Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games.
When Ubisoft sent me a copy of Watch Dogs 2, I was curious but ultimately worried that
I wouldn’t have anything to say about it.
I mean, it’s an Ubisoft open world game in 2016 – not only that, but it’s a sequel
to one of the most famously disappointing games of recent memory.
It’s been a year replete with total time sinks – No Man’s Sky and Mafia III being
two prime examples, and honestly I worried that investing so much time into this would
merely be another meaningless distraction from the masses of writing I need to do right
now.
However, as I cruised around the seemingly accurate representation of San Francisco the
game puts forward, I found myself having…
fun.
As I infiltrated top secret facilities without even setting foot in a building, I felt challenged
and tense in the same way a modern Deus Ex game evokes.
As I found myself caring about a group of misfits despite being framed by some of the
cringiest hacker humour since, well, any movie ever made with hackers in it, I began to realise
that maybe, just maybe, this was the game that Watch Dogs was always meant to be.
I mean, honestly, I’m actually kinda taken aback at how much this game is doing for me
on so many different levels.
It manages to straddle so many different lines that in modern open world design seem so incompatible
with one another.
Let’s start with the gameplay because, after the shitshow that was Mafia III, I thought
I had lost all hope in open world mission design.
Functionally, things don’t seem much different here – it’s the same ‘go to objective,
infiltrate objective to get to the goal’ design that drives almost any open world game.
The difference here is that in practice, the game weirdly ended up reminding me of Human
Revolution more than anyone else.
Like, remember in the first Watch Dogs where you had that interesting camera mechanic where
getting line-of-sight on a hackable object allowed you to create havoc but ultimately
you would have to stealth your way through the compound in order to get to your goal?
It made that game feel like a generic cover shooter with hacking elements rather than
the other way around.
Here, that is far from a problem.
Not only do hacking minigames appear in world adding a physicality to puzzle solving, but
thanks to the presence of your drone and jumper (a little vehicle that rolls along the ground
and can hack objects), you almost literally never have to set foot in the buildings you
need to get into.
It’s designed to be a far more difficult approach as your mechanical infiltrators can
be taken down in one hit leaving you to deal with a lengthy cooldown process unless you
do want to head in yourself, but there’s something so empowering about feeling like
you can get in and out without anyone knowing you’re there, mainly because you were never
there.
That said, there’s also a gleeful sense of mischief in messing with people, setting
traps and creating distractions just for the hell of it.
The game allows you to get truly absurd with it at times – the tension of infiltrating
an FBI building gives way to hilarity when you can highlight an agent as a gang traitor
and watch as two sicarios bolt past (apparently through the multiple security systems you
had to bypass to get there) to inevitably get cut down because hey, YOU’RE IN A GODDAMN
FBI BUILDING.
Of course it’s far from realistic, but it falls in line with what you want to do in
this world – mess around and cause havoc.
What’s perhaps most interesting about this and what I never thought I would say about
a fucking Watch Dogs game, is that this kind of playfulness is something I feel the game
encourages through its writing.
You see, in my eyes, the narrative here contextualises your approach to these missions.
Yes, the cringey “l33t hakz0rz” aesthetic and humour is there in spades, but the way
it’s implemented is surprisingly clever.
Remember how in the first game Dedsec was seen as a shadowy, dark organisation concerned
purely with justice?
Well here they’re revealed to be a bunch of bratty trolls.
If we’re looking at this in terms of the obvious reference to certain hacker groups,
then it’s rare for a game to actually nail the ‘for the lulz’ nature of that endeavour
(and yes, I hate myself for even saying that).
There is a larger target at play and as the story progresses, it becomes more and more
focused on that target, but at the start the game isn’t afraid to spend time building
up these characters and encouraging playfulness through attacks on more general institutions.
These characters aren’t simply doing these things for the greater good, they’re using
these missions to acquire online followers.
In a lot of ways, they’re kinda just fucking around.
And that’s great!
It doesn’t feel like the game is trying to pad its length because firstly those missions
are immensely fun in themselves thanks to expansive and varied level design; second
it allows the game to give you insight into these surprisingly deep characters and thirdly
because turning these early missions into little vignettes as opposed to super important
plot moments fits with what these characters are actually doing – their goals are initially
as immediate as the player’s actions, and it’s at once illuminating and gratifying.
Also, you may be thinking to yourself, “did he just say these characters are surprisingly
deep?
THESE hacker meme culture idiots?!”
Well, yeah.
I don’t know if this is me having my expectations set so unbearably low by Aiden Pierce – one
of the flattest, dullest characters I can remember playing in a game – but I actually
found myself really rooting for this group.
If the game has a common theme, it’s that technology can often be used as a mask – sometimes
literally in the case of Wrench – but it’s always hiding something deeper and weirdly,
the hacker stuff makes these characters feel more human.
It weirdly ends up tackling identity politics and the need to belong to something bigger
in an incredibly nuanced way – as opposed to asking whether or not technology is bad,
it asks where we draw the line between what is healthy and what is detached.
The edgy hacker humour is totally surface-level – a marker of collective identity which
acts as a vector for more interesting stories about the individuals within it.
What’s particularly great is that the game is never sanctimonious about the dangers of
technology or how we’re not projecting our real selves like it’s fucking Banksy or
something – it recognises the importance of the mask, of sometimes hiding parts of
ourselves or projecting the bits we’re most confident about.
It acknowledges that the danger is not the technology itself, but the people who would
seek to manipulate your constructed identity to their own means.
Ultimately, it conveys an incredibly compelling message for the modern age that few games
about hacking have done previously – choose whoever the hell you want to be, and if technology
helps you do that, so be it.
Just be wary of those who would seek to use that against you.
It may not always hit the mark (it’s a little weird if you’ve killed a million cops to
get to your objective and Marcus comes out with something like “it’s the hack of
the century!”) but nearly everything you do is thematically consonant with your character.
At the end of the day, Marcus is a dumb, action movie loving dweeb with a penchant for mischief
– not unlike your role in the world as a player.
It acts in stark contrast to Aiden Pierce – a guy who had all these powers at the
touch of a button, but was so dull and self-serious that it never felt like you as a player could
have any fun with it.
Here, they manage to strike the balance between an infinitely more playful tone whilst engaging
with our modern anxieties with technology, racism and sexism in the tech sector, how
we construct our own identities and so much more.
I have a feeling people will balk at the cringey humour on display and, well, you’re within
your rights to do so.
Peel that superficial layer back, however, and you’ll find a game that takes a lot
of risks with an IP whose name isn’t held in the highest regard.
Not only is it a wildly entertaining open world experience with a refreshing take on
the expected mission design of the genre, but its writing renders it all thematically
coherent, which should be commended in and of itself.
So there’s my take on Watch Dogs 2 – I was certainly not expecting it to be anywhere
near this good, so I’d heartily recommend checking it out if you get
the chance.
Also, I just want to take this opportunity to thank my Patrons who truly make this show
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And with all of that said, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games – thank
you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.