I decided to give Watch Dogs another go after playing the DLC Bloodline for Watch Dogs: Legion which has Aiden Pearce as the main lead. Simply, I wanted to know more about him and to see maybe if I had misjudged Aiden, and the game itself. The short of it is… yes! Yes, I had. While it does have some gameplay issues, the story, world-building, and characterization of Aiden are the most interesting parts – that now in retrospect make more sense in the Legion expansion.
A troubled man
During a hacker heist, Aiden and his partner are discovered. This leads to them making a hasty exit from the area. While they do get away, the heist angers a very dangerous faction within the city of Chicago that eventually leads to the death of Aiden’s niece during a high-speed car chase. Aiden survives the hit, but now with his niece dead, and his sister’s family shattered – his life takes a turn for the worse in a guilt-ridden and rage-fueled search for the men that caused this tragedy.
The incident has Aiden also sworn to protect the city, proclaiming himself to be the city’s vigilante, by punishing wrongdoings in any way possible. This he does by hacking the ctOS system that runs every fabric of Chicago, and wouldn’t you know it – the company behind this system is deeply involved in the corruption themselves.
The story isn’t too complicated, as it’s a revenge story at its heart. What makes it engaging is the characterization of Aiden Pearce. The first time I played Watch Dogs, I didn’t get very far. The death of the niece and the interaction with his sister felt like it was just there to justify all the hacking and killing. It’s of course true to a part, but the further I got into the game, the more captivating the world-building and our dear protagonist Aiden becomes. The world-building is interesting, as this is our first contact with the tech company Blume, a company that remains antagonistic throughout the whole franchise. Everything its long tentacles touches becomes corrupted, in one way or another. The whole thing feels very much on point with corporations spying, and then governments selling, trading, and buying this information – just like in real life.
However, that is not the main focus of the game, surprisingly. The focus lies entirely on Aiden, his mental state in this dirty world, and his psychotic hell-bent nature of saving Chicago’s citizens from themself. A noble cause perhaps, but during the game, you just can’t help to accumulate a few innocent casualties under your belt (unless you are a gaming god), and this is a thing Aiden himself acknowledges. Thanks to being fanatically driven, it’s justified as you must crack a few eggs to make an omelet. That’s how Aiden views it, at least. I found his mental state utterly fascinating and pretty damn well-told for being an open-world game.
If you can make it past the somewhat cringy exterior hacker edge of Watch Dogs, it’s an entertaining and dramatic telling of a man quickly falling into a hole of despair, trying to make right of all the wrongs in his so-called vigilante life. The revenge story is pretty good by itself since it’s a classic tale of starting at the bottom, eventually taking you all the way up to the king of hurt – with a few dramatic deaths and betrayals during the ride. I was very surprised by the narrative. It ended up pretty satisfactorily too, and it made the DLC for Legion that much more enjoyable now – meeting Aiden and his nephew again, years later. I just wished I would have played it in the right order the first time around for it to have more of an impact.
Hacking is life
When it comes to gameplay, it works like any third-person open world like from Ubisoft. You can parkour, climb roofs, take cover, and shoot mooks all day, but with the addition of hacking, which is the theme of Watch Dogs – at least when it comes to the gaming part. It works well and is fun to boot. Frequently, you don’t even have to leave cover to devastate the enemies guarding the location you want to purge. You can just jump from camera to camera, and lure “innocent” sentries to their doom by hacking explosive pipes and other combustible fun items. It’s amusing, but if you have played the other later games in the franchise, it is rather limiting, as these titles have expanded the hacking dramatically, allowing you to do even more heinous (& hilarious) things to the poor guards.
These hacking skills cover all areas of the game, from driving to infiltrating hideouts. There are even skills for mundane stuff, like scanning people on the street for juicy compromising information about them, and to clean out their bank account, of course. The Driving aspect probably contains the most devastating hacks since it will affect the most amount of people at one single time. Usually, these situations involve plenty of innocents, which makes the vigilante stuff a bit questionable. However, as mentioned, I don’t think there is a disconnect between the game and story, as Aiden recognizes his action, and if anyone gets hurt, it’s for the greater good after all according to him. This also plays into the reputation system, as long as you don’t murder cops or civilians en masse, like any Grand Theft Auto game, the population of Chicago will accept you. If you do, well, you might get into trouble a bit easier, since civilians will have a bigger incentive to call the police on you when they spot you doing something shady.
This system works fine and adds another level to the game. You will want to maintain a good rep with the citizens of Chicago since it makes life easier. Escaping from the police will be challenging without hurting either them or the civilians walking the streets, and I must say, this being an active part of the gameplay and narrative is great. It makes so much sense, especially, since while Aiden is a bit of a psycho, he is not a murderer of innocents. The general shooting feels good too. The feedback from hitting enemies with an assault rifle is satisfying, and the same goes for blowing them up. It never gets old seeing bad guys flying all over the place and landing in awkward and painful places. The damage is high, even in the normal setting. While you can take down dudes fast, the same goes for you. It makes finding and shooting from cover very important, otherwise, you will end up dead in two seconds flat like any low-level rookie robber. And you don’t want that. However, the PC version of the game does not work too well out of the box, if you decide to play with a mouse and keyboard. The game requires a few fixes, if you want your mouse to respond with any sort of precision.
Mod & config fixes
One baffling decision for the PC version, is that aim assist remains on, even when lowering it in the options. Very annoying, as the game will take control of your mouse in every firefight, making getting quick headshot kills extremely cumbersome. There is a fix, thankfully. Download Disable Aim Assist and follow the instructions. It requires a bit of tinkering, but this tutorial video here explains how to do it.
Another problem is the mouse acceleration, which makes the general movement feel very sluggish. No modding is required to fix this, but you will have to do some config file editing. You can find the original Reddit post here, but I will type down the instructions below (modified by me), in case the post gets removed.
- Go to C:\Users\\Documents\My Games\Watch_Dogs\
- There should be a file named “GamerProfile.xml”. Open it in a text editor of your choice.
- Look for the following settings and change their values respectively:
- Set “Sensitivity=” to 1.
- Set “UseMouseSmooth=” to 0.
- Set “Smoothness=” to 0.
- Save and Close the file.
- Then when in-game turn off v-sync if it’s on, and set your “Change your GPU Max Buffered Frames” to 1
- Enjoy a smooth mouse.
It’s a shame you have to do stuff like this if you want to play with a mouse and keyboard, but luckily, it isn’t too much work. I highly recommend going through it. I tried to power through Watch Dogs at first without these changes, and it only made me incredibly annoyed. It took away a lot of the enjoyment, but as soon as I made these changes the combat became fun.
The city of Chicago
Watch Dogs is a few years old now, but I can’t help to still get impressed with the visuals of the city of Chicago. Some stuff looks old compared to modern standards, but overall, the city feels like a place that is alive through its graphics, the amount of unique civilian animations, and the different environments of the city. What also is cool is that Chicago feels true to how it’s depicted in current year media – a crime-ridden city on a direct ride to Decay Street USA. There are pleasant places, but Ubisoft went all out in creating a dystopian city here, in more ways than one. I found myself often just taking a stroll, to soak it all in. The weather system and sound also add a lot to this. There are tons of different recorded street sounds, from typical traffic to hearing randoms on the street complaining about whatever. It all adds to a highly immersive experience from sounds and visuals alone, much more than say, Grand Theft Auto 5 in my opinion.
Beyond the radio music with licensed songs, there are also a lot of music performances to convey the mood of Aiden, the city, and the different set pieces throughout Watch Dogs. Some of these tunes are truly a step above. Just take a listen to this musical number below, which plays when Aiden has a moment of joy and wonder.
In conclusion
When I played Watch Dogs initially, I got the impression that it wasn’t much more than a run-of-the-mill open-world game, but now, after giving it a real chance – I see the error in my ways, so to speak. The gameplay, even with the added hacking remains fairly basic, as you will drive around, shoot people, and hack the occasional computer for funsies. However, Watch Dogs genuinely shines when it comes to story and mood. It has a dark, but still somber and melancholic tone throughout, which speaks to the emo inside me. A story of loss, coping with that, and trying to make right for yourself – to eventually learn to let go. I liked it, and it made me appreciate Aiden as a character. He is one of those rare protagonists that evokes a feeling in me – a very rare sensation nowadays. I will recommend the game on the basis of the story because the more modern titles (especially Watch Dogs 2) have the better gameplay covered. That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s just a bit limited compared to those titles. Happy hacking!
Thanks for reading.
/Thomas
Tom's Gaming Blog 