Watch Dogs: Get Excited

Watch Dogs is one of those rare games that gets me excited long before I actually have a chance to play it. The gameplay footage and discussions that the developers have had with reporters have been really fascinating, and I am very surprised at just how unique this game seems to be. And no, assholes, Im not excited about this game just because it's Grand Theft Auto in Chicago.

However, I will admit, it is going to be super fucking cool to run around neighborhoods I grew up in, ride the red line like I did for my entire childhood, and shoot up the theater that Steph and I saw Louis CK at. (Seriously, there is a gameplay video at the bottom of this post, watch it, it takes place in the Chicago Theater). What really shocked me is just how exact the areas of Chicago are compared to the real thing. The picture above looks identical to the real block of Wabash that the game is depicting. Awesome.

There are many more reasons that you should be excited about Ubisoft's upcoming sandbox, and I will highlight these reasons in bold. Bold!

Senior producer Dominic Guay said that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of references to The Wire throughout the game

You can hack everything as you roam the city, traffic lights, people's cell phones, electronic billboards, police communication, etc

Ubisoft spent a significant amount of time and money trying to correctly imitate Chicago's brutal downtown wind

Dominic Guay has stated that his decisions will be morally gray, and not clean cut nice or evil like most other decision games

You will be able to hack security cameras of your friends playing Watch Dogs, and secretly observe their play

You can learn any npc's background, blood type, occupation, age, and criminal record just by walking past them

The cops have believable Chicago accents

Watch this video, it's an important one. What really has me so excited about this game is that Ubisoft hasn't simply cloned a GTA or LA Noire and added some improvements, they have made a completely new type of game, with an entirely new gameplay engine to boot. Yes, it doesn't come out until November, and it could totally suck, but based on what has been shown already, and considering that other games don't come close to this level prior to a game's release, you should be following Watch Dogs. Put it on your radar.

Here's that interview that Kotaku did with Dominic Guay, the senior producer of Watch Dogs;

"[At] E3 2012, in our demo, the player went to a street corner, hacked a traffic light, caused an accident. That trapped his target. He started a firefight there and then.

"Now, theoretically, you could do the exact same thing in any game engine. You could walk up to a street corner, a specific street corner, then you’d hit the button—or not—and a scripted event, something with always the same outcome would happen and there would be an accident. And then if there was a fight… the [artificially-intelligent enemies] would be predesigned or predetermined to go to certain areas and start shooting at the player. Things would be very predictable in the sense that they would always happen in the same way.

"But not in Watch Dogs.

"The player can go to any of the hundreds of street corners in our city, Chicago, and if there’s a traffic light, he can hack it at any time for any purpose he has. He can do so at any time of day, in any traffic condition with any amount of pedestrians around. And when he does this, will he even cause an accident? I don’t know. It depends on the traffic condition. And if there’s an accident, the other cars will try steering away, avoiding the accident. At E3 that caused a fire—an explosion—in a nearby gas station. But it could have caused hundreds of other things. Now, some of those drivers will be knocked out, pedestrians will try to help those injured people, some pedestrians might call the cops, the cops on this street corner might try to intervene. If a fight starts there, any of those cars can be used as cover by the player or the AIs. And if the player wants to navigate across this busy intersection, you need to be able to do so in a very fluid manner even though that intersection was basically created out of his own will—his own source of action."