e3-2012-ubisoft-shows-off-watch-dogs

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4 mins read

At an event like E3, people expect the big games to take hold of the show; games like Halo 4, God Of War: Ascension, and whatever Nintendo has up its sleeve are the games that people usually see dominate these industry events. However, during Ubisoft’s E3 conference, Assassin’s Creed III, Rayman Legends, and Far Cry 3 all had a contender for attention, which bore the name of Watch Dogs.

A completely new IP, Watch Dogs is planned to be an open-world game where the player has control over the entire city through the powers of hacking. Below is the nine-minute demo that was played during Ubisoft’s E3 conference which details how the hacking would be implemented into gameplay.

The demo starts off appearing to be a simple trailer, but then stylishly transitions into pure gameplay. After walking for a while and providing the viewer with nice shots of the city in action, the main character navigates himself to a club of sorts, which is where we get our first real taste of what to expect from the hacking mechanic. A wheel of hacking options pop up, with the main character choosing to destroy local communications. This causes a local bouncer to abandon his post, allowing for the main character to easily sneak into the club. After meeting an associate in the club, the main character brings up the hacking wheel and decides to hack the phone of an individual who is working for the main character’s target. From here on out, this is where things get interesting; the main character hears that his target will be soon arriving at the club, and proceeds to take action.

After confronting a guard in a not-so-silent silent takedown, the main character exits the club from a back entrance. The main character starts to see his target’s path on the road, which prompts the main character to time changing the traffic lights in order to cause a pile-up that halts traffic to a complete stop. After disposing of what appear to be bodyguards of the target, the main character confronts the target and kills him, stating beforehand that the target’s death would “Send A Message” to the world. In  his escape, the main character is spotted by police, in which he again brings up the hack wheel and times the rising of a bridge so that it makes the perfect getaway. The trailer ends with the phrase, “Everything is connected. Connection is power.”

The response to this demo? The phrase “Watch Dogs” become a trending topic on Twitter. Needless to say, the game is doing quite well for itself, especially within the first day of the game being announced. Admittedly we at Digitally Downloaded never saw this coming, especially the occurrence of the game being announced during an event that is extremely competitive.

Watch Dogs currently has no release date or planned platforms of release yet. However, the game was demoed on a PC, highly suggesting the game will come to computers.

EDIT: In a recent interview with G4TV, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot confirmed that Watch Dogs would be available for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. When asked whether the game would be available on the next generation of platforms, Guillemot responded with, “We’ll see.”

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  • This is massive, massive news. Good to see Ubisoft investing in a major new IP. Fingers crossed this one, unlike every other new IP this generation, is actually a commercial success. 

  • I hope they release this game for the WiiU. So far its is the best game I have seen so far demoed at e3 by a long margin. Hopefully it will bring back the faith in developers to produce new IP instead of sequels only.  

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