Watch Dogs can't catch a break

Leave Watch Dogs alone!

Watch Dogs is certainly carving out its time in the headlines now isn't it? And with the game a literal hairs-breadth away that makes sense, marketing in full swing baby! In fact, by the time this blog comes out the game itself with be a day away, whether that's a day forward or backwards is beyond me, I don't care enough to look it up. But whereas this franchise that I haven't really fallen in love with is making the media rounds, it's funny how none of the stories it's generating are particularly positive. In fact, I can't remember the last happy Watch Dogs headline I've read, just a couple that elicited some mixed opinions. So in the effort of sanitising the Watch Dogs marketing train, I'm going to talk about a few of them because they tickled me and I wanted to share that mirth, even if it's sort of at the expense of others. (I never said I was a good person.)

First of all, the ironic kicker. So Watch Dogs is a game that's ostensibly about hacking, until the second game came along and hijacked the aesthetic to tell one of the most unfocused 'anarchy-central' plots I've ever witnessed. (I mean, it started off about surveillance but then seemed to descend into general corporate vigilantism.) This time around the team have created an entire fanatical government over London in order to hopefully narrow the narrative lens a little bit, and in doing so further pushed the hacking elements of the game a little bit to the wayside. (Although they are still there and still a selling feature.) With all that in mind, isn't it just a little bit funny that the Ubisoft offices were hacked and the source code for Watch Dogs Legion is currently being held ransom? Okay, maybe not so funny for the folk involved, but there's some irony there that is just tangible, no?

 Now the reports I've heard on this little debacle are scattered at best. Some say it was the result of a little phishing (or a lot of phishing, seeing how much data they have) whilst more official sources seem to conclude that it's some plain old ransomware; maybe it's both, who knows? Either way we find ourselves in this curious position where the hacking game which makes the act of security breaching infinitely more glamourous, and easy, than it really is, has fallen victim to actual hackers. Mostly I like how this demonstrates that those Legions of White-hat visionaries who use their powers of technological wizardry in order to make the world a better place are entirely fictitious. The real hackers are mostly just grifters who pick on video game companies because is alleged 'easy money'. (Although that's one heck of a way to signal boost you activities in the exact wrong direction, these guys might not like the attention they are currently getting.)

So that's as much as there is to that quirky little situation. Perhaps Legion will get it's source code leaked, if so I am curious what sort of affect that'll have on the game, it's not as though it'll be exactly easy to replicate the arguably-revolutionary technicals at play for Legion so I can't imagine copy cats will start popping up in droves. It will certainly help pirating though, and it would be a huge invasion of privacy. So a net negative for Ubisoft. Although, to look at a little silver lining, this may help a potential modding community spring up around the game, and seeing as Legion appears to be setting itself up as more of a platform than a polished game in it's own right, maybe that'll end up being what this game needs. God knows the wider modding community have been needing a new putty-like game to mess around with.

The other story I've been hearing out of Watch Dogs is a lot more subjective, in that you can take it to be good news or worrying news depending on your opinion. That being how recently the recommendations for systems requirements shot up to the brand new RTX 3080 in order to run at max settings. Now we are talking about max settings here so it does make sense that they'd be a little demanding, but many have pointed out that Watch Dogs Legion isn't by any means the prettiest game on the market, not even close, so why the heck is it demanding such a nuts graphics card? I mean some of the lighting looks pretty cool, but a 3080? Seriously? Well when you consider how this game looked like it was held together by a shoestring last year, there are certainly some conclusions that people can, and have, draw(n).

Most prominently I've seen the poor optimisation accusation, and I've not experienced enough to be able to validate if such a claim would be accurate, either with the game itself or programming, so I defer to others' judgements. Although I will say that it did certainly seem like Ubisoft were biting off more than they could chew with this game when they revealed it. A whole game wherein any NPC was playable? Stats and packages could be generated for any rando off the street? I have no idea how flexible the engine that is working on Watch Dogs is, but Bethesda's Creation Kit practically shut down whenever attempting anything like that on a fraction of the amount of NPCS that this game has, so maybe that scale is proving taxing to systems?

That being said, the team have been able to get it up to 4k on next gen consoles so perhaps things aren't terribly dire inside the inner workings. 60 FPS is as elusive as ever, to the point where I'm standing to wonder if consoles will ever see such frames for new titles, but at least the slightly ugly face models will look just as plastic as they are meant to! I'll be honest, I'm not exactly in my comfort zone when talking about graphical requirements in the world of gaming, but I am poor enough to gawk when a game that looks this average tells me to fork over £800 for a graphics card. (Not that such a card would be helpful for my outdated box anyway.) It just sort of turns me off. Though I'd imagine some others out there are bolstered by that same news.

In but a weeks time we'll finally have Watch Dogs in the hands of the public and we'll be able to see if Ubisoft managed to knock it out the park or just deliver another, 'yeah, this is pretty fun I guess' style game. (Given their track record, I expect the latter) To their credit, I do recognise the genuinely creative and interesting mechanics here are aeons beyond their usual single-step-per-game model, but looking at this hardware requirements and seeing their presentations I can't help but get the nagging feeling that ambition might have outpaced ability in this one. But hey, maybe a bolder, more risk-taking, Ubisoft is exactly what the Industry needs right now, I don't know but I'm willing to be open-minded enough to find out.