Happy July 4 to all our friends in the USA! Today the UK team loosely tries to join in with a story about the Independence Day game that time forgot, and this celebration of the best US cities in PC gaming.

We're lucky enough to have visited a lot of the cities on the list, and it's always a surreal experience to compare reality to a virtual interpretation. These games capture something special about the places they model. It's not just about getting all the landmarks in, the best cities use light, weather and sound to create a distinct mood. Sometimes the shooting and driving feels secondary to the experience of wandering the streets, soaking up the atmosphere.

Washington DC, The Division 2

It's odd to walk around a virtual city you've also visited in real life. The layout of the city has to be changed to fit the mechanics (cover everywhere!), but there are sudden moments of powerful recognition as you have a tense gunfight in the National Air and Space museum. As in real life, the White House is smaller than you expect, and the Capitol Building seems huge. The soft storms of the Division 2 make DC's wide avenues even more beautiful. A cracking bit of virtual tourism with the bonus ability to shoot nanobees at bandits.—Tom Senior

Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto 4

Los Santos is a much bigger and undeniably more impressive location, but the now decade-old Liberty City is still my favourite open world city in any game. The over-the-top golden skies of Rockstar's love letter to New York are completely unrealistic, but they add this mythical feel to a playable space that was unprecedented in detail at the time. From Star Junction, its version of Times Square, to the light coming through the train tracks on the streets of Broker, it's still an emotionally stirring place to explore. I'd love to see it revisited in GTA Online or a new singleplayer game at some point.—Samuel Roberts

San Francisco, Watch Dogs 2

My memories of San Francisco mostly consist of sunshine and good sandwiches—our sandwiches are crap in comparison. Ubisoft's interpretation of San Francisco is luminous and extremely fun to drive around, not least because you get to live the Bullitt fantasy of careering down those steep hills. The in-game phone has a Scout app that encourages you to tour the city's landmarks, which is a really nice touch that encourages players to see the city as a storied, lived in place, rather than just a chaotic play space. I've always wanted games to follow Ubisoft's approach to cities. In Assassin's Creed you can access historical information about the locations you're visiting. I like learning little bits about places I won't get to see in real life.—Tom Senior

City of Glass, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

I had to check the wiki to make sure the City of Glass is technically part of North America (it is! If it's technically in Canada and we've goofed, I unreservedly apologise). This Mass Effect-y environment is full of clean skyscrapers and high-end apartments that look like they're owned by rich jerks. Both Mirror's Edge games use colour theory to provoke a powerful response from the player, but Catalyst is the game everyone seems to forget about, so the location from that game lands a place in this list.—Samuel Roberts

Lytton, Police Quest

When I venture into digital American cities, it seems to be almost exclusively to break the law or sow chaos, even if it's inadvertent, but not in Lytton. It's a wee, peaceful town that's sprouted a drug and murder problem, and as Sonny Bonds, Police Quest's by the books rookie, playing by the rules is the only way forward. You can't even drive recklessly. Everyone else is getting to do the crimes, but you've got to behave and stop them from having fun. It's a bit dull and completely obsessed with procedure, but even 30 years later, Lytton and the Police Quest series still feels novel.—Fraser Brown

Los Angeles, LA Noire

It seems so unlikely that a period-set game could have this level of detail, but this was a Rockstar-published game, after all. LA isn't much for chases and open world side quests, designed as it is as the ultimate movie set-like backdrop for solving scripted crimes, but it does that almost impossibly well. From the store fronts to the landmarks, it's still lovely to look at now, and the interiors are lovely little locations to pick through. I like that it captures the beauty of the city while also making it feel new and dangerous, in the way neo-noir films like Chinatown and LA Confidential do so well.—Samuel Roberts

Empire Bay, Mafia 2

Rain is really important in open city environments, and Empire Bay has gorgeous, grey rain. It feels great to wander around in a soaked trench coat listening to the authentic honks of old cars. The city itself is a collage of famous imagery from the 40s and 50s that uses New York and Chicago as obvious touchstones. Away from the skyscrapers and colourful districts like Chinatown, Mafia 2 does a good job of modelling industrial zones and warehouse districts. That doesn't sound very glamorous, but it's important for the sense that there is hustle (and crime) happening in every corner of the city.—Tom Senior

Detroit, Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Hengsha is probably more memorable in 2011's Deus Ex game, what with its ludicrous nightclub The Hive, but Detroit is a lovely location to explore too. And you'll do that in the way we've come to expect from the series: by throwing bins and boxes around while trying to climb over stuff. Detroit has the massive Sarif Building, Adam's apartment complex, the futuristic LIMB clinic, and even those twats dancing in the subway.—Samuel Roberts

Boston, Fallout 4

It's not a problem that I've picked a place that's technically been hit with a nuclear warhead, right? Cool. I'm pretty fond of all of the modern Fallout games' US locations, but Boston in Fallout 4 is the most well-realised city among them to date. It even has its own comic shop! I'm not particularly familiar with the real place, but the way it adapts landmarks like Fenway Park and the USS Constitution to Fallout's universe is really cool, even if the game itself didn't blow me away like I hoped it would.—Samuel Roberts

Paradise City, Burnout Paradise

Screw humans, this is a city built for cars. The city planners were drag racers and stunt drivers and destruction derby enthusiasts, creating the perfect stage for infinite races and collisions. It’s one big race, really, and any street can become part of it at any time. Rules are tossed aside in favour of letting you just do whatever you want, including choosing your own route to the finish line. Memorising Paradise City, etching it in your brain—that’s how you win.—Fraser Brown

The Epic Games Store has its fair share of critics, and there are some good reasons to be critical—its half-assed search functionality, for instance, or the inability to easily pull full-res screenshots from store pages. But it also offers some pretty spectacular prices at times, including at this moment a trio of big-name games from Ubisoft—Far Cry Primal, Ghost Recon Wildlands, and Watch Dogs 2—that you can pick up for just $5 each. 

Each of the games is on sale for $15, which is a good deal on its own. But Epic is slicing another $10 off the top of every game in its ongoing Mega Sale priced $14.99 or higher, so those $15 games end up a fiver—three for the price of one, basically. And when you compare that to the regular price points—$50 for Far Cry and Wildlands, $60 for Watch Dogs 2—you very suddenly find yourself deep in "screamin' good deal territory." 

The EGS pages don't say how long these prices are valid, which is unfortunate, but the Epic Mega Sale runs until June 13. 

Remember a couple of years ago, when a trailer for a fake game that appeared in Watch Dogs 2 turned out—maybe, according to sources—to be a real project called Pioneer? It looks like that report may have been accurate, because now it appears that the whole thing has been cancelled. 

Hutchinson is in a position to know: Prior to co-founding Typhoon Studios in 2017, Hutchinson was the creative director of Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3. And while he didn't come out and say explicitly that the project had been cancelled, he did have this to say when asked about it specifically:

Jonathan Cooper, the animation art director on Asasssin's Creed 3, also chimed in:

It's worth emphasizing that this is all purely speculative, not just because of the nature of the tweets, but because Pioneer was never actually confirmed to exist in the first place. It's really more akin to sad musing about what might have been, then, but it fits with the 2016 report, which said that the game was facing an uncertain fate: Development wasn't unfolding as smoothly as expected, and so the announcement had been put off while the project was "retooled." But the trailer had already been inserted into Watch Dogs 2 by that point, and so out the door it went.

I've emailed Ubisoft to ask if there's anything to all of this, and I'll update if I receive a reply. But unless Hutchinson and Cooper are messing with us, it looks like that's the end of any hope we had of one day getting our hands on Pioneer.

For all of the money and effort invested into the open worlds where we spend so much time, it’s amazing how many ways we’re given to ignore their construction. Trained to ignore them, by the way the games they’re built around are designed. Maps are filled with icons containing vital missions and content and collectibles, so we set a course to the nearest desirable one and follow a line on the minimap until we reach our destinations. Turning on the secondary vision mode of Rocksteady’s Batman games, Detective Vision, is made so essential by its usefulness in identifying secrets and fighting baddies, that you can spend most of the game breezing by the sights of their graphic novel grandeur brought to virtual life. All for the sake of finding the next breakable wall.

While it might have disappointed some players and critics on its release, Watch Dogs actually found ways to emphasize the world its developers painstakingly crafted. Roots its successor paid off to remarkable effect two years later.

Beyond the cliched, problematic framing of Chicago’s criminal underbelly, and the hypocritical, unlikeable figure of protagonist Aiden Pearce, Watch Dogs genuinely seems to want to put a spotlight on the city it expects you to spend the next thirty hours roaming. This is a warmth that the central story belies. It attempts to do this in a few ways, the first being “Digital Trips”. They're fleshed-out minigames that allow you to bounce across Chicago on psychedelic flowers to rack up points, free districts of the city from the dystopic reign of robots, run down demons in a car with extendable buzzsaws, or take the controls of a literal Spider-Tank. They’re temporary changes of context, but it could be just enough for you to see Chicago as something more than a set of grey boxes hosting the site of Aiden’s revenge.

The second major method Watch Dogs uses to create positive connections with Chicago is a City Hotspot app on your in-game phone. Upon reaching certain Chicago landmarks, players can ‘check-in’ and read information about the location’s actual history. They can also donate gifts to other players who will follow in their footsteps, and if they continue to visit the location and check-in, rise to become the mayor of a given site (much like the Mayorship system in location service Foursquare).

The final, flawed way Watch Dogs attempts to showcase the life of Chicago is through its ‘profiler’ system. Tapping the Z key allows you to view all hackable devices in sight, as well as access the biographies, conversations, and even bank accounts of everyone around you. The one to four word vignettes comprising these biographical descriptions are, surprisingly, more damaging to empathy than enabling of it. You know just enough about this randomly-generated pedestrian to make a value judgement about them, but not enough to see them as a true individual.

Within Aiden’s dispassionate, swaggering stroll and scroll across his phone screen as you walk through the city, the people around you transform into data points. Prompts, just like the overwhelming flow of objective reminders popping onto your screen. You can drain the bank account of a struggling mother of four with a misplaced button press and not feel a thing.

Here, we see the tonal conflict at the heart of the game. Watch Dogs, the self-aware, silly, Chicago-set action game where hacking is a somewhat naughty superpower, and Watch Dogs as it was advertised: the ultimate loner hacker fantasy of the next generation, with all the grim ‘maturity’ and lack of empathy that supposedly entailed. The desire to entertain and even educate is present, but it’s buried in a game that already has too many things it wants the player to do.

Enter Watch Dogs 2.

At first glance, in its attempt to get you to connect with the city of San Francisco, Watch Dogs 2 shares many of the methods (and potential weaknesses) of its predecessor. Scanning the map, you can still find information about city landmarks by hovering over their names. The profiler is still around, and the hacking systems of Watch Dogs 2 actually give you more ways to mess with NPCs than ever. However, these elements are tempered by the same spirit driving the game’s narrative—a focus on the whimsically personal.

The profiler is no longer an almighty, agency-stripping tool. Tapping the V key to use it strips the game world of color, reducing your screen to a grainy, blue-scaled void if you wish to look for collectibles or glimpse the lives of those around you. In doing so, it represents its data points as just that—data points. Small pieces of ‘actual’ people. It emphasizes that this ugly, omniscient view isn’t reality, or the summation of a given pedestrian. It's just a part of it. Despite the greater powers you wield, this simple change in context makes the player feel slightly more responsible for how they use or abuse the people around them. 

This evolution in the depiction of the power of hacking, and the people, places, and communities that make up a city, is best seen in Watch Dogs 2’s replacement for the City Hotspots app: ScoutX.

As you travel across San Francisco, the phone of protagonist Marcus Holloway will vibrate. You’re next to a hotspot—it could be anything from the world-famous Golden Gate Bridge, to a street performer beneath a prominent pagoda in central San Francisco. A brief paragraph tells you more about the sight you’re interacting with. You hit the appropriate prompt and turn on your in-game camera, to find its automatic setting is a selfie mode. Toggling a series of gestures, you find a satisfactory angle and posture, and take the picture. 

A set of celebratory chimes play as you gain ‘followers’, the game’s equivalent of experience points, and get one step closer to unlocking more unique, characterful selfie gestures for Marcus to use. This snapshot also produces a picture that your in-game companions will comment upon in the app.

It’s a compelling, self-contained loop, that educates, motivates through gameplay progression, and provides valuable personality while subtly causing you to become more familiar with this eccentric, vibrant city. In a demonstration of how far the narrative design and cohesion of the Watch Dogs series has come in a relatively short time, the app unites the player and Marcus, by turning both of you into tourists. His memories—his gallery of pictures—become yours as well. And once you begin to look at San Francisco through a lens of seeking the weird and photogenic, something magical happens.

Coming out of the profiler, you see a cool series of abstract lines drawn on the side of a building. You climb up to the site, pull out your phone, and find that...it’s not listed in the ScoutX directory. It’s cool. It might even exist in real life, but you won’t be rewarded for taking a picture of it. So, objective-oriented as you are, you leave—but the graffiti sticks in your head. Another in a string of landmarks you come to recognize across the virtual San Francisco. One not signposted by the game.

Passing by one day, you and Marcus stop to finally take that picture.

Welcome to San Francisco.

If you've been holding off on buying any Ubisoft game in anticipation of an inevitable sale, well your patience has just paid off. Or at least, it will if the game you want is among this new Humble Store Ubisoft sale, which offers some big discounts on Ubisoft games both old and new.

All of Ubisoft's 2017 games are featured: you can get Ghost Recon: Wildlands for 55 percent off, Assassin's Creed: Origins for 33 percent off, and For Honor for 67 percent off. Even the most recent South Park RPG, The Fractured But Whole, is available will a 50 percent discount – pretty good, since it only released two months ago.

If you're looking to pay less than a fiver for a map strewn with icons, Assassin's Creed 2 is available for $4.78. I'd highly recommend both Rayman Legends and Splinter Cell: Blacklist too, both of which can be had for less than a tenner. Check out the full sale here.

Once upon a time, Ubisoft's library was simple: it made platformers starring terrifying mascots with no limbs, and roughly 17,000 Tom Clancy tie-ins. But over the last decade, Ubi has muscled in on the genre that GTA made famous, building huge worlds spanning radically different time periods. Regardless of whether you’re controlling a historical hitman or a coma-bound cop, though, Ubisoft’s sandboxes love to borrow mechanics from other Ubi games.

Join us as we look back at the history of the Ubisoft's open world games, to see just how these sprawling sandboxes have evolved (and grown more and more alike).

A stealthy start

Ubisoft first began to dabble in the sandbox space with 2007’s Assassin’s Creed. Skip back a decade, and you’d never guess the seismic scope the franchise would reach. Before the 2D spin-offs, books, and shitty Michael Fassbender films could wear us all down, there was just this ambitious (more than a bit broken) sandbox that spawned many of the features open world games still cling to in 2017. 

Chances are you don’t remember much about the original Assassin’s Creed. You probably recall moping around ancient Jerusalem stabbing folk as a dude in a hoodie. Perhaps you have a dim recollection of eavesdropping on NPCs chatting away on benches. Maybe you even remember that early kickass trailer with the horribly catchy Unkle song. 

The one thing you’ll definitely recall is Ubisoft’s obsession with making players scale super lofty buildings. That all started in Altaïr’s adventure. To fully scope out all of the Holy Land’s side activities, you had to climb the tops of the tallest structures across Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus. Doing so gives you a very literal eagle’s eye view of the sprawling mass of humanity hundreds of feet below; a bird of prey swooping around the building when you reach its summit. 

These vertigo-bating landmarks birthed Ubi’s most infamous open world feature: gradually filling up a map with mission markers.

Crossover feature: Climbing towers

Assassin’s Creed may have introduced us to the idea of big-ass buildings that revealed points of interest when climbed, but it was 2012’s Far Cry 3 that really cemented the feature. Jason Brody’s leopard-punching, pirate-blasting, tattoo-inking tropical holiday had the sort of wide reaching influence on the open world genre its two predecessors could only have sweaty night terrors about… mainly because its predecessor literally gave you malaria. 

Surprisingly, Far Cry 2’s obsession with making you stuff pills down your throat to keep mosquito-borne diseases away never caught on—nor did its love of jamming weapons. Far Cry 3 ditched the annoying obstructions in favour of features that kept you itching to explore.

Far Cry 3’s antenna towers undoubtedly cast the longest shadow on almost every Ubi open world that followed. Scaling these rickety structures—which often feel like they’re being kept up by little more than prayers and a few loose screws—helps Brody fill his map up with all manner of side distractions. Haphazardly jumping, swinging and climbing your way between the crooked layers of the towers in Far Cry 3 isn’t just a hoot in and of itself, it also makes tracking the series of wildlife hunts, enemy encampments, treasure chests and races spread throughout the densely packed archipelago a lot easier.  

Crossover feature: Animals

Also, animals. An ark's worth of animals. Brief hunting escapades may have popped up a few months prior in Assassin’s Creed 3, but it was Far Cry 3 that really took the pelt-collecting ball and ran with it. Forget quietly ruminating on the unspoken majesty of the animal kingdom: Ubi’s critter-obsessed shooters just want to make you shoot endangered species in their furry faces. 

Not that the trend Far Cry 3 kicked off (which seemed heavily inspired by Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption) entirely revolves around needless slaughter. Hunting down and skinning animals allows Brody to use pelts to craft ever larger ammo bags and other weapon-focused accessories. 

The creature carnage in Far Cry 4 takes things even further, with attacks coming from land, sea and air—lord are that game’s ultra aggressive eagles ever jerks. The Himalayan sandbox would also introduce rideable beasts in the form of rampaging elephants, which the prehistoric follow-up would go nuts with.

Last year’s Far Cry Primal makes the toothy, tusked inhabitants of its ancient world the stars of the show. Far Cry 3 may have let you punch sharks, but next to Primal’s wild encounters, that's positively tame. When you can train sabertooth tigers, command jaguars to stealth kill fellow cavemen, and use an owl as a sort of feathered, Mesolithic drone to tag enemies—a feature both Watch Dogs 2 and Ghost Recon: Wildlands would quickly reskin—bopping Jaws’ cousin on the nose ain’t no thang. 

Ubisoft has since pushed more animals into Assassin's Creed: Origins. Even Watch Dogs 2 depicts San Francisco's Pier 39 with a rookery of slovenly seals leisurely sunning themselves on gangplanks.

Crossover features: Sneaking, tagging, and stealth takedowns

Stealth has also played a large role in many of Ubi’s open world games, regardless of the setting, era or enemy type. It started with players blending into crowds with the ‘social stealth’ gameplay of the original Assassin’s Creed. It was an innovative feature for its time—after all, most stealth games up to that point forced their characters to either hide in the shadows or a cardboard box.

Sneaking mechanics were quickly shoved into most of its games following Assassin’s Creed's success. Who cares if these stalking scenarios were often absurd: they make for easy mission design, dammit!

Diving underwater, then pulling pirates into the drink as you clear out enemy strongholds in Far Cry 3. Slipping between cover to slap a chokehold on Watch Dogs’ various shortsighted guards. Poking Edward Kenway’s head out of Assassin’s Creed 4’s suspiciously plentiful patches of long grass. Using a tiny, extra voyeuristic RC car to infiltrate the offices of a tech startup in Watch Dogs 2, then zapping any security personnel that get too curious. Solid Snake and Sam Fisher have a lot to answer for.  

Whether you’re whacking religious zealots in the time of the Crusades or putting San Francisco office workers to sleep with a taser gun, over the years Ubisoft has proven there’s no open world setting it can’t crowbar a stealth section into. 

Tagging enemies is another prominent feature most Ubi games have turned to over the last few years. This actually predates Ubisoft's open worlds, in games like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six: Vegas, but it's since become a vital part of their sandboxes as well.

Placing markers down to keep track of your foes’ positions popped up in Far Cry 3, with Brody’s super useful set of pirate-tagging binoculars. Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, and Ghost Recon have all subsequently borrowed this eagle-eyed feature, while even the likes of Metal Gear Solid V have benefited hugely from Jason’s peeping Tom bouts of recon making tagging an open world staple.

Oh, and almost every one of those games lets you perform stealth takedowns, too. Because of course any self respecting hipster hacker/out of his depth fratboy/neanderthal can neutralise foes with the quiet, deadly efficiency of a Navy SEAL team.

Crossover feature: The Ubisoft collectible

This is the big one. More than any of the above crossover features, one recurring element has helped prop up Ubi’s increasingly sophisticated sandboxes this past decade: collectibles. ALL the collectibles. 

Eagle feathers in Assassin’s Creed; lost letters and spirit totems in Far Cry; Watch Dogs’ key data caches; Kingslayer files in Ghost Recon: Wildlands; even crystalline shards in the otherwise wonderfully nonconformist Grow Home, and its sequel Grow Up. Grand Theft Auto 3 may have introduced the world to sandbox collectibles with its fiendishly placed hidden packages, but we doubt Rockstar envisioned game worlds rammed full of bird feathers, PC files and statue heads. 

Hell, Ubisoft has even managed to cram several garages full of collectibles into its vehicled-based sandboxes. 2011’s brilliantly offbeat Driver San Francisco has 130 movie tokens to hoover up as you bomb around the Golden City while you mind-jack cars in gaming’s most exciting coma. The Crew wouldn’t miss this OCD party for the world, either. The flawed 2014 racer scatters 20 Wreck Parts in each of the five sections that make up its vast North American sandbox of endless highways. 

It’s almost as if Ubisoft doesn’t trust you enough to leave you to your own devices for five minutes. A good thing, too. Why take your time admiring the painstakingly recreated canal networks of Renaissance era Venice in Assassin’s Creed 2, when your inner completionist could be making Ezio ruin his shins by scampering up rooftops for mangy bird feathers?

There’s no question Ubisoft’s open worlds have evolved drastically over the last ten years. Place the original Assassin’s Creed next to the upcoming Beyond Good & Evil 2 (Michel Ancel’s long awaited sequel lets you explore entire galaxies), and you may as well be comparing a kid’s crayon scribbles to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Still, there’s no question Ubi’s plethora of internal studios love to crib concepts from each other’s games. 

So whether its a slightly out of place stealth mission, wads of XP to splurge on increasingly convoluted skill trees, or vaulting up towers to open up that fog covered map, you should probably expect Ubisoft open worlds to continue to share crossover features as they continue to evolve. Darwin would be delighted. Probably. 

It took a few days, but Nvidia has figured out what was causing Watch Dogs 2 to crash after installing its recently released GeForce 384.76 WHQL drivers. There is now a hotfix (GeForce 384.80) available for anyone who does not feel like rolling back to a previous driver release.

Nvidia's GeForce 384.80 hotfix driver is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit builds of Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7. The release notes mention the fix for Watch Dogs 2, but not for the other issues that were discovered. One of those issues is that some PCs may boot to a black screen if DuetDisplay display is installed and running on the Windows 10 Creators Update. The other issue is brief graphical corruption can sometimes occur when starting Windows.

The 384.76 drivers introduced "Game Ready" optimizations for the LawBreakers beta and Spider-Man: Homecoming Experience in VR. Nvidia's latest drivers also fixed a handful of issues, including certain glitches observed in Doom when using the Vulkan API.

If you need the hotfix, you can download it here.

Some gamers are reporting trouble getting Watch Dogs 2 to run after installing Nvidia's 384.76 WHQL drivers that were released yesterday. If that is a game you play, your best bet is to avoid the driver update for the time being, or roll back to a previous version if you've already installed them.

As far as driver releases go, Nvidia has had smoother roll outs. For one, Nvidia noted on its forum that a temporary server issue prevented its latest driver updates from appearing on its website. As we noted in our article yesterday, the only way to apply the update at the time was to go through Nvidia's GeForce Experience software.

The other issue is a lack of consistency in Nvidia's release notes. Nowhere in the release notes available online as a PDF does Nvidia mention the Watch Dogs 2 issue, though it is brought up as a potential issue on its web forum. It is one of two bugs that users might encounter.

Here is what Nvidia says on its GeForce forum:

• Your PC may boot to a black screen if you have DuetDisplay installed on a PC running Windows 10 Creators Update. Please uninstall the software until the issue is addressed by the app developer.
• Watch Dogs 2 may crash on launch with driver 384.76.

While the latest driver package introduces a couple of known issues, it also fixes several others, including the presence of stuttering in Prey on GeForce GTX 1060, 1070, and 1080 graphics cards.

The main reason to download the newest driver release from Nvidia is because it includes optimizations for the LawBreakers open beta and for Spider-Man: Homecoming Experience (VR). If you don't plan on playing either game and aren't affected by any of the issues it addresses, then you might as well wait for the next release.

Watch Dogs introduced the awfully-named but rather fun PvP mode Showd0wn back in April, alongside multiplayer functionality for races. Furthering its friend-fusing trend, the latest update adds four player co-op—due this Tuesday, July 4. 

The 1.16 update is free-of-charge (it was originally planned as paid DLC), and lets players buddy up in groups of four to roam freely around its digital slant on San Francisco. In doing so, players can either fire through the game's host of multiplayer modes—the trailer below teases three modes in 'Hacking Invasion', 'Bounty Hunter' and 'Armored Truck'—or engage in general mischief as they see fit. 

Have a gander at the new update's trailer:

Despite the freedom offered in free-roam, quartets can't access the game's two player co-op missions, however they can invade other people's games. Which you totally will do, right?

Watch Dogs 2's latest update is due on July 4—full patch notes can be found this-a-way. 

One of the most popular microphones out there is the Blue Yeti. Like most higher end mics, it's a bit on the expensive side, though GameStop has on it sale bundled with Watch Dogs 2 for $90.

That's for the sleek looking Blackout Edition. By itself, the Yeti typically sells for around $130, with GameStop listing a retail value of $140 for the bundle that's up for grabs here.

This is a USB microphone with three proprietary 14mm condenser capsules. It offers four recording modes: cardoid, bidirectional, omnidirectional, and stereo.

Here is a look at some other specs:

• Power: 5V 150mA
• Sample Rate: 48kHz
• Bitrate: 16-bit
• Frequency Response: 20Hz - 20kHz
• Max SPL: 120dB (THD: 0.5 percent 1kHz)
• Dimensions (extended in stand): 12.5cm x 12cm x 11.61cm
• Weight (microphone): .55kg
• Weight (stand): 1kg

There is a mute button the Yeti, along with a headphone output (with a built-in amp) and a gain control knob on the front (right above the pattern selector).

Watch Dogs 2 isn't what makes this deal worth considering (check out our review), though it's a welcome bonus on top of the sale price. For $90, you'd be hard pressed to find a better microphone.

You can grab the microphone on sale here.

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