I know that video games aren't Hubski's biggest deal, or at least not for the people I follow. Understandable, it's a very immature medium and you need to have an incredibly high tolerance for inane fucking bullshit just to get by. Gaming culture can be absolutely vile from time to time, and if you didn't grow up with it, I won't fault anyone for not wanting to take part.
I have played maybe 3 hours of the game. I may or may not play more.
Let's give a little backstory. I really like Ubisoft games. They are what I consider "solid" on most fronts. They are rarely revolutionary, but they are usually quality products with some degree of creativity. They do plots other than "MILITARY GUY DOES MILITARY THING TO VAGUELY BROWN PEOPLE" and I appreciate that. Military Guy needs a goddamn break.
I really liked Assassin's Creed 4. It might actually be my favorite game of 2014, because it was really goddamn fun. It was not the most amazing game, it's not as respectable or poignant as The Last of Us or The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us or dozens of other games, but it's fun. I would play it after working a job I had grown to really hate, and it always got me in a good mood. You had sailing songs, the collectibles weren't an unnecessarily long grind to get, and even though it wasn't the highest resolution in the world, the art direction was really solid.
For being so fucking close to Assassin's Creed 4, Watch Dogs lacks the best goddamn part of the franchise. It is completely and utterly miserable to play. I don't know if it gets better and I really honestly don't care.
Instead of the traditional AC style stealth system they have a cover system, where your character locks on to cover and can move by pressing the X/A button in order to move to a different position. The problem is this interferes constantly with precision movement. Why? Why put that in there? It makes movement awkward and uncomfortable, and in a game that has stealth elements, awkward and uncomfortable movement is kind of the worst thing to have.
There's more than just this flaw, like the driving (fuck the driving), but this game is just tedious. I looked at the ship upgrades in AC4 and I wanted to fill them up because I enjoyed the vanilla ship combat. You have to unlock bullet time in this. You unlock your abilities by grinding out experience. What the fuck happened there? I liked the material system in AC4, it was grinding sure, but it was grinding by doing my favorite part of that game and you could power through it no problem. In this, I've got to do endless missions to save people in a city I don't give a hot fuck about.
Also, for the promises that were made surrounding this games graphics, it looks awful. It's like the worst part of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, it's that flat Ubisoft cutscene look, where nothing has depth or weight.
If you're jonesing for a game, just pick up Transistor. That game is great! It has it's flaws but they're small. It's fun. It's 5 hours and you've finished a cool little story in one of the best looking games of this year.
Fuck.
So I've been complaining a lot about this game, and Ubisoft lost a lot of my previous respect for them. I might rant here, so apologies if this goes long. I followed Watch_Dogs since E3 2012, and that's where we all saw this game that was dark and gritty and built around hacking and wasn't a shoot-'em-up. Great. The thing looked beautiful. The environments looked real. The gameplay looked unique, and most of all, the graphics were absolutely stunning. Then time went on and we saw more and more things hedge the excitement. It was pushed back. The trailers looked bad. The graphics weren't there. So let's add up what we ended up with. Full disclosure, I haven't played yet, but I watched my friend play it yesterday for two hours. -The game looks like shit. That, right out, is the biggest complaint and most disappointing. I know graphics aren't all that important to games, and they wouldn't really be important here, but I'm serious, it looks like shit. GTA 4 level graphics. Things from 2008 look better than it. And while that's a massive issue in and of itself, this game was built up around the hype of how great it looks and feels. Worse than just bad graphics, it lost all of it's dark and grittiness. Everything is blocky and generic, so I feel like I'm playing yet another random city sandbox. Ubisoft straight up lied to us on this one, and that hurts. Their continued insistence that it's TOTALLY as good as in 2012 is fucking insulting. They fucked up bad and instead of admitting it or revising expectations just kept lying. -The gameplay itself is generic . It's another GTA clone. Shoot the shit out of everything, and oh, there's a gimmick of hacking. On top of that, they decided it's going to be just like Far Cry and AC, where something something only allowed a portion of the city until you needlessly climb to the top of a tall building and look out at everything. -The DRM is fucking bullshit and they should have learned from EA not to fucking require always-online because you know it's not going to work and will piss people off. They took it a step further though. Yesterday, my friend buys it through Steam. First level of DRM. From Steam, it launches Uplay. Second level of DRM. From Uplay, it has to get into the servers. Third level of DRM. Guess the fuck what? Both Uplay and their servers shit themselves. It took three fucking hours to get into a game that she just spent 70 dollars on. 70 bucks on yet another generic, boring , stagnant the gaming industry game.
Game are not inherently immature. The mainstream gaming culture sure is , but nobody force it on ourself. I'm currently playing Transistor. I wont finish it. That's sad cause that's exactly the kind of game I like: Tactical turn based combat and heavy stat customization RPG. The game failed me on this 2 point. The customization is very bland. Most function just give the same bonus with whatever you pair them. And despite strong game changing function like Stealth or Switch (enemy become friend for some time), in the end you'd better use your most damage/turn_cost function.
Now I just I play for the narrator, but he also become kind of annoying. That so much you can convey by alluding at a deeper secret without ever revealing anything of importance. And snarky tone one liner become boring after hundred of the same. The visual may be cool -probably a subjective element, I liked the Banner Saga art-style way much- But you're stuck on railroad tiny tiny level .
You cant even do 2 'jump' ( move function, or -Q- planting) without bumping on a fence. I hate the claustrophobic feeling with tiny level, I hate bumping, that probably the main reason I hate 3D game (always end up bumping on a wall, a tree, or a table). And the reason I see no good things coming out of Virtual reality gadget. Cramped tiny VR !
Bref, no Transistor for me, nor Shadorun Return (same railroad story), nor Faster than Light . I still like the Banner Saga better.
This is just another example of executives, marketing and game directors force feeding their egos onto an unwilling audience. People who actually play and love games are not in charge of the decisions being made there. That said, Ubisoft Montreal has done well in the past, so this sort of comes as a surprise. But there are definitely people in that office who should not be in there, above the line and writers included. I've been watching some bug videos and at times the game almost looks like Goat Simulator...
The bug videos aren't really the problem. I like bugs, I actually do. If they don't break the game, keep them in. This was clearly never going to be a serious video game tackling the deep issues of our time. I care, in the case of games like this, about fun. And Watch_Dogs isn't fun. You don't get a playbox to roll around in. You can't set people up to do weird bullshit. You can't climb on buildings to get a good view or declare this particular intersection holy to your secret religious order and proceed to murder anyone who defiles it. You can't go in to a back ally and then stare at an NPC who is clearly a shitbag but not a criminal and decide that today you are going to be that person's god, that by your vindictive and almighty hand you will judge and execute them according to your will and that they will live or die by your mighty whim. These are NPCs. In an open world game, I do not want them to be people. I do not want them to feel "alive." I want them to have a hilarious physics engine reaction when I explodinate them, and I want them to scream in terror if I decide that I am not longer a hero. They fulfill a very specific purpose in their miserable life, and that purpose is to provide me with entertainment. The cops are there to provide me with a challenge. I want the game to let me have stupid fun if it isn't going to be different. I mean fuck, the shooting is actually enjoyable! I like the shooting in that game, it feels fine! There's no way to track where your grenade go but okay, that's half the fun! Cars explode good! Bullets deal damage, people react to getting hit more than grunting, I like that. What I don't like is using a silenced pistol to quietly murder someone in a back alley and then someone on the OTHER SIDE OF THE BUILDING CALLING THE COPS. WHEN THEY WOULD HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING WHAT THE NOISE WAS OR THAT THERE WAS SHOOTING. The game has a fucking spidertank that you never get to actually use. Why? Why is it taking itself so seriously? It's a game about a hacking vigilante being chased by a police force that knows his name, with a baseball cap and a trenchcoat, who hacks literally everything he can with a touch screen smartphone. This is not actually a serious premise. It's not dumb schlock but it's not Papers, Please. It's like a burger, but they just sort of handed you the burger and there isn't a bun or anything with it, it's just a patty and it's cooked, but not how you want it. I could've been playing Wolfenstein instead of this. Goddamnit.
I do this in GTA V all the time with Micheal who has all of his combat stat thing-ys maxed out. Actually I only do this when I'm not hunting armored cars to blow up and raid... You can't climb on buildings to get a good view or declare this particular intersection holy to your secret religious order and proceed to murder anyone who defiles it.
I haven't played Watch Dogs, but I can feel you on the cover system complaint. Watch Dogs by all accounts is more of a GTA clone than something resembling Ubisoft's other titles, so there's that to consider. But damn, I hate clunky cover-based 3rd person shooter gameplay. Fucking Gears of War ruined everything. It wasn't even that good back then, but now every damn 3rd person game with shooting has to have cover that you snap on to. I've recently been playing Sniper Elite v2 which does the same damn thing. Freaking 3rd person cover-based shooting. A rather fucking odd design choice to make a sniper game in 3rd person too, if you let that sink in for a minute.