Hack the world!
Watch_Dogs 2 is one of the very first games I ever spoke about on this blog of mine for my fears and expectations upon a game that I quite liked back in the day when it was first unveiled upon me. Since then I have actually gone through the effort of playing through it once before, to completion, on Xbox; and this was actually my second time playing the game with a great emphasis on what it does in comparison to Watch_Dogs 1 and how I feel about it, as well as a look upon the narrative. What I hope to do here is set up a baseline for how I think the Watch_Dogs series should have propelled from, because I will say now that from a base mechanical level, the promise of what Watch_Dogs presented fans is increadibly better realised with Watch_Dogs 2, more so than it was with 1. Before this game I could understand if the Watch_Dogs franchise was a staunch one-and-done; but afterwards, the team would have to be crazy not to go back for another. (Which they did, Legion will have it's day for review.)
Firstly I have to say that Watch_Dogs 2's San Francisco is a million times more interesting of a locale than their Chicago, and I think the first game did a decent job bringing a realistic metropolis to life there. But from the very first trailer the Ubisoft folks made it clear that Watch_Dogs 2 was targeting a more colourful and punky heart for their hacker-centric vision of the Watch_Dogs universe that embodied all of the visual aesthetic flairs indicative of the Internet-raised counter culture movement. I'm talking popping clip-art, pulpy comic frames (for some reason), geek references and disobedient but not violent colour schemes that rely on your Purples and greens. San Francisco, with it's large green hills, sloping streets and sunny disposition better fits such an environment. But the hand-shake goes more than skin deep.
San Francisco has Silicon Valley, the tech investment heart of America where fledgling techie nerds go to watch their dreams pulled apart before their very eyes in a field every bit as competitive and unforgiven as the starlet's Hollywood. It's know to be flooded with investment money, tech company head quarters, pretentious gullible hipsters who suck up any trend that's sold to them as a 'life style', and being one of the cities of America pricey enough to live in have gentrified itself clear to the city limits. In otherwords, San Francisco is literally the perfect place for a technology trend conscious Hacktivist propagating franchise like Watch_Dogs to set itself within. And perhaps that perfect synergy of location and concept impassioned the developers to really hit the nail on the head with their concept because the raw hacking in Watch_Dogs 2 is the deep dream I always wanted the first game to be.
As opposed to the contextual and very deliberate manner in which the world of Watch_Dogs 1 was set-up to facilitate Aiden's hacking antics; Watch_Dogs 2's San Francisco was clearly designed from the wire-frame to play together in such a way that empowered the player's attempts to play around with it. It's like the difference between an Assassin's Creed target set-up and a Hitman target set-up. In Assassin's Creed the team are focused on making the very basic elements of the world work, you have very obvious approaches to the target and not a great amount of options once you get there. Hitman travels into the complexities of routines, synchronised AI packages that can be effectively turned on their head without breaking the game, innumerable opportunities and creative ways to reach your target and a endless toolbet of methods once you get there. Watch_Dogs 2 maybe isn't quite at the level of IO when it came to mastery of concept, but they're a damn sight closer to that end of the spectrum than the Assassin's Creed end.
In Watch_Dogs 2, hacking allows you control over everything the first game did and more. (And not just because this game gives you the ability to hack cameras behind walls so you don't have to camera hop anymore.) Now you can influence the actual direction of vehicles to send them speeding down the alleyway by themselves or careening out of the hands of the driver, a very free-form way of creating opportunities for yourself to shake off pursuers, clear a busy highway in the middle of a chase or just barrel over a troublesome area guard you otherwise can't approach in a stealth scenario. You can actually hack civilians on the street to do more than just steal their back accounts or play voyeur. Now you can distract any citizen with a contextual window phonecall or, if you unlock it, you can falsify an arrest warrant and send out a police report or gang hit on anyone in the world, (A cruel prank, perhaps, but completely judgement-free now that Ubisoft removed their garish morality bar) which highlights another strength of this game.
The world's AI has been completely overhauled with a range of reaction and interaction both within and outside the control of the player, resulting in a level of open world in-game life I hadn't felt since San Andreas. I never thought I'd dish out such high praise or comparison for a Ubisoft open world, but credit where credit is due; Watch_Dogs 2 does an incredible job making you feel like a mouse pulling apart gears in a clock already rife with rodents. Citizen react differently now, with some coming up to fight you if you piss them off with the new subtle emotions system, and the new enemy AI system is capable of reading combatants other than the player, so when you call an enemy hit on a restricted area, those guards will go to war exclusively with your call-ins creating a dynamic opportunity for distraction. Elegant, rewarding and it works so well!
Speaking of smoothly integrated systems, Watch_Dogs 2 also overhauled the way that online worlds speak to each other, in a manner that also slides in and out. (Provided you have good internet. The stuttering told me pretty definitively whenever my world had a visitor.) Other online players will just slip into your world space without any interaction from them, allowing you to go and team-up with them or just pass like ships in the night. Of course, hacking events and death match encounters are still very much on the table, as well as a bevy of very functional, if basic, multiplayer missions you can take on with an online rando if you so please. And, just like with Watch_Dogs 1, you can still expect to find a surprisingly active community on the PC version. Even today.
The raw gameplay controls are also a area of supreme improvement for the team, ironing out a lot of the movement quirks that Aiden had and making the new protagonist, Marcus, more agile and less sticky to cover. He has a non-lethal stun-gun always equipped allowing for less-violent options at all time for the conscious, and he has a very unique takedown in the form of a pool ball with a bungie cord wrapped around it. Designed to be more 'homemade' and 'resourceful' than the retractable baton of the very brute-force and efficient Aiden but, much as it sounds when you just compare the two, the ball is far more violent. (I seriously have to wonder if Marcus gives brain damage to the people who's head he smashes open with that pool ball.) Marcus has a more dynamic free-run mechanic which has a greater range of surfaces it can launch from and stick to and a greater pool of animations to cover that transition, although the system can be a little overly forgiving at times and have Marcus launch several feet further than he should. It's still a 'paired animation' system however, which means you can't have Marcus backflip off the side of a building unless the game can work out a surface for him to land on at the otherend. (Unless you find a ramp. The game will happily let you kill yourself off any ramp.)
But here's a very strange take from me, even though I recognise that Marcus plays better, and even that the shooting itself feels better, from a very personal level I actually prefer Watch_Dogs 1's gameplay. Perhaps that comes with a genuine disposition towards Watch_Dogs 1's theme, but I find the more clunky, but simultaneously earthy and rigid, gameplay better suited the experience I wanted. Snapping from concrete blocks and wooden slabs with hard running animations whilst bullets strike around you just feels more tense when you lack the mobility to easily run away or climb somewhere the AI will have trouble targeting you. Additionally, Watch_Dogs 1 lacked a lot of the enemy types that Watch_Dogs 2 has, which meant that pretty much every weapon was a deathly instrument. In Watch_Dogs 2, armoured enemies can become absolute sponges even for automatic weapons, which can make gunfights in the late game feel like an absolute chore that demands headshots or nothing. Oh, and I think the developers removed the ability to 'disable' an enemy with a leg shot, which sucks because I really enjoyed doing that so I could later saunter up to the wounded foe and... (Look, i'm a bit of a sadist, okay?)
Entering into the main story, one of the first things I noticed was the character dialogue which seems to walk the very tight line between geeky back-and-forth and 'how do you do, fellow kids' levels of cringe. I can totally understand people who absolutely hate every reference to pop culture this game makes simply for the presentation through which they exposit it. Perhaps this is best exampled actually in the first mission, wherein Marcus has to hack his way through a Blume substation in order to remove his own name and details from the ctOS 2.0 system. When he makes his way to the servers we can hear the members of Dedsec commenting on his progress in the background, and Sitara makes the comment "Nobody's got that far, it's like the secret cow level." Now I think this is an objectively bad line, made simply to acknowledge the existence of Diablo and convey pop awareness. But it's really up to the personal standards of the individual whether this is simply a dud of a line, or an inherently objectional attempt at referential humour. Because I'm more forgiving, I can call this a miss in a script with a few very-light referential hits, but if you hate this kind of writing... then I'm sorry for the game you're going to have to endure.
Pretty much from the get-go Marcus is a more personable and charismatic protagonist than the angst-filled Aiden Pearce; always brimming with personality and enthusiasm for his activism and geekiness. I do wonder if he's a little too cool to be considered 'one of the outcasts' like Dedsec seems themed around, but I understand Ubisoft's approach to make a hard-to-dislike front man through which we can see the world of Dedsec. I do wonder if he's just a little conceptually safe of a hero. Well written and even better performed, mind you; but from a conceptual level he doesn't take a lot of character risks. His arc is very standard, really just following him slowly becoming a leader (although more through the rest of Dedsec's refusal to lead rather than any actual assertiveness on his part) and nothing more substantive than that to be honest.
The framing of the narrative is a lot more freeform than traditional open world narratives, a direction that Ubisoft has become increasingly more praised for leaning towards as it better suits their structure of world design. For Watch_Dogs 2, you're basically told that in order to oppose the new ctOS 2.0 which bloomed after the catastrophic role out of ctOS 1.0, (Which Aiden and the gang turned into silly putty throughout Watch_Dogs 1) Dedsec, through you, needs to target various tech-company partners of ctOS and expose the ways they're exploiting Blume's systems to the detriment of the people; typically through shenanigans which, quite often, shape up as being more pranks than serious activism. (Although you get the chance to go full cyber-terrorist in the late game, don't worry.) With this it might seem that this campaign is going to be totally devoid of personal character attachment, but whilst there certainly is a lot less personally driven connection, even after the midgame twist which attempts to establish some, this narrative isn't devoid of it.
Marcus, for example, was personally effected by ctOS' overzealous profiling systems when it flagged him as a potential threat and preblocked his access to opportunity. Of course...in a way the system was absolutely correct in marking him as a threat, because he goes on to become an FBI most wanted cyber criminal so... actually, everytime in the narrative that Blume attempts to forge something incriminating on Marcus (which happens on three separate occasions because the script writer had a good idea and they weren't letting it lie) the details are eerily on point. They accuse him of terrorism, which he does partake in remotely. Being a public danger, that might be more related to player's actions rather than Marcus' but again, tick. Even him being on the no-flight list seems warranted; I don't think I want a man who could, and just might, crash the whole plane with the press of a button on my flight.
I do quite like the decentralised structure of the narrative where mission threads are tied together only by the organisation you're targeting rather than an overall plot, although that does make it so that the only difference between side missions and main missions is the lack of a cutscene leading into side missions. Also, a lot of the time it can feel like you're somewhat scattergun in your approach, which works well for depicting the actions of a hacktivist collective seeking to shift the tides of public opinion, but less so for building an overarching narrative with a central villainous puppet master behind events. Watch_Dogs 2 does have one of those, but he's so generically designed (in a manner absolutely fitting who he is, though. He's supposed to be interchangeable with any number of top knot wearing Silicon Valley 'yogi's) that you remember his hipster face better than his name. Which is probably the case because the game doesn't even say his name until the second act, when you first meet him your character merely refers to him as 'Blume CTO'. The first time anyone says 'Dusan' I had to forcibly remind myself they were talking about the same guy.
This structure of game also suffers, in my mind, from feeling a lot like Dedsec is a very childish and prank-driven collective, not least of all because their central San Fransisco team is run by a bunker of teenagers. In Watch_Dogs 1 Dedsec was this mysterious and enigmatic faceless organisation which haunted the broadcasts around Chicago. You never got to really see what they were doing or meet them, beyond one encounter with the mask-wearing 'Council of Daves', who were said to be their leaders; but their presence was a shadow on your shoulder for the entire narrative, utterly inescapable. This shift in direction delineates them into a much less imposing social-activism collective with quite a large chunk of ludonarrative dissonance when you take into the account the amount of killing that Marcus in particular performs in order to pull off what are essentially pranks. He breaks into a movie studio with potentially lethal firearms in order to steal a fancy movie prop car and take it for a joy ride; all because the movie studio released a trailer for a bad looking film in which the villains were a badly disguised satire of Dedsec. (Thin skin, much?)
Satire is actually something of a running theme along the disparate plot threads of the game, although unlike with GTA, Watch_Dogs 2 targets very specific real-world parodies to make fun of, which simultaneously makes them more directed by narrowing the scope and opens the opportunity for these plot threads to grow more cringey as they age like milk against the rapidly shifting world. One such hack targets Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, with a scheme based of his real life purchase of a one-of-the-kind Wu-Tang Clan album. Another mirrors the Sony Pictures emails hack, one attacks Scientology, one where you 'SWAT' someone, (I literally can't remember why) and there's even on mission where you hack into ctOS controlled ATMs and play god with people's back accounts because... actually, I don't even know why you do that last one. What kind of activists screw with ordinary people's livelihoods and call it fun? I mean I don't mind doing that in the game, but I'm inherently amoral; Dedsec are clearly presented as the unimpeachable good guys throughout this narrative, just like Ubisoft always do.
As you perform these hacks and complete missions and side content, you'll earn this game's version of EXP currency known as 'followers'. That's right, you're an influencer. At the beginning of the game it's established that users who follow your antics and start to download your app will be lending their processing power to Dedsec in order to allow them to... well you see it lets them... their hacks get... better? Looks, it's an attempt to add context to the levelling and ability improvement system whilst providing a bare basic justification for the unfocused questlines the game frames itself around. I appreciate the attempt, inelegance be damned, and thus find the RPG-light system acceptable, if still devoid of intrinsic depth and fulfilment. I at least wanted to go down the unlock tree to get certain power-ups, because hacking in this game is so fun and free-form.
It was as I was approaching about the midgame that I started to notice a problem that wasn't inherent to me when I started playing the game, and it was around the stealth. Now Watch_Dogs 2 improves a lot on the first game when it comes to the range of tactics available to you in stealth, namely through the RC Jumper and the Drone. (Ubisoft was really big into drones at this point; every one of their games had to have a drone in it somewhere.) The drone gives you air coverage but no interaction, and the Jumper remote car allows you to enter small spaces in the environment and finagle your way to key points in the environment that you need to interact with. Like the new Blume wall-stations that are a reoccurring road-block to progression you'll find scattered throughout the world space. The RC Jumper pretty much makes it feasible for you to infiltrate a building without ever stepping foot in it at all, with minimal risk because even if you are spotted, enemies have a hard time pinning the rogue RC car on an infiltrator in the neighbourhood. (They typically just try to smash the car.)
But around the midpoint I started to realise that the RC Jumper wasn't just a cool alternative to in-person stealth activity. I think it was implemented in order to try and patch an stealth system that the team broke. Watch_Dogs 1's stealth works pretty much as you would expect, AI routes and stealth takedowns, functional and fun. Watch_Dogs 2 has that basic front, but the AI has this bizarre hive mind so that if you pop out to shoot any enemy, unless you kill them the very second they spot you- their acknowledgement of your existence is instantly broadcast to every enemy in the area. They don't need to open their mouths and say anything, merely know that you're there. It makes stealth increadibly annoying as it eliminates all margin for error; which is made worse by the fact that silenced weapons can set off guards too. (I don't know why the team decided to get realistic with silenced weapons not being silent.) It all comes together to make in-person stealth feel too fragile and not fun to risk with.
T-Bone has pretty much no real purpose in the final act of the game beyond introducing the idea of the Bellweather, Blume's predictive behavioural algorithms they use to manipulate the will of the public by subtly influencing the flow of data. (It's literally just Arsenal Gear from Metal Gear Solid 2; well done Ubisoft, you copied Metal Gear.) But the narrative does become more focused and progressive during this third act and as such some of the operations have really memorable set-piece moments. The FBI arc is almost all really fun siege-style missions and the Congressman penthouse infiltration from the E3 trailer, whilst unnecessarily filled with contextually out-of-place exposition, (You'd have thought they would have rewrote it after it served it's purpose as an E3 set piece) is still a big and badass mission.
And then there's the robot spider. I guess I have to apologise a little bit for my raging about the wasted development time of Watch_Dogs 1's digital trips, because it came home to roost with the giant war spider robot from this one Watch_Dogs 2 mission. I'm not sure if we can say all of that development was justified for this one set-piece; but it is one absolutely sick set piece moment where you can crawl up walls and fire mounted miniguns as a giant metal spider. Which kind of makes up for the final mission of the game being an absolutely boring by-the-numbers infiltration with a tiny enemy rush at the end. I seriously don't know what Ubisoft were thinking to have the final mission be so dull after all that ramp up. It was seriously a let down for me.
Summary
Watch_Dogs 2 is one of those classic instances where the sequel improves upon the original in just about every single way with the exception, in my opinion, of tonality and story. I know that Ubisoft were very much still trying to find their voice with Watch_Dogs 2, but I can't help but wonder if they ended up taking the easy route instead of the more interesting one. Some of the punky anti-establishment flair can feel synthetic and performative, and the hacktivists angle of the characters really highlights the dissonance between the freedom of the gameplay and the staunch moralist values that Ubisoft insists on promoting throughout their properties. Still, I'd be a fool not to acknowledge that Watch_Dogs 2 corrects most every major mistake of the first (even if it does make it's own new mistakes) and thus is finally worth my implicit recommendation alongside the arbitrary rating of B- Grade in my scaling list. Now all that's left to see is if Watch_Dogs' return to grit in Legion is as far a step forward as 2 was for 1. Early impressions- I'm not exactly positive it is... (Update: The review isn't coming. After 8 hours of play Legion decided it didn't want to run for me anymore. I've given up on it.)
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