Our readers have some bones to pick with Watch Dogs
More Like Botch Dogs, Am I Right?
This week finally saw the release of Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, a much ballyhooed open-world crime game that has been making waves since its big reveal at E3 2012. In his review, John Teti didn’t think all that ballyhooing wasn’t necessarily worth it. It’s a decent open-world game and not much more. Besides running down a few problems with how the game plays, Merve offered this insight into a flaw in the way the game presents itself:
I’m nowhere near the end of the game, so perhaps it will surprise me thematically, but so far, I get the sense that the game is pushing the idea that technology is a weapon that can be wielded against the elite; it’s empowering to have all this information at one’s fingertips. Playing through the game, though, is a different experience altogether. Everywhere I look, there’s an icon popping up somewhere indicating something that I don’t understand. The HUD occupies a lot of screen space. The profiler keeps shoving information in my face. It’s an information overload, and it makes the game difficult to play. Having all that information at my fingertips actually feels disempowering, because I have no idea how to process it.
And Pawel Samson had some bones to pick with the game’s portrayal of Chicago:
I pretty much solely bought the game because I was excited about seeing my home city in game form. What a disappointment.
· The lakefront is basically nonexistent, while the Chicago river has been expanded so much that it makes the city unrecognizable.
· The game’s Chicago is surrounded by forest and mountains. Real world Chicago sits on prairieland, and you’d be hard-pressed to even find a single hill within miles.
· The 100 hotspots in the game are made up of mostly nonexistent landmarks and locations. The few that really exist were oddly tweaked to look very different (the giant jellybean and Millennium Park, especially). A very rough approximation of Wrigley Field is there, but you can forget about US Cellular Field or Soldier Field. The Ferris wheel, which really sets the Chicago skyline apart from other cities, has also disappeared.
· What the hell is Pawnee? Or Brandon Docks?
The el and most of the Loop looks fairly Chicago-esque, at least. I wasn’t expecting LA Noire levels of accuracy, but what we got really looks more like Pittsburgh than Chicago.