doesn't add anything to the game just make it easier. You can also use it for hacking things while driving, but that's just to tackle a bad design I think.

But the hacking of static objects is probably not interesting enough to make it the only way to get through enemy infested area's. It's like the question "should WatchDogs be an open world game at all?", well if not then the whole game would need a redesign, or else the mechanics are just way too simple for this day and age.

@lawgamer: But how does the hacking "suck" exactly? What would you actually want? Did you want a game where Aiden goes to an internet cafe, opens his Mac Air and you'd have to start typing away code for the next 10 minutes? Or better something along the lines of that abominable hacking mini-game from the Bethesda Fallout games?

This is an action game with a hacking twist. I don't really understand the complaint that hacking is "too easy" or "sucks" because it cannot work in any other way for this style of gameplay. This was never touted as a Thief game, or as a single player RPG. This was always going to be an open world game with some hacking stuff - a dynamic fast moving game.

@dussck: as for Focus - yah I still think bullet time is cool. Bullet time is always cool. It's also necessary to pull off some cool hacking while driving to get rid of your pursuers. Thats not getting around bad design - that is intentional design that works perfectly. Focus is also something that you could quite literally never use in the game if you didn't want to - but thats like people that play games and make up some crazy rules in their head that they will never use XYZ items because thats not pure or something.

The people who keep picking this game apart seem to have really wanted Alpha Protocol 2 instead of GTA with hacking - and this game from the very early days was always advertised as GTA with hacking.

@humanity: I practically never used focus throughout the whole game, I always just kept forgetting to use it.

See, I love having the option. I hate that you can only carry a couple guns in GTA. I also play Watch Dogs very steathily and basically never use my gun but I like when the game gives me options. There's no reason for it to be limited.So no, the game shouldn't have no guns because if I don't want to use guns I generally don't have to.

It would be better with hand to hand combat. And give me the option to attack people walking around. Some times I just want to punch a dude on the street.

I played through Watch Dogs on normal, but about 3/4ths of the game I played as a stealth game, spending a lot of time figuring out how to silently take out individual enemies one by one - mostly using the melee takedown. (this does not include the convoy missions that largely require you to use firearms). I described my playstyle as "batman-esque" at one point (the stealth bits, not the combat).

In the late part of the game, I started using guns rather liberally, and quite enjoyed the gunplay at that point.

Best single mission experience was probably the final mission of the Arms trade arc - where I kept moving around, taking out enemies and then moving on before their friends could catch up to me, using a mixture of IED's, "The Destroyer" (sniper rifle) and the silenced pistol - as well as using hacking as a distraction.

I do think it makes a lot more sense for Aiden to use guns than to be a martial artist master - and I do think they found a good gameplay balance between stealth and action - it's the player's choice (I tried both). There are some contrivances that don't make a lot of sense - like carrying all of the unlocked guns with you. But for gameplay, it was nice (as it let you swap from the silenced Goblin to the LMG without needing to visit an armory, if things went poorly).

Anyway, yeah, Aiden isn't a very nice guy - and Watch Dogs is pretty much a "Let the world burn"-style revenge story. But I still found him quite a lot more reasonable than the characters of ... say, any GTA? At least Aiden has a motivation. Those of you hating on Aiden - I wonder what your feelings on Trevor (GTA 5) are?

I think Watch Dogs would need a compelling reason for Aiden to not have guns. Either model him after Batman, and give him more combat based devices and hacks, or have him avoid combat entirely, though that might mean adding more turrets and/or mechs to the game - or letting him mislead police and or security people into fighting for him. Lots of ways Watch Dogs 2 could be interesting and different, certainly.

I think guns as an option are better than guns as a core mechanic - Mirror's Edge is a wonderful example of this, you can play the entire game without using a weapon, but they are still there, because it just makes sense that if you are running from armed soldiers, that you might want to use one of their weapons.

Na guns are fine would of just seamed like a modern day Assassins Creed game.

Open world games are my favourite games so I enjoyed this. I played it 2 ways, I either went in black panther style, stealthily killing dudes with silenced weapons (got that silent burst-fire assault rifle super early and loved it) and the occasional take down. Most times I still did that first option but I started by doing as much damage as possible through the cameras.

Nope.

This conversation has made me realize a few things in general. First of all, people give up in this game far sooner with their stealth than they should. I've seen a lot of people complain that a lot of scenarios are easier gun blazing than hacking and I think as far as I am into the game, I completely disagree. There are missions I've completed without setting a foot inside the red zone, just camera jumping efficiently and finding my way to my goal.

Most times I've been feeling forced into a gun situation, I've still have a ton of uses of hacking first. I remember one mission in particular where you had to kill every enemy inside a place. Once you did that, backup arrived. And I did that backup session a bunch of times with guns and grenades and died doing it. What finally made me clear it? Sitting behind a thing and hacking. It was easier to set up traps and lure them into explosive things in the surroundings than take them all on head first with guns. So when people say going guns first is easier, I am not sure they've really figured out how useful hacking can actually be.

Also, as some others have said, Aiden isn't a saint. Beyond not being a saint, he's completely obsessed with getting revenge for the death of his niece. It seems like a lot of people look at that as Aiden not being obsessive and dangerous but righteous and as such should be more of a good guy. But I feel like there's scenario after scenario in the game where he just proves how much his own interest goes before other people's (including his sister's wishes) and other people's lives. There are events that take place where I've really questioned how justified I feel Aiden is in some choices he takes. I had a mission recently where I felt like Aiden is basically a less manic Trevor (GTA V). His own morals are what matters and anything in his way can die.

I feel like people end up in the place I do when I play Uncharted and they get disappointed that the game doesn't live up to their vision of what the game could be, as opposed to what the game actually is. For example, I love everything but the combat in Uncharted. For me, they could remove it and only have a globetrotting puzzle solving game where at best, you escape someone shooting at you. But that's not Uncharted. It's just me looking at some parts of the game envisioning a completely different game.

If guns were removed, they would have to rethink the entire game as most scenarios are built as a gun/hacking combo and the hacking would need to be substantially more diverse than it is.

It certainly does have room for more stealth mechanics and objectives, each making it less linear. Being forced to use stealth mechanics, however, does not make a game enjoyable as far as I'm concerned. More options are always better.

Personally I liked the mix of shooting and hacking. I'd use the hacking to set some stuff up and deal with some guys then I'd go in stealth and pick off the rest. There were a few big shoot outs in the later game though.