EVERYTHING WE KNOW SO FAR ABOUT WATCH DOGS 2
*UPDATE* Ubisoft has confirmed Watch Dogs 2 will be at E3 2016 via a press release. "Ubisoft reveals its plans for E3 2016, where its creative teams will proudly present highly anticipated titles such as Watch Dogs 2, For Honor and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands," the press release reads.
TrustedReviews will be at E3 covering the event, and will provide you will all the latest news from the show floor.
When it was released last year, Watch Dogs was greeted with a mixed reception from the critics. It wasn’t just that it had been hyped to the rafters for roughly two years ahead of its release and it had been pared back visually before it hit retail racks; critics gouged it out for offering little in the way of open-world innovation, a rather pedestrian storyline and the fact that it stuck rather slavishly to Ubisoft’s cross-game rubric.
The critical drubbing, however, didn’t slow it down in the sales department. Watch Dogs was the biggest new IP launch in UK history when it launched, shifting over 4 million copies in a week and as of December 2014, its sales have passed the 10 million mark. A sequel is, at this stage, inevitable.
And why not? For all of its flaws, Watch Dogs was a solidly entertaining open world romp and one of its central mechanics – the superphone wielded by its gruff-voiced protagonist, hacker Aiden Pearce – was one of the most fun we’d seen in ages. We also seem to remember being rather underwhelmed by the gameplay in the first Assassin’s Creed game and Ubisoft blew our minds with the second instalment. Who’s to say Watch Dogs 2 couldn’t do the same?
We’re gathering together everything we know about Watch Dogs 2 here, so keep it bookmarked for all the news, rumours and trailers.
WATCH DOGS 2 RELEASE DATE – WHEN IS IT COMING OUT?
Ubisoft has confirmed that Watch Dogs 2 will release before March 2017, the end of this current fiscal year. This news almost guarantees a reveal of some sort at E3 2016 along with a potential release date.
The Assassin's Creed franchise will not see a release this year, so many are speculating Watch Dogs 2 to take its place in Ubisoft's Winter schedule.
WATCH DOG 2 NEWS – WHAT’S BEING SAID ABOUT IT?
What we do know is that the smart money is on it already being in development. In an interview with CVG, vice president of creative at Ubisoft, Lionel Reynaud, stated that Watch Dogs established a “brand and a promise”.
"There are flaws, obviously. We absolutely want to tackle these flaws and surprise players, and the way to tackle some of those flaws is going to be quite radical. There are parts of the game that will need to change," he said. "This is quite a high ambition and will require us to develop technologies that we didn't have for Watch Dogs 1, but this combined with fixing and refining what worked well is probably the way to go for Watch Dogs 2."
If that wasn’t enough proof for you, the eagle-eyed so-and-so’s over at Videogamernoted that the senior gameplay programmer’s LinkedIn profile listed Watch Dogs 2 as one of the titles he is involved with. The listing was removed shortly after Ubisoft was reached out to for comment.
Watch Dogs 2 is all but confirmed at this point, with promotional materials for the game showing up on social media.
WATCH DOGS 2 STORY – WHAT’S IT ABOUT
At the time of this writing there’s nary a hint of what story Ubisoft are planning for the Watch Dogs sequel, but rumours continue unabated. A couple of sources have hinted that Aiden Pearce may be cut from the sequel altogether, which may make sense, because apart from his throaty growl, there wasn’t much to distinguish him as a protagonist worth caring about. See also: the dour Altair in Assassin’s Creed, who lasted for only one major instalment before being tossed aside for the flamboyant Ezio in the next three games.
These sentiments were echoed by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot who said "some people loved the characters and some didn't. It was difficult to please everybody with that character. Now, having seen the reaction, we know what we will do next to improve that."
"I can't say [if Aiden will return as the lead character in Watch Dogs 2] because I don't know actually," Guillemot said. "We'll see."
Guillemot also said that Ubisoft was moving away from ‘angry white man’ lead characters and attempting to introduce more diversity in the publisher’s game’s protagonists. So a female lead in Watch Dogs 2 may not be completely out of the question.
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WATCH DOGS 2 WISHLIST – WHAT WE WANT TO SEE
Here are just some of the features we’d like in a new Watch Dogs game.
1. A new location
Don’t get us wrong, Chicago is a lovely city filled with a rich history and some absolutely stunning architecture, but once Aiden Pearce and T-Bone had sorted out their respective lives, we were in the mood for some fresh surroundings. With that in mind, we’d like to wander the streets of a new city in search of adventure – and given that ‘smart cities’ are part of Watch Dogs’s selling point, a few potential candidates immediately raise their heads. Tokyo, would be a good start. Seattle, San Francisco and New York are all hugely advanced cities boasting massive tech communities and tons of opportunities for hacking. You could even set Watch Dogs 2 in London, since this town has more CCTV cameras than any other city in the world.
2. Multiple protagonists (including a strong female character)
It’s unfair to say it, but GTA 5 is pretty much the gold standard for open world games at this stage. Rockstar’s sandbox stands one of the most amazing technical achievements within this genre and it’s pretty much the game against all others of this type will be judged. With that in mind, Watch Dogs 2 might want to take a couple of pages out of Grand Theft Auto 5’s book and introduce multiple protagonists – and we’d like at least one of them to be female. Clara Lille – aka Badboy 17 – started off as an intriguing character in the first Watch Dogs, before the story remembered she was a woman, and then shunted her into a supporting role. In the end, the major developments in her story only served to spur on Pearce, who incidentally, turned out to be something of a sociopath. Strong female leads are rare enough in games. Here’s hoping Watch Dogs 2 makes a step towards changing this.
3. Better and more varied vehicles
The automobiles in Watch Dogs felt a little too utilitarian. Sure you got bikes and sportscars, but most of the time you ended up driving around in sedans and mum-wagons that didn’t exactly gel with Aiden Pearce’s dark avenger veneer. Vehicles that have better handling and more variation would be one of the items at the top of our wishlist – and if Ubisoft could toss in the ability to customise our cars (both inside and out), that’d be great too. Hey, you can do it in The Crew…
4. A story that does more with the game’s central premise
Watch Dogs has one of the juiciest central conceits we’ve seen in games in ages; the idea that the inter-connected world we all depend upon so much in our day-to-day lives could be turned into a weapon to be used against us. It’s not science fiction or cyberpunk. It’s the world we live in now. Black hat hackers, hacktivist groups and government agencies pop up in the news on an almost daily basis and, used as grist for mill of a gaming narrative, they can turn a simple story into an Orwellian reflection on our current state of existence. Watch Dogs didn’t even attempt anything remotely like this. It simply handed the player a phone as a weapon and let them get on with it. That made for a good game, sure, but the plot hardly resonated in the slightest beyond the end credits. Here’s hoping Ubisoft’s developers improve on this in Watch Dogs 2.
5. More interaction with NPCs
One feature in Watch Dogs that seems ripe with potential, is the player’s ability to not only hack the phones of the NPCs around Pearce and listen to their calls, read their text messages and generally dip into their lives. You’d think that listening in on a call between two lovers breaking up or reading a message about how someone was about to lose their house may prompt a side mission to start, but in the case of Watch Dogs, this didn’t happen. What’s the point of invading an NPC’s life as an end in itself? Why not create an array of side missions concerning these poor souls?
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6. More deviation from the Ubisoft template
And since we’re talking about creating something new, can we also ask for a little deviation please? We love you Ubisoft, we do, but there are only so many times we can head to a part of a map, tinker with a puzzle, climb up and over a few obstacles and then have our reward be part of the map opening up for us. We understand that has to be progression in a game, but some of the structures you’re using are a little flat. Stop it.
7. More opportunities to cause havoc
The phone in Watch Dogs was awesome. With it, we could scramble traffic lights, deploy bollards, raise bridges and even send manhole covers flying skyward. As much as we could do with it, though, we wanted more. How about the power to overload pylons? Or deploy the brakes on an enemy’s car remotely? Or blow up a nearby smartphone?
8. More investment in our surroundings
The city in Watch Dogs was a vast, sprawling metropolis surrounded by backwoods and trails, but it never really seemed like anything other than a backdrop to trundle through. There was no option, for example, to buy property, to kit out a lair, to customise any equipment or cars. Given the amount of fun we had building up Ezio’s Homebase in Assassin’s Creed II – and given how many games offer these features as standard far (GTA IV and V, Fallout 3, Skyrim) – making our own mark on the city in Watch Dogs 2 would be something we’d probably enjoy.
9. Improved hacking abilities
The original Watch Dogs had a nifty range of unique hacking abilities, and we'd loved for the sequel to innovate upon these in cool and interesting ways. Not only should Watch Dogs 2 provide us with a bunch of new powers, but they should also pack more visual flair and mechanical potential. Imagine surveying the city from above, toying with individual mobile phones and traffic lights, watching the city spiral into a slow yet satisfying pit of chaos. Instead of toying with the environment, our actions should have a lasting effect in the game's open world.
What would you like to see in Watch Dogs 2? Let us know the comments below.
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