Watch Dogs: Will You Leave Los Santos for a While to Pay a Visit to Chicago?

I've been following the progress of Watch Dogs for almost a year, but lately I had been missing out on a lot of news and updates due to college work. So, just now I did some quick catch-ups because the longer I ignore them, the harder it would be for me to concentrate on my college work. I just had to get things out of my system quickly before I started walking on all fours. Anyway, I must say, I got a bit psyched reading all those gaming news. It seems like the most talked games are GTA V, Saints Row 4 and of course, Watch Dogs. The console gaming scene is obviously dominated by GTA V. Everything GTA V is a hot topic, haha.

I didn't really intend to post news regularly on this blog since I'm not a journalist myself. Besides, there are already a lot of major gaming websites to keep you updated with accurate news all over the web. But since I'm really into Watch Dogs, I'm gonna do a bit of that anyway. So, here's some Watch Dogs news I have collected from around the Internet.

Two Months Are Enough for Los Santos

Last September, the guys at Ubisoft poked fun at (or challenged?) Rockstar's GTA V by stating on the company's Facebook page, "Enjoy your time in beautiful Los Santos. On November 19, we'll see you in Chicago." While GTA V takes players to the fictional city of Los Santos which is obviously based on the real-life city of Los Angeles, Watch Dogs is set in an alternate reality version of Chicago, a futuristic city controlled by a supercomputer known as CtOS. Ubisoft also released a promotional image which declares, "Two months are enough to visit Los Santos. Come to Chicago on November 21st." Can you feel the heat?

Players Will Not be Able to Fly Aircrafts

For those who are looking to go sky high in Chicago, I got some bad news for you guys. "Players will not fly aircrafts in Watch Dogs", said Watch Dogs' senior producer, Dominic Guay. "We did not feel it was core to the experience we wanted to create." Guay explained, while players are not able to fly aircrafts in Watch Dogs, they however will be able to travel outside of Chicago. So the question that everyone keeps asking now is: does this mean that there is another location or two outside of Chicago? And when I say 'location', I largely mean 'city'. But anyway, I'm cool with not being to able to fly aircrafts, because to be honest, Watch Dogs is not one of the games in which I'd be looking to play Top Gun. If I want to do that, I'd be playing other already released titles such as GTA V or Saints Row 4.

Players Can Remotely Control Choppers

Not to be confused with flying a chopper, Watch Dogs will allow players to hack helicopters and control them the way they do a remote control chopper. According to creative director Jonathan Morin, players can hack into other players' game to watch, challenge or simply wreck havoc in others' game, such as by hacking the choppers. This, of course, is optional. Players can turn the option off if they wish to. I mean, who can stand having others hacking into their game and fucking around with their privacy.

Watch Dogs' Chicago Will Offer a "Huge Density"

While some gamers are complaining about how Ubisoft keep comparing Watch Dogs to Grand Theft Auto V, I'm more interested in the comparisons. During an interview by Eurogamer late last September, creative director Jonathan Morin claimed that Watch Dogs' Chicago would offer a "huge density". According to Morin, he wanted to promote density in Watch Dogs, a lot more than scale and that a lot of games aren't exploring the shared density of their city. That, I have to agree on.

Morin further explained, "In Watch Dogs, you can stand still and profile people for ten minutes - you're playing without moving, almost. I think that's even more important to me than just adding size to it. I don't want size to just becoming a space between A and B. We have a huge world and it's more about density."

"GTA V has a huge world but it has flying, it has jets so it serves that purpose. You don't have a jet unless you have the space to fly into. Us, we have huge density, so if we double or triple the scale then you're going to start hitting repetition because we wanted to aim for the density first. We wanted the game to be the right size for that density, so it's a matter of balancing what you want to achieve." OK, so that explains why Ubisoft isn't going to give the players the key of the airplanes.

Ubisoft is a big company, so it's not really considered bold for it to challenge GTA V with Watch Dogs, if that's what the guys there have been doing. Even though Watch Dogs is a fresh title and most probably the first of a possible franchise, it has Assassin's Creeds on its back. Jonathan Morin explained that the guys who did the Assassin's Creed series helped the development of Watch Dogs a lot in terms of world designs and mission structures.

"It's great to have the guys who did Assassin's in the same studio. We can always question about what gamers liked, why they made those decisions," Morrin explained. "What really helps is those conversations [...] It's especially important to us as we're selling the idea of hacking a city. It would have been lame if we'd done that and you'd never have to go anywhere to connect your shit together. That would have been bizarre. But there's plenty of know-how at Ubisoft Monteal that has been useful."

Apparently, Watch Dogs also feature some parkour elements, as seen before in games such as Brink and Sleeping Dogs.

To be honest, I'm kinda anxious about the game. Not only I'm worried that it won't be as good as we are expecting now, but what if it's buggy and broken as well? What if it's rushed and unfinished? But Ubisoft Montreal has worked on a lot of extremely successful games such as the Prince of Persia, the Assassin's Creed series, as well as 2012's critically acclaimed Far Cry 3, so there's a high chance that Watch Dogs is going to be the next big thing in gaming.

New Characters

As you guys already knew, we'll be playing as vigilante Aiden Pearce, a hacker primarily armed with a device that appears to be a smartphone (God knows what that is, it hacks everything). Since Pearce is the main focus of the game and appears in each and every Watchdogs trailer, it's easy to forget that other characters also do exist in the game. 

Recently Ubisoft released a promotional image displaying a line of characters from the game. One of the characters you might recognize is T-Bone, a fellow hacker that appeared in one of Watch Dogs gameplay trailers, as well as Clara Lille, one of Pearce's associates. Nothing much to say about the other additional characters for now, though. I guess we'll have to wait for the game to come out. 

Also, Watch Dogs would also offer some elements of character customizations. Players will be able to customize the protagonist's appearance, but not to the scale as offered in the Saints Row games (a hacker running around wearing a clown suit and wielding a purple dildo isn't quite the scenario Ubisoft wanted to create in Watch Dogs). There will also be some role-playing element, as Pearce has his own skill tree. I'm not sure how deep the role-playing system is though. Just like any other open-world game, Watch Dogs will also feature numerous vehicles and an arsenal firearms to choose from. I personally love muscle cars, so I'll keep on eye for one of those cars that Pearce drove in the trailer, haha.

So Will You Leave Los Santos for a While to Pay a Visit to Chicago?

Well, I know I will. I've been looking forward to Watch Dogs for a long time. A lot of people seem to be upset about not being able to fly aircrafts in the game. I mean come on, don't they have enough of that in GTA V and Saints Row 4? Not all open-world game lets you fly a chopper around just for the fun of it. The inability to do that in Watch Dogs says a lot about the game. Perhaps Chicago isn't that large of an area compared to Los Santos or Steelport. But maybe it's more detailed? Who knows?

Watch Dogs is one of the most anticipated games of this year. With all the promotions, hypes as well as the challenges that Ubisoft issued on GTA V, this upcoming title has a lot of pressure on its back. Will it live up to our expectations? Will it pull it off? Or will it be just like Homefront or Duke Nukem? So now, whether or not you're going to leave Los Santos for a while to pay a visit to Chicago is no longer the question.

The new question is this: is your visit going to be permanent? I guess we'll have to see.

Update [19.10.13]: Watch Dogs launch has been delayed to spring 2014. Fuck!