Why we've stopped playing Watch Dogs

Watch Dogs is a great game built by a huge team of very talented people. But it's not perfect, and we can't be arsed with it any more. Here's why the VG247 crew has moved on.

Watch Dogs is a triumph for Ubisoft, selling like hot cakes on both sides of the pond and proving once again that when it comes to huge open-world action adventure games it really has its production lines in order. It's definitely not a bad game, and many people enjoy it.

One month on, when we've had time to faff about with it at our leisure, we've mostly gone off it. Here's why Watch Dogs just isn't doing it for us any more:

The novelty of hacking wears off quickly.

No, give Ubisoft the credit it deserves: the hacking in Watch Dogs is cool. Raising and lowering bridges, messing with traffic lights and bollards, shifting trains about, peeking into people's lives - that's all brilliant stuff, and a lot of fun.

The problem is that it's strapped to a pretty tired genre - the open-world action adventure - and this one differentiating factor just isn't enough to make us feel interested in another million-hour side activity marathon. In the beginning, hacking is awesome and you want to do it all the time, but it soon becomes just another tool, and that's when the rest of the game starts to underwhelm.

It goes for about three centuries.

Part of the reason why the novelty of hacking wears off is that Watch Dogs is so long. Like the Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games (and competing titles like GTA and Saints Row), it's absolutely packed with content. Now, if you only play one or two games a year, maybe that's perfect for you; maybe you need that to feel like you get your money's worth. For many other people, the dragging on of mission after similar mission starts to grate.

We're in that camp. Watch Dogs feels unnecessarily padded, and stops being fun. Again, the rest of the game experience just isn't enough to keep you going on, doing the same thing over and over; it has none of the insolence of GTA or the self-awareness of Saints Row to inspire you to keep going.

The city doesn't feel alive.

The Chicago of Watch Dogs is a tremendous technical achievement. It might not be quite up to GTA 5's level, but it's certainly the best city we've seen on consoles besides that, and second place to Rockstar's stunning effort is not an insult. Comparisons of screenshots from Watch Dogs and photos of Chicago show off how beautifully Ubisoft have captured the city's shape and form, while exercising judicious artistic license to lend it the drama and gravity required of a gritty modern video game.

Unfortunately, Ubisoft Montreal haven't managed to capture the feel of Chicago. The thing about Chicago, the thing that makes it an important place and not just a convenient spot to move cargo between riverboats, is that a s**t ton of people live there. Absolutely nobody lives in Chicago except Aiden and a few other main characters; the NPCs are lifeless and colourless and behave like weird little robots as your prance among them, overturning their lives. They seem so cool at first, with their own little personality traits and background stories, but it doesn't take very long before you realise there's no meaning to this randomly-generated information; it has absolutely no effect on the game, and you'll hit duplicates faster than you might expect.

The best bits aren't scripted.

Yes, we admit it: there are some really great stories coming out of Watch Dogs. It gives you just enough tools that being set loose in the city can lead to incredible adventures. Just wandering around and interacting with things can trigger some great emergent behaviour, and if another player invades your world, the most amazing s**t can go down.

Unfortunately, this doesn't happen very often. Like, at all. For most of the time, Watch Dogs just plays out like an other action adventure game, and the little mechanics that ought to fit together beautifully don't. Some of this is to do with the dull AI, as discussed above, but it's also because the missions make so little use of the world. It's just go here, kill that guy, get this thing - so much linearity, and very few opportunities to get some real sandbox play under your belt.

The driving's, uh, interesting.

Ubisoft doesn't have a hell of a lot of experience with vehicles in games. Assassin's Creed has horses, which naturally aren't going to handle like a Ferrari. Far Cry's driving is so bad that we're going to describe it as a unique, deliberate feature of the game in and of itself because that's the only way we can justify its awfulness. But Watch Dogs takes place in a modern city, and it needs modern cars. The driving needs to be fluid and fun.

It's not though, is it? And it doesn't seem to be deliberate. In LA Noire the cars all handled like something built without consideration for economy, fuel consumption and limited parking space because historically, that's what cars were like: boats. In GTA, the handling and physics varies wildly between vehicles, so that lowriders can be a real challenge to steer through races. In Watch Dogs, everything drives like you've lost all sensation in your hands and there seems to be no possible justification for it.

It's not as pretty as we expected.

Look, let's not beat around the bush: Watch Dogs (2014), the PC, PS4 and Xbox One release, is not anywhere near as pretty as Watch Dogs (2012), the E3 demo. That's par for the course as almost all demos are deliberately gorgeous bits of code designed to start the hype machine, often bearing no relation to the game you actually get in a box years later. (In the wake of the Aliens: Colonial Marines scandal we may see this trend die off a bit; more and more games are being shown as in-development code or not at all, rather than with bullshots, which is interesting.)

It's always possible that a developer aimed so high and had to scale a project back. But given that with a very minor bit of fiddling a modder had managed to unlock graphical performance very similar if not identical to the vision we were sold a few years ago, the fact that the PC and next-gen versions of Watch Dogs don't look as brilliant as they apparently are capable of, we're finding it hard not to be disappointed. And confused.

It's frustratingly buggy.

Watch Dogs is getting a major patch this week which may address many of the issues users are currently complaining about, and if so this complaint will look a bit petty. But you must admit, it's a buggy game. Some of the worst offenders include broken missions and the weapons wheel, which is rather an essential item, but the really heartbreaking one corrupts your save and prevents you from loading.

Watch Dogs went gold in mid-May, and Ubisoft has presumably been working on this patch since then. Almost a full month to fix game-breaking errors. Ouch.

The PC version seems to be pretty poor.

Ubisoft keeps trying to get back on track with PC support but it still just can't quite seem to get it right. We're not PC perfectionists around here - you can't work in games media and maintain platform purity - but we do all enjoy a bit of PC gaming and it's a damn shame to see the platform let down so badly time and again.

The PC port of Watch Dogs is the buggiest of the lot, too, and that's weird, because Ubisoft kept saying it was the lead platform. Let's not even get started on the Uplay server disaster.

It feels racist.

In their review, our colleagues at Kotaku highlighted the fact that the majority of black characters you see in Watch Dogs are bad guys to be mowed down, and speak in clichés. Kirk Hamilton called Ubisoft out for its depiction of black people as "street hustlers, gangsters, drug addicts and thugs".

We're not talking about a small number of characters in a cast of dozens, as in Deus Ex: Human revolution, which was similarly criticised. Two or even three walking stereotype characters could be explained away, although not to a degree that I personally would feel comfortable with. But dozens and dozens? Even nameless cannon fodder deserves better treatment - and people of colour deserve better representation than to be presented as nameless cannon fodder.

Aiden is about as interesting as a bread sandwich.

Now guys, I love bread. Bread is delicious. I certainly don't want to see a world with no bread! And happily, there's no chance of that world ever coming about. Bread is everywhere. You can buy bread at any store. Watch any movie or TV show where people eat - there'll be some bread or a bread product. Everyone knows about bread; everyone can talk about bread. Some people don't eat bread, and some people even hate bread, but the bread industry is certainly not under any threat. Bread is not going anywhere. Bread is here forever, whether we like it or not.

The thing is though, bread's not the only food there is. There are loads of other foods. How weird would it be if, whenever you turned on the TV or fired up a video game, the only food anybody every showed or talked about in any detail was bread? If 90% of the groceries at the store were bread? If every restaurant menu was almost entirely bread? Wouldn't that make you feel a bit weird?

This is a long drawn out metaphor for why I'm sick of angry white male video game protagonists, and also why I'm having bacon for breakfast tomorrow. Hell, even Yves Guillemot has admitted Aiden is dull as dentistry.

The story doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.

This is a criticism that could be lowered at the Assassin's Creed franchise equally. The story boils down to this: some bad guys do a thing, and our hero is upset and wants to stop them from doing more bad things, or take revenge on them. That would take about 90 minutes to resolve in any action movie. But this is a video game, so instead it has to take at least 12 hours, and sometimes - gods - hundreds more. As such, there can be no straight A to B.

Let me fill you in on a little secret about video games: most of them don't have a plot till quite close to the finish line. They have some vague details - good guy, bad guys, certain explosive high points - but mainly, the mission to mission sequence is being laid out by designers trying to make fun gameplay (or, perhaps in the case of million hour epics, just gameplay. Any gameplay. Oh my god how are we going to meet quota? Put in another eavesdropping mission). Later, someone strings all this content together in a way that's supposed to make sense.

I'm not saying that's necessarily how Ubisoft does it, but it's a well-documented practice elsewhere, and that's why writers have made a career out of coming in, leading the producer gently away from the script to somewhere they can do less harm, and performing emergency surgery to cobble together some sort of Frankenstein over-plot. It's why writers like Rhianna Pratchett, who fight for narrative to be a consideration at the start of a project rather than the end, are so important.

Maybe you don't give a s**t about story, in which case more power to you, but if I have to sit through unskippable cutscenes (in 2014!) then god dammit I want sufficient narrative justification for the ludicrous events my hero seems to be helplessly tumbling between, obeying the weird whims of every unique NPC he meets.

The dialogue is abysmal.

It just is.

So that's why we're not playing Watch Dogs. That said, we know many of you are, and that there really are a lot of things to love about it. So we'd like to know: what do you like about it? What are your favourite experiences so far?