Watch Dogs is one of those games I find myself arguing about a lot. Sometimes in on the side of “hey that game was great.” Others, I'm saying “it lacked this and this and this.” It was far from perfect, but not so far to make me ignore the sequel. There was room for improvement, and after my hands on with Watch Dogs 2 at E3 2016 I'm confident Ubisoft found some.
The first thing I noticed in my demo was the improvement to the hacking system. A floating line constantly extends from your character, highlighting the seemingly endless amount of people and things to hack. I was forced to do a linear story demo, but all I really wanted to do was explore all the fun things I could hack into and the chaos it would cause.
Unfortunately, hacking is still of the “hold x" variety. I would've liked to see Ubisoft add puzzles or minigames instead of just button pressing. I understand why it wouldn't work for every hackable object, since there appear to be thousands in the game, but even the advanced door locks or target PCs I hacked were this simple mechanic. It just felt anticlimactic, especially since achieving the objective adds thousands of “followers" to DedSec, the hacker collective you work for.
The “you” in this instance is Marcus Holloway, a cool hacker dude that hopefully has more personality than Aiden, the hero from the first game. I was not alone in my distaste for Aiden, and I didn't get enough time to know if Marcus will be that much better. But I'd have trouble believing he could be worse.
The best part of the demo, the part that really shined through to me as the most promising, was also the thing I got to do the least. Because the E3 demo was super structured, with an Ubisoft rep constantly telling me where to go and what to press (it was like a step removed from just watching someone else play) I didn't get to have much fun. I had SOME fun, mainly when I ignored instructions to instead hack cars and smash them around. Watching the civilian reactions was highly entertaining. I even accidentally put a hit on someone, and moments after the poor schlub was gunned down the cops showed up. Bullets were flying, people were screaming but I was told to leave this engaging anarchy to chase a checkpoint across town.
it was a shame, really. Sure, the mission was fine. It felt a lot like the missions from Watch Dogs, which feel a lot like the missions from any other third-person open-world action game. I'm not interested in Watch Dogs 2 for all the ways it's like other games. (Sidenote: it had the same drone mechanic as GRW). I wanted to play the side of Watch Dogs 2 that isn't like other games. Hacking parked cars and police equipment and helicopters is super fucking cool, and the more of it I get to do in Watch Dogs 2 the happier I'll be.
So did my hands on demo alleviate my concerns? Kind of. As frustrating as it was to be told how to play, the fact that I wanted to do more than that gives me hope. I wanted to run around and cause chaos, and when Watch Dogs 2 releases November 15 that's exactly what I'll send the first few hours doing. Once that gets old then I'll consider doing some missions with a main character that hopefully doesn't suck. The Watch Dogs 2 I want to play seemed to be there sandwiched between the check point chasing and cell phone calls. Hopefully that game is there on the release date too.
