Watch Dawgz

Watch Dogs is a game that was meant to start the 'true next gen'. It was heralded as the golden child that was meant to usher in the new age of fancy graphics, impressive performance and audio-visual bliss those who ponied up the cash for a PS4 or Xbox One were waiting for. 'Twas a free-roaming open-world action game about hackers, with a mysterious story filled with intrigue and espionage and a gruff vigilante protagonist who sounded a bit like Batman. Gameplay footage proudly flaunted in 2012 showed a gorgeous, detailed game world that ran smooth as butter. The hype train had left the station.

And then it fucked it all up. The first fuck-up was revealed quickly - the final game was noticeably (some would say substantially) worse looking than the supposed 'gameplay footage' paraded two years previously, to the point where it looked ugly in comparison. The gameplay demonstration was quickly revealed to have been a ruse, using spruced up graphics not available in the game to pre-sell it on its graphics. The open world was not as dynamic or interesting as the demo suggested and the gameplay proved to be like pretty much every other generic third person shooter. Quickly the goodwill died and the hype train derailed. People were out for blood, feeling they were duped by the developers who had, essentially, lied in their aggressive PR campaign.

I was not part of the hype train. I was, as I usually am, one of the ambivalent. To cure my ambivalence I picked the game up to try it out for myself. And the game is ok. It takes some getting used to, but it's entertaining in its own right. It's just not that impressive. Good but not great is a term thrown around and I feel it applies here, though maybe change 'good' with 'alright'. The gameplay is fun enough, but nothing astonishing or, it has to be said, even special. The open world is large and has plenty of things to do, but not much of it is compelling. While the game looks nice, it's nowhere near as impressive as that two year old fake-out gameplay (that thing was gorgeous).

Anyway my issue isn't with the gameplay or graphics, it's with the story. That's what I was always interested in. An intricate mystery involving corporate espionage, hackers, technology, vigilante nonsense...I was intrigued. I wanted to know more. And then I played the game and found out the story is stupid nonsense. Watch Dogs has a bad story. Not just the actual content of the story, but the way its told and the specific events - it's all nonsense.

So I'll be doing a synopsis of the game's story. This might seem odd, but think about it - unlike a movie, a game can run to anything from six to thirty hours. There's no easy way to get the story if you don't have access to the game. I've kept things as basic and relevant as I can, since Watch Dogs campaign is somewhere in the realm of fifteen hours or so.

First, there’s some bullshit flavouring I need to outline. This shit goes initially unexplained in the game, making the first few hours really confusing, so it’s useful to know in advance.

In Chicago, a technology company called Blume has developed an operating system called ctOS, which links all technology in Chicago together. It’s meant to make everything better, but doesn’t. Instead it allows Blume and hackers to collect information on everyone and everything, destroying any privacy. Phone calls, text messages, browsing history, video camera footage, bank details and more are collected on profiles for every single person in the city. While the people go about ignorant of the situation, there’s a hacker group called DedSec (constantly mentioned in the game but not featuring in any of it) that do cyber terrorism against Blume.

 

You play as Aiden Pierce, an unlikeable, gruff-voiced ‘fixer’ (hitman/mercenary). He’s like if Batman wasn’t cool and killed heaps of people (and also always wore a cap in every situation). He works on a job with a skeezy hacker named Damien. It’s a digital robbery of a fancy hotel, where they plan to rob the bank accounts of the rich clientele by exploiting the ctOS to hack their phones. The plan is disrupted when an unknown hacker blocks them out and puts them on the radar. Fixers are sent out to kill both men, resulting in Damien becoming crippled and Aiden’s niece being killed. One year later and Aiden broods and vows violent revenge.

He teams up with Jordi, another fixer, and Clara, a lady hacker. He also gets his hands on a magic phone that can hack into anything (doors, traffic lights, people’s phones, car alarms, bridges, explosives, etc.) with a single click of a button. This is the central gameplay gimmick, but the story never actually gives you any origins on it. With Jordi’s help, Aiden captures Raymond, the guy who accidentally killed his niece in the assassination attempt. He tortures him for information but Raymond doesn’t crack. Aiden hands him over to Jordi who, over the course of the game, tortures Raymond, tied to a chair, for weeks for information.

Damien shows up and tells Aiden that he wants to work together with him and take down whoever it was that got them both. Aiden says no, because he doesn’t like skeevy Damien. Damien doesn’t respond well, and sends fixers to kidnap Aiden’s sister and hold her hostage to force him to co-operate. Aiden is pissed off, and gets his nephew to safety.

Clara tells Aiden about a secret fancy research hacker lab that Blume abandoned years ago, and the two find it and start doing their operations from there. Clara keeps telling Aiden that she’s done helping him, and every single time he just compliments her vaguely and she agrees to help more. 

Aiden discovers that mobster boss Lucky Quinn, a violent decrepit old man, is in town and controlling things. He’s introduced in a scene where he murders one of his own men for failing him. The second this scene happens you know that Quinn is the main villain. Spoiler alert or whatever, but it’s super obvious the moment Quinn shows up that he’s the big bad.

When hacking into buildings and networks a while later, Aiden finds out about a street gang with super-advanced hacking skills that have taken residence in a derelict building with heaps of security. It’s run by Iraq, a ghetto gangster who talks in ghetto slang but is also a high-tech hacker who talks in techie slang but is also an Iraq war veteran who mentions the troops a lot. He’s an absurdly stupid character. 

Iraq, working for Quinn, has hacked into ctOS and collected information on everybody in Chicago to use as blackmail to control everybody. This occurs mid-game, but this is the evil guy’s evil plan – mass-scale blackmail. Aiden also deduces that Damien wants the blackmail for his own nefarious purposes. All this blackmail info is stored on a server in Iraq’s building, which is under heavy guard.

Aiden, for whatever reason, then needs to get into a mysterious auction to find more information, and does so by taking the identity of a European businessman that nobody’s ever seen before. To do this, Aiden deduces that he should just murder the guy to remove any loose ends. Clara is shocked, but then it’s made ok because they reveal the European guy is a crazy murderer who kills and eats prostitutes (I'm not joking). He kills the guy and takes his identity.

He sneaks in to the auction to find, of all things, a Taken-styled sex slave auction of abducted girls, run by Quinn and Iraq (this is where the game does the whole ‘they were the bad guys the whole time’ thing despite the player knowing this for hours). They instantly notice that Aiden isn’t European (and that he’s obviously the ‘vigilante’ whose face and name have been shown every day on the news) and try to kill him, but he calls the cops and gets the sex slave ring shut down (there are side missions where he shuts the entire operation down as well).

Aiden gets annoyed with all the bullshit and eventually just assaults Iraq’s building with machine guns to get the information, before killing Iraq as well. He steals all the information and takes it home. Once back at the base, he finds that Clara can’t hack it, and they need Richard, the reclusive guy who designed the ctOS system before running off.

You track Richard down to the countryside where he lives as a crazy drunk hermit. He agrees to help, sort of, if you hack into the Blume corporate office and delete all surveillance data about him so that fixers will stop trying to kill him. You do this, and also find out that Damien has sold you out to Blume for literally no reason. Fixers turn up, you kill them and you and Richard get back to base.

          

                   The heroic retard crew. From the left: Richard, Clara, Aiden and Jordi.

Then there are a bunch of missions dedicated to hunting down and killing a rival hacker named Defalt (he's pretty much just deadmau5), who has no dialogue and no importance to anything going on. It’s a roadbump, just something that happens to pad the game out a little more. You have the data and un-decrypt it or whatever. Also it’s revealed that Clara was the unknown hacker who screwed you over at the very beginning of the game, and that she’s been working with you because she feels super bad that your niece died as a result. Aiden tells her to fuck off.   

Aiden, finally sick of Damien calling up every few minutes to gloat about kidnapping his sister, decides to rescue her. She ends up killing somebody in the rescue attempt and is all freaked out, while Aiden slaughters a bunch of goons without batting an eyelid. You get her and her son to safety, at which point you split up, presumably forever. There’s a bit of moralising here about how Aiden kills a bunch of people but sees no problem in it, and that he’s lost his family in his quest for revenge, but it’s so half-hearted it’s weirdly detached.

Aiden then decides to finally go after Quinn, who was the one who ordered the hit on him (which you probably figured out the second he showed up in the game). He assaults Quinn’s hotel room and kills a bunch of dudes. Quinn then finally reveals what it’s all been about. All the assassination attempts, the sex slave ring, Aiden’s dead niece, Iraq, it’s all because of this – the city’s mayor accidentally killed his mistress and it was caught on video. That’s it, that’s what all the bullshit has been about. Aiden’s niece was killed because, for whatever reason, Quinn somehow thought that Aiden and Damien were after the video, which he’s been using to blackmail and control the mayor. Aiden takes down Quinn by using his magic phone to turn off the old man’s pacemaker. A bit anticlimactic but whatever.

Clara, because she’s an idiot, plans on surrendering herself over to Damien in exchange for Aiden’s kidnapped sister – despite Aiden having rescued his sister several days ago. Dumb move honey. Aiden tracks Clara down to his niece’s grave, where she’s laying some flowers. Fixers show up and she’s shot in the arm, and takes cover behind a tombstone. Aiden shows up, Clara sticks her head out from behind the tombstone like an idiot and gets shot in the throat. Boom, that’s it, she’s fucking dead. Aiden kills the fixers and gets a little bit sad about dead Clara. Gotta say it was refreshing to see her taken out so abruptly. There were no final words, no tears – just a bullet through the neck and she went down like a sack of bricks.

Aiden then uploads all of the blackmail videos and photos from ctOS onto the internet for shits and giggles I guess, thinking somehow it’ll stop everything. It doesn’t. Damien calls and reveals that, somehow, despite not having the skills, he’s ‘unlocked’ ctOS and now has total control of the city. He’s gonna use that to fuck things up. Now Aiden could free himself of this by simply getting on a boat and leaving Chicago, but he decides to finally go kill Damien (something he should have done at the beginning).

Aiden needs to hack into a terminal to find Damien, but can’t get past the security, so following Richard’s advice he instead uploads viruses on three terminals scattered throughout Chicago to take down an orbital satellite above the city and cut all the power off completely. This is all as stupid as it sounds. Before he does this, DedSec contact him (first time they’ve done anything in the game) and tell him to let them take over the city. He says no and they vow vengeance like cartoon villains. This is obvious sequel-baiting nonsense. Anyway Aiden then tracks Damien down to the old abandoned lighthouse for his final confrontation. They have a short talk, and then Jordi turns up for some reason and switches sides. Aiden kicks Jordi’s ass and then kills Damien. The end.

The end credits though are full of little sound bites and videos that basically say ‘this is for the sequel’. Aiden decides to remain a vigilante to ‘fix’ the world, Blume makes a new version of ctOS and stretches out to other countries (they name Paris, so maybe that’s next?) and DedSec basically say ‘we’re evil now and we’re gonna take over the world’ just so you know who is bad for the next game.

After the credits, before the return to free-roaming, there’s a short scene where Aiden goes to see Raymond, the guy responsible for killing Aiden’s niece, who has been tortured by Jordi in the background for the entire game. You have to decide whether to kill him or let him live. I let him live.

Why? Well throughout the game you can find hidden little voice recordings that make you feel really bad for Raymond. He was a fixer, like Aiden, but he wanted to get out of the business and have a clean break so he could live peacefully with his loving wife. So in that respect he was less morally bankrupt that Aiden, who never had any intention of quitting his day job.

Raymond was strong-armed into doing hits for Quinn, who constantly threatened to kill his wife if he didn’t. Raymond reluctantly followed orders, knowing that if he didn’t then his wife would be killed, while hopelessly trying to find a way out.

The Aiden hit happened and Raymond freaked out. Aiden's niece is accidentally killed in the hit which totally destroys Raymond emotionally and psychologically to the point where he can’t sleep and has nightmares about it. But then it gets worse - the gangsters then kidnap his wife, drug her up on crack cocaine and then sell her as a sex slave at one of the auctions. So Raymond wasn’t having a good time. And yet Aiden still acts all high and mighty over him. He does a little ‘maybe we’re not so different’ thing briefly before going ‘no, we totally are’ despite Aiden slaughtering his way through hundreds of people through the game and not getting shat up about any of them.

Your magic phone can do anything. Like explode random power boxes somehow

Watch Dogs doesn’t have a good story. It’s a bad one, prone to randomly getting side tracked. There are very few missions that actually push the story forward. Characters don’t really have much going on. French eye-candy Clara is an odd addition, since she doesn’t really do much in the confines of the game. She’s not important to the plot. Neither is Richard, or Jordi, or that weird detour with Defalt. The stuff that is important to the plot all feels out of place. Quinn, despite being the main villain, feels completely disconnected from all the hacking stuff (he seems like he doesn't know what a computer is). The sex slave auction comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit in with any of the hacking stuff. And the big reveal of 'the mayor killed his mistress' feels like something from a particularly weak episode of Law and Order. 

Damien as the back-up villain is really strange, since his ability and motivations are inconsistent. He’s established as a middling hacker who needs Aiden to be better, but at the end he’s suddenly king hacker of hacktown with a mercenary army at his disposal. He initially wants to find who put a hit out on him, then he wants to blackmail everyone for cash, but then he tries to get a job at Blume, and at the end he goes full villain and tries to take over Chicago. What the hell?

So that was that nonsense. Not a good effort I must say - they should have focused on corporate espionage over Blume (who is in the background for most of the game) instead of the whole 'old gangster blackmails people' nonsense. Maybe they'll get it better in the next one. That being said, this is from the same developer that brought us Assassin's Creed, the game series about a wimpy man in the future who uses a space chair to relive the memories of his ancestors, which include a pirate and a Native American, and who had a fistfight with the Pope over control of a magic ball that was built by robot aliens from the past.