Currently Playing: Watch Dogs 2 Is An Empty Playground
I'm currently playing Watch Dogs 2. And I'm quite enjoying it, overall, although possibly not in the way the designers intended. I like the graffiti aesthetic, the free-roaming gameplay and the charmingly stupid story. The satire is ham-fistedly blunt and characters have an endearingly naive cheerfulness which makes them utterly unbelievable in every conceivable way. Everyone has a role, everyone is friends, everyone makes wise-cracking jokes, has no serious personal problems and is effortlessly brilliant at everything they do. It's like being in the Scooby-Doo gang. Despite the recognisable Ubi look, this game is essentially a cartoon. It's quite hard to take it too seriously, and quite easy to image a worried looking Senior Producer writing the words "kooky" and "zany" on a white board and underlining them several times in red. From the Burning Man tribute section with it's gratuitous nipples to the desperate tech puns (Google becomes Nudle, X becomes Y to your inexplicable ability to hack a fork-lift truck rather than just, you know, drive it, it's all a bit try-hard. Watch Dogs 2 has no chill.
And I'm fine with that. Not every game has to draw me in and plunge the emotional depths of my soul. Watch Dogs 2 is very dumb and moderately fun. It's a time-waster. A pick-up-and-put-down kind of game I can play with the sound turned low whilst I sit around at home half-watching bad daytime TV. It's not War and Peace. It's GTAV-lite. It's a free roaming city with ridiculously easy gameplay, likeable characters and pretty sunsets, and without the gut-wrenching bleakness of GTAV's sexist, racist, homophobic, hyper-masculine Libertarian hell-hole world-view. Watch Dogs 2 is not my Game of the Year, but it certainly has a place in my collection. Yet, the issue have with GTAV's cities also crops up with Watch Dogs 2's cities, and interestingly, wasn't a problem I remember having so badly with the original Watch Dogs game.
The issue is that, as an o̶l̶d̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶ Experienced Player of Many Games, there is no immersiveness to the cities of this game world. They are painfully 2D. One button press produces a sound effect, a line of dialogue or a simple cookie-cutter animation, and then the NPC or object returns to their short_idle-loop.anim again. San Francisco is not a fully realised location, it's a film set. It's a maze of walls through which to navigate, and, knowing it's a maze, I pay the decorations and set-dressing very little heed, pretty though they are. I like Dedsec techno-grafitti aesthetic, but the actual cityscape is bland and shallow. There is a lot to look at but not a lot to DO. The joy of exploration is painfully missing; the city is too easy to grok. Nothing sparks an "ooh" moment as it looms from the mist, despite that ostensibly being the purpose of the ScoutX mini-game. There is no illusion of society life, which means that stalking NPCS or grabbing bags of money of leveling up Marcus's abilities particularly worthwhile. There are just a lot of NPCs, milling around, being basic and boring and only good for running over with heavy goods vehicles. It's the Alphabetti Spaghetti of game design; it's big and superficially varied and colourful, but ultimately it's all the same stuff.
On the plus side, this makes the Driver: San Francisco mini-game easily the most compelling collection of missions. It acknowledges the Watch Dogs 2 cityscape for what it is, a mere navigational obstacle, rather than pretending it's a thriving metropolitan hub of deeply intertwined digital and human systems. With such endearingly ridiculous characters, the city should be the star of the game, giving a sense of place and purpose to ground the pick & mix mission content and inconsistent moral themes. Instead, its a cardboard backdrop, and its blandness amplifies the quirkiness until it feels brash, forced and token, rather than witty or knowing. For a game with a storyline all about deep and complex digital systems, its lack of any of its own is particularly noticeable.
