DedSec isn’t dead yet, as legions of loyal Watch_Dogs fans prepare to feast on new n00bs. Ubisoft unleashed Watch_Dogs 2 for free during the Ubisoft Forward conference on July 12, throwing another litter of script kiddies to the wolves. The sequel to the unfairly maligned Watch_Dogs (2014), whose mind-blowing E3 graphics were toned down for performance reasons, Watch_Dogs 2 rebooted the series with smoother parkour, tighter driving, and industry-defining art direction.
Anonymous anti-hero Aiden Pearce and his monotone quest for revenge were dropped in favor of fresh protagonist Marcus Holloway and his online army of Facebook followers. Though new abilities, drones, and gadgets overclocked the gameplay, solidifying W_D 2 as the modern-day Assassin’s Creed fans were dying for, some preferred the serious tone and higher stakes of the original vigilante to the Saints Row-style hacktivist antics of Marcus and his merry men. Looting the bank accounts of homeless cancer patients to pay for 3D-printed automatic weapons on your way to sabotage a teenage girl’s dancing livestream was a bit much, but at least you could pet the animals. Watch dogs, indeed.
Unfortunately, Marcus, Wrench, and Sitara were no match for Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. Once again, Grand Theft Auto V stole the spotlight, selling over 120 million copies, but Watch_Dogs had one last trick up its trenchcoat: hacking invasions. Like all great games, the premise was simple. Profile your target, install a backdoor, wait for the download to complete, and run. Succeed, and you were showered with likes, followers, promotions, and another hit of dopamine—plus some selfies for Instagram.
Hacking invasions were the opposite of every other PVP experience on the market. Your objective was not only to avoid harming your mark, but to stop them from even knowing you did anything at all. Accessing the contract from an in-game app and driving miles through dull Bay Area traffic to get visual confirmation of your target built suspense and ensnared you in Ubi’s immersive world. Borrowing seamless online multiplayer from Dark Souls like Bill Gates borrowed the code for DOS, Watch_Dogs multiplayer became the cyberpunk genre’s final boss.
At first glance, Watch_Dogs 2 was merely a competent but sterile 20-hour open world Ubisoft Game. It ticked all the boxes: one-button takedowns, collectible MacGuffins, architecturally questionable towers, papier-mâché scenery, more DLC than missions. Still, beneath its cunning disguise of a 75 Metacritic score—“generally favorable”—lurked the most addictive, primal, no-holds-barred, one-on-one hide-and-go-seek-with-guns ever programmed.
Aside from E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy, which was more of a religion than a digital entertainment product, there were basically zero cyberpunk franchises with multiplayer. Technically, the first Deus Ex patched in deathmatch, an odd move for a game whose entire plot was about how violence is wrong. And The Matrix Online was shut down in 2009, presumably killing everyone still jacked in. The closest analogue to Watch_Dogs hacking multiplayer was SpyParty, still stuck in Early Access.
“DedSec has given you the truth. Do what you will.”
Watch_Dogs 2 invasions are incredible, a heart-pounding synthesis of surveillance, deception, and paranoia—a chess-like battle of wits in a pixel-perfect recreation of Silicon Valley beneath Blume’s omniscient eyes. Though the stealth genre has been clinically dead ever since Splinter Cell Blacklist perfected the sneaking mission in 2013, Watch_Dogs multiplayer has secretly kept the torch burning all these years.
You and your phone against the world. Black hats could be anyone, anywhere, at any time. Wasting suspicious passerby who bumped into you the wrong way was just the cost of doing business. Some people only feel like they are being watched. In Watch_Dogs, you know.
Anything can happen during those ninety seconds of pure adrenaline: stalking your prey for blocks with a quadcopter, initiating a hack from a nearby rooftop, cutting off the power to an entire parking garage mid-chase, starting a gang war with one text message, opening fire into a crowd of civilians in a last-gasp attempt to perforate your fixer and stop the inexhaustible death march of your enemy’s loading bar as it nears 99%. Watch_Dogs invasions are every movie ever made, John Wick meets The Bourne Identity meets The Lives of Others.
It feels intimate. Getting inside your prey’s head like the Batman, blowing up manholes to cause chaos as you turn a corner and melt into the screaming crowd, cancelling the transfer and flooring it while your sprinting victim unloads his 1911 through your passenger-side window. As the glass shatters across your lap and you crank up the Mozart to drown out the gunfire, it feels romantic, suicidal. Uniquely American.
Like life, Watch_Dogs invasions are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Thomas Hobbes never played Watch_Dogs 2, probably, but we suspect he would have enjoyed it. Or at least given it a 75.
Watch_Dogs: Legion will come out October 29 on PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Stadia. Next gen ports are forthcoming. Keep those phones charged.
Source: Claiming Your Free Copy of Watch Dogs 2 During Ubisoft Forward
