If I could describe it as one thing, it would be the combination of Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed.

That sounds awesome, right? So why isn't the game?

I typically enjoy open world games, but I'm a ridiculously huge Assassin's Creed fan. That being said, Watch Dogs bored me to tears. I've put hundreds of hours into 100%ing the Assassin's Creed games, but I just didn't feel the same drive to do so with Watch Dogs. The main issue I have with the game is that nothing feels interesting enough to spend time doing. I mean absolutely nothing. I didn't give a damn about the storyline, and none of the minigames or subquests ever rewarded me with anything that I felt like had any value. I was excited for a leveling system because I always felt like the AC series should have one, but even that doesn't give you anything of real substance to change up gameplay.

With the Assassin's Creed games I constantly felt like I was affecting the world around me. In ACII, for example, I felt a huge change in the cities as I progressed by clearing towers, making money and investing it, and gaining new equipment and wardrobes. Things like the constant rebuilding and enriching of my family villa, unlocking new costumes for Ezio, new character upgrades, and new items to use was what created the uncontrollable desire to keep playing. It was a Civilization-like addiction of "it's 12AM and I have work tomorrow? Damn... Well, I can do just one more bank deposit".

The main problem with Watch Dogs is just that none of that stuff exists. Everything feels completely arbitrary, like there was a producer hovering around the designers' desks repeatedly telling them to make sure that they had vigilante missions like Grand Theft Auto, or to make sure they had vantage points like Assassin's Creed. There's just no point to any of it. None of it affects the world or your character in any way that feels meaningful. And none of it felt cohesive at all. As a result the entire game feels like something patched together by a team of people that know nothing about game design. Like they put a bunch of popular titles on a wall and cherry picked certain features from them to throw into Watch Dogs.

It's not a bad game, it's just a bland one. It's something that could have been saved and pulled along by a strong story with good characters, which is how I feel about BioShock Infinite (a game that, in my opinion, has poor gameplay design but becomes greater than the sum of its parts due to a great story, excellent characters, and amazing voice acting). Watch Dogs even has a great, pulled-from-the-newspapers theme regarding technological surveillance and privacy. But it completely fails to capitalize on any of it, making zero meaningful points about it. The characters are paper flat, boring, and in the case of Aiden Pearce, flat-out unlikeable to the point that they're actually dislikeable. How you fail that miserably in writing a protagonist is mystifying to me.

Add in the fact that it runs poorly on PC and you've really not got any reason to consider this. I will say that the game looks absolutely beautiful with the E3 2012 mod, but that's about all it's got going for it. The rest just feels like busywork.

Right now, basically all it is is a game that has the potential to turn out a great sequel. Aside from that, I'd steer clear of it.

It's like waking up on Christmas morning after being promised a puppy, only to find a skeleton in a box.

A single thought comes to mind after finishing Watch_Dogs – is that really it? This is where all the money and hype went to? A half-baked GTA clone with a gimmick and none of personality or charm? Where to even begin...

Obvious visual downgrade controversy aside, game certainly has its fair share of issues, but it overall manages to deliver a pleasant visual presentation that really gets bumped up in cutscenes which seem to be using some entirely different lighting system compared to one used in the game proper. Much to my surprise the online segment of the game has proven to be quite an amusing distraction, although like pretty much everything else in the game it's copy/pasted from somewhere else, which still manages to tie into the main experience of the game. Hacking mechanic itself is pretty good, although simplistic, and does a decent job of being both in the background and stealing the spotlight when required.

Sadly, real problems are with essentially everything else in the game. From derivative gameplay which simply checks off a list titled "GTA clone features; even though we don't really understand why they're there or why they SHOULD be there 101", to performance issues and utterly disgraceful story and narrative which frankly aren't even worth mentioning considering just how bad they are. I don't know if things got cut or whether it was just incompetence, but I most definitely didn't care about what was happening with the main character or any of the side characters, most of which were wasted in similar fashion with very few exceptions. I don't know what went wrong with the game but by the end you're simply going through the motions, with the exception of the last mission which manages to raise some ruckus by turning your tools against you, but it's way too little and way too late at that point.

Not designed for PCs, as Mr. Lead Foot Pearce clearly demonstrates in every car he drives. Sure, you get used to it over time, but it's a mistake that should have been caught in the port. Even at the highest resolution settings, the textures are still poorly done and the faces look like they're made out of rubber. The story was predictable and boring at times, the protagonist was frustratingly stupid and bland, and the AI was easily fooled (duck into a boat with the police nearby and they'll never find you). The game had its moments, certainly, but it was hardly worth the $60.

Not worth a full price.
Gimic game, car physics so bad, and really ubi didnt deliver what they promised in the first E3.
Just a overhyped game, we are all victims to this overhyped game.

Incredibly over-hyped, and pretty disappointing.
Lots of bugs, very repetetive.

You're better of buying games from a developer that can program mouse controls (Mouse acceleration on by default and turning it off doesn't turn it off but makes it negative - The faster you move the mouse, the slower the camera moves) and optimize their games rather than make them run worse with each subsequent patch.

Oh, and it has the lovely Uplay service with it's slow updates, slow save syncing and frequent downtime.

Great game otherwise. I just wish a good developer had made it so that I could actually stand playing it and have it run well.

Honestly this game is completly average. Nothing to bring to the table, it's like eating completly bland cereal without any milk. And also that on every 3rd spoonful you choke a bit (Stuttering issues ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥).

Watch Dogs provides a rather enjoyable experience once you get past the rather shotty performance that this game provides along with other nusances. The story is enjoyable although appears to happen at a faster pace then what should have. I did have a lot of fun with this game but I will not recommend this game because of the technical problems that this game has. If you have a new computer with top notch performance then this performance problems might not be there at all but that is for another discussion.

In regards the the performance, the game provides tons of microstuttering and frequent framerate drops that can harm you ability to perform well in the game. This is after the game has been out for a while. Actually, recently after taking a break, this game just randomly freezes and becomes unplayable. I have seen no improvement but actually a degredation of the performance.

The rendering distance for static objects is perfectly fine but there is absolutely horrifying draw distance for dynamic objects such as cars, bikes, and things that you could crash into when doing high speed manuverse in a vehicle. This is utterly annoying and ends up being a slap in the face because it ends up being entirely random to when you crash rather then based on your ability to drive.

The driving mechanics for a keyboard are good but could be better but the crux of the problem is that the physics for your car as compared to others feels different. What I mean by that is you can run right into a car and then drive off while leaving the other car completely destroyed. Somehow your car altough being the exact same in every way can simply drive off. Your character can simply get up from anything and there is no feeling of vunerability.

The gunplay is good in that it doesn't have any major problems but it doesn't excel in any particular way that any other game hasn't already done equally as well. The number of weapons feels just about right and they feel unique in their own right. Unlocking some of the weapons and having others weapons readily purchaseable feels like a nice touch.

A variety of minigames are there throughout the game. Some of them may not be enjoyable depending on your tastes but I essentially see these games as pretty in depths games in themselves. Completing these can unlock things for the main game. I personally enjoyed them quite a bit.

The storyline is a moderate length and begs a sense of urgency so I found myself completing several missions at once then forcing myself to take a lengthy breaks from the main storyline so that I could unlock other guns and tools that I might need during the main storyline. Certain plotholes are in the story that could have been avoided by not attempting to simply write off all other possible solutions especially when there are perfectly valid solutions taking a different route.

Multiplayer works out pretty being seamless for the most part. I did not participate very much in this because I did not personally find it to my tastes but it is pretty cool to realize that someone is tailing you and then take them out.

♥♥♥♥ you Ubisoft.
I paid $70 for this game, and I get a mission where I can't progress.
It's the Uplay mision. Can't even start up the ♥♥♥♥ing game.
Never pre-ordering from Ubisoft again.

Utter nonsense and a total waste of time. Excellent graphics.... but thats about it. The game does not engage, it is simply a beituflly made boring toy. Car mechanics are awful. Quests are pointless. Hacking gets old after about the 10th time you do it.... which will be in about 5 minutes. The idea behind the game is great, but the storu just isnt there. Its bascially an Assassin type game, but without the story, the plotline, and the quests to support it. Even running around smashing things isnt half the fun it is in SR III or GTA.... I really hate to say this, but dont waste your money.

This game was overhyped. Runs bad on my beauty of a machine, story line/characters are beyond boring, and you can't do as much as you expected.

Sadly I have to agree with the majority of the negative reviews.

Way Overhyped.

The game works well with my computer, no crashes or anything, so definitely no complaints there. Also never had trouble signing into UPlay, So no complaints there either.

After you finish the single player if you can even keep yourself inspired that long, there's literally nothing to do.

Finish all the missions, get all the gear, and all you are left with is boring multi player.

Even the graphics aren't great. They are good, but to say that something stands out would be overstating it.

Can't recommend that its worth buying for the full price. Buy it on sale if you have time and money to waste.

I am personally not a fan of this game nor GTA, However when GTAV is released on PC, I'm probably going to buy it and play it more than this game.

Overall impression: Meh.

[English available below] **UPDATED PART 2.
[Portuguese] *ATUALIZADO PARTE 2.
*Atualização 2: Um suposto ex empregado da ubisoft disse: “Eu estava em uma reunião pessoalmente com Yves Guillemot (presidente da ubisoft) que disse que não se importa com jogadores de PC porque 90% deles aderem à pirataria. Isso foi uma resposta direta à um programador respeitado o qual perguntou: “porque os as versões dos jogos para PC são uma porcaria?””.
A maior prova que a citação acima é verdade, são o próprio Watch Dogs e o novo Assassin’s creed que aparentemente foi lançado em sua fase alpha.
Ainda de acordo com ele: “É difícil produzir jogos AAA, estávamos nos esforçando bastante mesmo com lançamentos a cada 4 anos, e agora vocês (ubisoft) decidem lançar todo o jogo anualmente.”
Eu posso dizer que eu nunca me senti tão arrependido e ao mesmo tempo ofendido de ter adquirido um produto. A ubisoft NÃO PODE castigar o consumidor que paga pelo produto porque outros não o fazem, mesmo se apenas uma pessoa no mundo comprasse este jogo, ela ainda sim teria que receber um produto de qualidade. E 90%? O presidente da Ubi está inventando números para justificar a falta de qualidade do produto final na plataforma? Onde está o profissionalismo deste CEO?

A ubisoft não se importa com os jogadores de PC, então porque você consumidor, se importaria comprando jogos dela? Isso é no mínimo masoquismo.

No lançamento do próprio AC: Unity a ubisoft embargou o jogo para que as análises fossem publicadas apenas depois que o jogo já estivesse sendo comercializado, assim quando as críticas negativas começassem a ser jogadas em cima do jogo, ele já estaria na mão do consumidor.

Fontes:
“gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/rumor-ex-employee-s-take-on-working-at-ubisoft-31695562/”.
“forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/953207-All-PC-Gamers-Are-Pirates-Says-Ubisoft-Executive”.
“teksyndicate.com/forum/pc-gaming/all-pc-gamers-are-pirates-says-ubisoft-executive/189009”
“reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/2mcies/as_an_exubisoft_employee/”
“www.wired.com/2014/11/assassins-creed-unity-embargo/”

- Review

Sim eu joguei 50 horas... 50 horas tentando fazer o jogo funcionar e quando eu finalmente consegui ele ficar mais ou menos jogável através de mods feito pela comunidade, meu save game foi corrompido.
O jogo em si é bom, porém a otimização é decadente, a Ubisoft cuspiu na cara dos jogadores de PC ao fazer o pior port para computadores da história desde GTAIV, além de ter feito propaganda enganosa antes do lançamento mostrando um produto diferente do lançado, removendo todas as características gráficas mostradas na E3 2012 e fazendo do mesmo um jogo last gen com gráficos apenas "razoáveis".
A história é clichê atrás de clichê, as interações hacker são repetitivais demais, os mini games de criptografia são entediantes.
As viagens digitais são um ponto positivo.
A dirigibilidade do jogo é deplorável.
Lançaram DLC para o jogo antes de entregar o produto final prometido antes do lançamento.
Nota: 4.5/10
Não recomendo comprar este game, se você quer um jogo de mundo aberto de qualidade, procure em outro lugar.

[English]

*Update 2: An ex-ubisoft employee said: “I was in a meeting personally with yves guillemot (ubisoft’s CEO), who said that he doesn't care about PC gamers because, and i quote "90% are pirates anyway", that's after a direct question from a well respected, well paid programmer back in the late 2000s asking "why are our pc ports ♥♥♥♥ing sh*t?".
The greatest proof that this statement is truthful is Watch Dogs and AC: Unity that was released in it’s alpha stage.
And he continues:” We were struggling under normal load, AAA games are HARD to develop. And then instead of 4-odd years between releases, where we worked 50-70 hour weeks, (anything above 37 is unpaid), you decided we should release every year”.
I can say that I have never had such a headache and at the same time felt so offended by buying this game. Ubisoft CANNOT punish the consumer that pays full price just because others don’t. Even if only one person in the whole world bought the game, this person should receive a quality final product. And… 90%? Really? Is the ubisoft CEO making up statistics to justify their lack of final product quality on the platform? Where’s his professionalism?

Ubisoft DOESN`T CARE about PC gamers, then why would you care buying their games? That’s masochistic.

In the AC: Unity release, ubisoft used an embargo to prevent bad game reviews before the game was already at the store shelves.

Sources:
“gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/rumor-ex-employee-s-take-on-working-at-ubisoft-31695562/”.
“forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/953207-All-PC-Gamers-Are-Pirates-Says-Ubisoft-Executive”.
“teksyndicate.com/forum/pc-gaming/all-pc-gamers-are-pirates-says-ubisoft-executive/189009”
“reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/2mcies/as_an_exubisoft_employee/”
“www.wired.com/2014/11/assassins-creed-unity-embargo/”

- Review

Yes, I have played 50 hours... 50 hours trying to make this work properly, and when I finally made this game barely playable using mods, my save game was corrupted.
The game itself is good, but it's optimization is awful, Ubisoft spits in the face of the PC players by producing the worst PC game port since GTAIV and cheating the consumer, making a video at E3 2012 showing a different product that the one it has been released, downgrading the game and making it look like a last gen port.
The story of the game is a clichê, the hacker interactions are repetitive, the hacking mini games are boring.
The digital trips are cool.
The driving is... there's no words to describe how unrealistic it is.
Lots of DLC were released and I'm still waiting for them to fix the game's engine, of course, that will never happen.
Score: 4.5/10
I don't recommend buying this game. If you want a good open world game, look somewhere else.

Played the 1.0 version, some thing that enfuriated me were:

1- UPLAY
2- UPLAY
3- The driving was so bad it isnt even funny, back in the day when i played NFS 2, the controls were more responding and better, i have no idea how the ♥♥♥♥ they messed it so bad, Farcry 3 had decent controls..
4- Graphic things and all the mess around it, if you don't know what i'm talking about, google it
5- I was so hyped it disappointed me a little to see this game turning out to be not as good as i wanted it to be, when i first launched it i saw something was amiss.. the graphics were not as good as i remember in the videos from e3, the controls of the car were horrible, the mainly thing i did was go from bar to bar to play chess and even some of the puzzles were just annoying
6- UPLAY, well ♥♥♥♥ ubisoft and that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ UPLAY, i made a vow never to buy from them again.. unless they drop the uplay bs

Buggy, terrible gameplay, horrible framerate drops on an awesome system. One of the most disappointing games I have played in a long time. Graphics were good, and the story was alright, though dark. Overally, a dissappointment

taken from experts - http://www.gamersnexus.net/games/1487-critical-review-watch-dogs

Starting Hard: Some of the Worst Optimization We've Ever Seen

Watch Dogs is a good-looking game. It's not this generation's Crysis—not even close—but the graphics technology is impressive and promising. Ubisoft worked within an internal engine, called "Disrupt," and plugged-in Havok for software-accelerated physics. I benchmarked Watch Dogs at launch, whereupon it was discovered that a 780 Ti + 4770K—a setup that'd put you close to $1500-$2000—barely made 50FPS with max settings. The game doesn't look good enough to justify such poor performance, so something was clearly going on under the hood. Further investigation has revealed a myriad of issues that sabotage the PC as a stable platform. For starters, we determined that anti-aliasing of any sort in Watch Dogs produces severe stuttering and even full freezing on some devices (270X, 7870) and significant, disproportionate frame drops on others (780 Ti). The word "disproportionate" is key here, as I've never seen performance halved by going from TSMAA to MSAA 4x in any game before -- ever -- on a 780 Ti. Performance should be impacted, yes, but these are new levels of framerate disparity.

With 5.04 TFLOPS of raw COMPUTE power on 2880 cores, a 3GB framebuffer, and 336GB/s memory bandwidth (384-bit interface / 8 * 1750 clock * 2 for DDR * 2 for GDDR5), dropping to TSMAA shouldn't increase performance from the 50s to the 80-90 range. This is doubly so when considering that a change from Ultra + MSAA 4x to Medium + MSAA 4x saw almost zero performance impact (~10FPS), but dropping from MSAA 4x to TSMAA produced about 30FPS improvement. Something is wrong.

So I thought it'd potentially be a CPU throttle, as I was using a 3570K when performing this test. Switching to the 4770K, which is a generation newer and $100 more expensive, the bench produced one half of one FPS increase. That's within margin of error, so for all intents and purposes, there was 0 difference. It was not a CPU limitation, then.

That's when I started to heavily consider the possibility of absolutely no software-side optimization on part of Ubisoft. This stance was reinforced when testing the performance of an HDD vs. an SSD in gameplay once static assets had been loaded (read: not hitting storage for data much at this point). By switching to an HDD, it became evident that Ubisoft is abusing (or misusing) the pagefile before saturating system memory to any reasonable extent. In fact, Watch Dogs barely utilizes 1.9GB of RAM on max settings. That's even less than Titanfall, a game that's arguably far less graphically-intensive.

And this isn't even getting to the good stuff -- like rampant CTDs, inexcusable BSODs, audio loops, NAT errors, Uplay's inability to stop drooling on itself, random input functionality breaking (enter key), inability to minimize, the "alt" key getting stuck, and more. Years of English classes taught me that "and more" was an excuse not to actually list more; I also worked as a test engineer in a previous life, so doing Ubisoft a favor, I'm going to combine these two experiences and get this out there:

All this GPU benchmarking, crash fixing, and performance optimizing later, I think it's about time we officially comment on Watch Dogs as more than a benchmarking tool. It is, after all, a vexingly-hyped game leaving a $68 million footprint in Ubisoft's budget. Putting things in perspective, Battlefield 4's budget hit nearly $100 million (and look how that turned out), Destiny's budget is $140 million, but even that is still pennies to GTA V's $265 million budget.

All the millions in the world, though, and I'm not sure Watch Dogs would ever be classifiable as "good" or "playable" for PC gamers.

Unintuitive Input Dooms a Game to User Abandonment


If a game doesn't have intuitive input and mechanics, it's doomed to collecting (now-digital) dust. This dates back to arcade games. In a discussion with Mark Cerny some years ago—a 30-year industry veteran—it was made clear that arcade games were explicitly designed with a single item in mind: Keep the player playing. They're pumping money in for each play -- so how do you get them to play without inducing rage, but simultaneously bolstering arcade profits? Cerny answered this question with great depth, but short of designing play to last 2-3 minutes for the quarter, he made it explicitly clear that the controls must feel intuitive and make sense. This dates back to Cerny's 1983 "Major Havoc." The veteran designer told us that without intuitive input and mechanics, developers risk creating a situation where the player feels somehow cheated, unable to pinpoint why they'd failed at a certain task. If the on-screen result doesn't match what the player's brain tells them is going to happen, there's a disconnect; that disconnect ultimately causes frustration and abandonment.

And so we have Watch Dogs, one of a great many console-to-PC ported titles that has brought along its console input. Watch Dogs fundamentally alters mouse functionality beyond any recognition, and it does so on more than one level.

Most immediately noteworthy is the uncontrollably high sensitivity on the main menu. Easy enough -- just turn the DPI down. Then we get dropped into the game, where suddenly the movement is immeasurably slow. Fine, then -- turn DPI back up. Easily done with most modern mice. Then we hack into a camera, or open the menu, or smartphone, or hack into infrastructure, and input speed has once again been altered. The fact that I've got to use all three DPI profiles on my mouse—menu, camera, shooting—is a red flag for usability.
And that's before even getting into the matter of 'acceleration' and mouse smoothing.

Mouse smoothing is an artifact of the beforetimes, when mice had balls and movement was oft choppy and inconsistent or overly sharp. Enable mouse smoothing with an ultra-high precision mouse, like the G502 we looked at, and it will alter input in a way that feels sluggish and as if the mouse is being dragged through a syrup-coated surface. The effect is "smoother" corners and circles when moving the mouse in such patterns, but that effect is entirely undesirable. When I move the mouse, it's done with purpose. Perhaps not always the correct purpose, but always something that I -- as a user -- have done as second nature. I know that moving my mouse at a certain speed and a certain distance will produce a specific result. I want that result. That's why I've moved in that manner. Watch Dogs, however, enables smoothing by default, which results in insufferable inconsistencies when moving a mouse made after 2001.


and we havent even gotten to the gameplay yet :( this game is so poorly optimised for pc it reminds me of GTA4 when it first came out, and they could not fix that console port either. the bad coding is the backbone of all the problems. they did not even make an effort to get this game to PORT correctly to PC so that its is playable on anything other than minumum to medium settings. the fact that even on high end GPUS and CPUS this game is unplayable and guess what UBISOFT DONT CARE AND THEY WILL NEVER FIX THE GAME.

A bigger disappointment than finding out your girlfriend has a ♥♥♥♥♥.

Looks good. That's about it. Such a let down.

even if this ♥♥♥♥ is on sale do not support the ♥♥♥♥s who created a game that runs like ♥♥♥♥.