There's an especially great scene in Watch Dogs where . The character you're shooting alongside, Raymond 'T-Bone' Kenny, is the main character in this first DLC drop for Watch Dogs. If you thought Aiden Pearce lacked character, then T-Bone should make up for it. Entitled Bad Blood, the new campaign follows T-Bone's exploits about halfway through the regular campaign, when he's called upon by former Blume employee Tobias Frewer to get him out of a tight fix.

Well, good news: if you're a Season Pass holder that pack is available to download right now, though everyone else will need to wait until September 30. Bad Blood's campaign content will be complimented with a bunch of other new stuff, including new cooperative 'Street Sweep' contracts. Meanwhile, the Hacking and Tailing online modes are now playable as T-Bone.

All this, alongside new weapons, perks, outfits and a remote-controlled car called 'Eugene'. Check out the launch trailer below.

The original Assassin's Creed was a beautiful world in search of a game to occupy it. (When a large proportion of your mission design involves sitting on benches, you've got a variety problem.) Second time around Ubisoft made good on the premise with the brilliant Assassin's Creed 2, Brotherhood, and the company expects Watch Dogs to follow a similar pattern.

In an interview with our friends over at CVG, Ubisoft Montreal vice president of creative Lionel Raynaud called the cyber vigilantism game "a brand and promise" for the future. "The reception has actually been pretty close to Assassin's Creed ," he noted, "with the first one we didn't have such a good reception, and it was fair."
Raynaud also admitted that there were problems with Watch Dogs' replayability, and that it was easy to spot that it was a first iteration. He also made the point that while Ubisoft always knew that Assassin's Creed had potential, it didn't know it would become the mammoth franchise that it is today.
"It's the same thing with Watch Dogs: it was difficult to do everything at the right level, which is why we took more time," he said. "The time we took was definitely useful it allowed us to release the game without compromises and do everything that we wanted. We also kept parts of the game we felt didn't fit with the original for the sequel."
That sequel is already in the works, as Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot revealed just weeks after Watch Dogs launched.
Raynaud confirmed that the sequel will not only try to make good on the promise of the core idea, as the Assassin's Creed series eventually did, but also live up to that first impressive demo of the game we saw at E3 2012.
That's likely to be quite a way off, though. If you don't want to wait, the final release of TheWorse Mod enables many of the visuals effects presented in the E3 2012 demo that were cut from the final release.

Haven t you caused enough damage? Near-future Chicago is a city under secret siege, not from human traffickers, petty thugs, and gangbangers, but from you and your smartphone. The stop lights are broken, the vending machines depleted, the public s knees permanently scrapped from stooping to grab the cash you sent flying out of malfunctioning ATMs, and no one stands near vents. Isn t it time to put the phone down? Not according to Watch Dogs first expansion, Bad Blood.

Ahead of its September 23 release, I played the first four of ten campaign missions, as well as a handful of side activities and some online co-op. The story takes off directly after the conclusion of Watch Dogs. With Aiden Pearce s journey wrapped, you play his dreadlocked hacker ally Raymond T-Bone Kenney, a man fond of septum piercings, bowling shirts, and booze. This software engineer once worked for Blume, that shadowy corp behind ctOS the Central Operating System that powers Chicago s infrastructure and runs everything from road signs to data records.In fact, T-Bone wrote the base encryption code for that operating system.

After sensing how dangerous it is to give control of an entire city to a few technologically literate people, he fled the company, but not before causing the infamous 2003 North East Blackout to make his point, a blackout that inadvertently killed eleven people. Now living off the grid, wracked with guilt, and looking to take down Blume, T-Bone is the most dangerous person in Chicago. Which isn t good for Chicago.

We first meet T-Bone conducting an illegal terminal intrusion in the heart of Blume s central offices. Two guards apprehend him, but T-Bone plays bait and switch, casually insisting he s been sent by Blume to check on network integrity before pretending to talk on his phone. Unwritten rules of social politeness stress that you must never interrupt a phone conversation, so the guards wait, biting their tongues and scratching their heads. Cue T-Bone turning around and smashing their faces with a wrench and taser, his two new melee weapons. But he s not out of danger yet; now comes the escape.

Blume security know there s an intruder in the building, but fortunately for you, they don t know where. Using familiar tricks of whipping out my phone and hacking into cameras, I get a bead on patrols. I hack a device in a side room to make a noise and attract a guard, then shut the doors to lock him in. Then I sneak behind another and taser him before exploding a panel beneath the last man s feet. For those who ve played Watch Dogs, it s a familiar pattern.

Stepping into the cold Chicago night, enforcers are waiting. Snipers on skyscrapers sweep glowing red lasers across my path, so I duck between cover points until I reach the main road. It s chase time. As I make my getaway on a motorbike, two heavy duty cars with tinted windows careen after me. There are two ways to lose my tail: kill them or escape the search radius. Seeing as I ve only got a pistol, I drive up a ramp and into the bay to lose them. That s mission one of ten over. I m all wet now.

As I doggy paddle, my (thankfully waterproof) phone starts ringing. The voice on the other end sounds panicked. It s Tobias Frewer, estranged former colleague of T-Bone s at Blume, and he s in the back of a car. The very back, like, the boot. Frewer reveals the landmarks he can see through a crack, but his battery is dying and I need to establish sight of the vehicle before it goes completely. I see a car tellingly swerve up ahead and race towards it, but now comes the tricky part: I need to stop it. Which is hard because I m on a motorbike. Curse my love of 2003 action film Biker Boyz starring Laurence Fishburne.



Ah, but I m forgetting I can hack traffic lights. The car snags on a crowded intersection and I seize my moment, jumping off my bike and killing the driver. Before I can untie poor Frewer, though, more cars join the hunt. I jump in the front seat and evade them, a muffled voice yelling Ahhh! from the trunk.

Tails successfully shaken, I take Frewer to my home/squatting residence, an abandoned military silo entered by way of construction lift. He s paranoid, pursued by Blume, and needs a safe house. This ll do. It s a heavy duty havan of hackerdom: mountains of whirring machines, screens filled with flickering lines of code, and even a mounted moose head you can hack into for a cheesy one-liner.

The next mission tasks me with another infiltration into a secure area. Are you seeing a theme here? Bad Blood, from what I ve played, seems to like its car chases and stealthy break-ins. At least this time I have Eugene, a C4-equipped RC car with bonnet-mounted surveillance cam. It s new to the world of Watch Dogs, even if remote control drones aren t exactly fresh ground in the wider world of vdeogames.

I decide to retire from the campaign and screw around with side activities. Most from Watch Dogs make the cut. There s the phone game NVZN in which you blast holographic aliens emanating from portals. There are city games involving chess, drinking, and slots. Best are the bonkers Digital Trips, triggered by an app that uses binaural frequencies to lull you into a dream state. There s Psychedelic (bounce across giant rubbery flowers), Madness (drive a Hell car), Alone (sneak past weird robot sentries), and Spider Tank (drive a spider tank). Completing these unlock new outfits for T-Bone.

After getting my fill, it s time to head online, and into a series of dynamic missions unique to Bad Blood called Street Sweep. Here you ll run jobs for detective Sheila Billings aimed at cleaning up the mean streets of Chicago. There are three gang types and three skill trees. Completing the first mission against the Chicago South Club gives me discounts at gun shops, for example, while reaching level 20 in the Fixer missions offers a range boost for my phone jammer.

Street Sweeps randomly generate enemy spawns and locations, so they re never quite the same twice. Missions I play mostly revolved around room-clearing: subdue a set number of targets non-violently, hack into and explode the phones of two militia, neutralize everyone in sight, etc. They re hard. Whenever I raise the alarm, a neverending stream of backup henchmen arrived, and my only course of action is to die and start over.

That s why co-op is a blessing. You can play alone, in a private session with a friend, or search for a stranger publicly. Simply walk up to the mission icon, interact with it, and the game will search for a nearby partner to help you out. Travel too far from each other and you ll even teleport to their location. Handy.

With ten campaign missions and an technically inexhaustible supply of Street Sweeps, along with new locations, new characters, new gadgets and new perks, this is, at the least, a solid ten-hour chunk of game. Not that Chicago will thank you, poor thing. It s not essential, especially if you ve already plumbed the depths of Watch Dogs, and there s a criminal lack of new ways to interact with the smart city, but nonetheless, Bad Blood is shaping up to be a robust chunk of familiar action. It's out on September 30.

The upcoming Watch Dogs DLC Bad Blood will put players in the shoes of T-Bone Grady, the legendary hacker and trusted companion of Aiden Pearce, who risks his safety to help out an old friend but soon realizes that there's more to his story than meets the eye.

Bad Blood will introduce a new story campaign that takes place shortly after the events of Watch Dogs, with ten new missions set in new locations scattered throughout Chicago. It will also a new system of side missions known as "Street Sweep" contracts, offering "endless hours of challenges" that can be played solo or in co-op mode. The "Hacking" and "Tailing" modes, and the ctOS Companion App, will also be playable as T-Bone.

On top of the new missions and gameplay mode, Bad Blood will also add new weapons, perks and outfits, including the remote-controlled car Eugene, which can be upgraded with both offensive and defensive perks.

The Watch Dogs Bad Blood DLC will be released to the public on September 30, but will go out to season pass holders one week earlier, on September 23. Full details are up now on the official Watch Dogs website.

That's the problem with Grand Theft Auto IV: you can't hack, you can't ride on the roof of trains and you can't use nuclear weaponry. The latter isn't likely to change any time soon, but two clever GTA IV modders have managed to add a lot of the functionality of Watch Dogs into the six-year old game.

The mod, which is available right now, covers Nico Belic in Aiden Pearce's trademark trenchcoat and even shares the same hands-in-pockets idle animation. You'll be able to hack payphones, ATMs, ticket machines, wall lights, trains, traffic lights, road blocks, cameras, drink machines and parked cars. It also introduces the ability to shoot witnesses to your crimes.

Of course, you could choose to stick with the originals instead: Watch Dogs is reportedly getting a whole new city via DLC, while Grand Theft Auto V releases later this year for PC.

Here's a video of the mod in action:

One of the more amusing controversies to emerge after the release of Watch Dogs concerned its drinking mini-game. Dedicated players were outraged that drinking in Watch Dogs was too hard, and they were right: if you wanted to play the mini-game past the point required by the main campaign, it did get very bloody hard. Never mind though, because the newest Watch Dogs update makes the uniquely annoying mini-game much easier, for those among you still determined to master virtual drinking.

There are more changes introduced by the patch: you can now reset Gang Hideouts and Criminal Convoy missions, in much the same way you can Outposts in Far Cry 3. You can now choose to hack friends in multiplayer, while CTOS multiplayer matches will no longer cease if the player controlling via a mobile device drops out.

Relatedly, players in the habit of disconnecting from multiplayer matches halfway through will be matched with other guilty players, creating a virtual troll hell. "If you re playing against someone else who disconnects unfairly, you will get the same amount of Notoriety as if you had won at that moment," the patch notes read. "The disconnector will not receive any Notoriety."

Full notes can be read on the Ubisoft website.

It looks like Watch Dogs may leave the Windy City behind when its first DLC release comes out this fall. The official Twitter account recently teased a move to the green fields and blue skies of Camden, New Jersey, and then confirmed that new content is on the way.

"Our data indicates surveillance has become more prominent in high-crime areas_," it tweeted earlier this week. An image accompanying the tweet added, "The city of Camden, New Jersey had the highest crime rate in the US in 2012. A 24/7 surveillance program is now in effect_"

@FatalRift Coming this Fall!— Watch Dogs (@watchdogsgame) July 28, 2014


That's not actually true, according to Forbes, which doesn't even list it in the top ten, but that's not the point, either. The point is that it appears the game will hit the road at some point over the next few months, a timeline confirmed in response to a question about whether the tweet was teasing DLC. "Coming this Fall!" it tweeted.

Ubisoft hasn't officially announced that the DLC will go to Camden, but it's hardly the most subtle tease I've ever seen. Who's ready to go to New Jersey?

Ubisoft has released another update for the PC version of Watch Dogs that should "reduce" stuttering during gameplay, particularly at higher texture settings, and promised that more such fixes are still in the works.

Watch Dogs has suffered from visual stutters of varying intensity since the day it launched, even on high-end video cards. Today's update should address the problem, at least in part, although Ubisoft warned that "some players might still experience some stuttering while playing with 'Ultra Textures' settings on."

"We optimized some of the performance issues that were causing some users to experience high amounts of stuttering while playing Watch_Dogs. Instances of stuttering during gameplay should now be reduced, especially when using 'High Textures'," Ubisoft Community Manager Nik_CtOS wrote. "We ll keep updating you as more fixes for stuttering are currently being worked on."

The update also improves NAT-type error messages, improves support for PCs with multiple network interfaces and fixes a few specific gameplay bugs and crashes.

Based on the response to the post, not everyone is having success with the patch, but some users are reporting significant improvements. The one consistency seems to be, as Ubisoft indicated, that the improvement is most pronounced when using "high" texture settings, while "Ultra" textures seem to be only marginally influenced. Disappointing for gamers with bleeding-edge video cards, perhaps, but it's a start.

Article by Tom Marks

Last week, modder TheWorse released the final version of his now infamous Watch Dogs graphical mod, and we decided to put it to the test by offering it up to the angry god we call the Large Pixel Collider. Ubisoft has stated that the mod could have a negative impact on performance and gameplay, so I jumped on Watch Dogs ummodded with the settings maxed out, and then installed TheWorse Mod 1.0 to document the changes and to settle this once and for all.



Before creating his mod, TheWorse found shaders and graphical settings labeled "E3" in the Watch Dogs code. Switching them back on enabled graphics closer to those shown from Watch Dogs initial announcement at E3 2012. Since then, he s gone in to fine tune those settings and teamed up with modder MaLDo to add textures intended to reduce stuttering on some machines.

I played both the modded and standard versions on the LPC at 2560X1440 resolution with all the graphics settings cranked to the max. TheWorse Mod can be used with or without the MaLDo textures, but I chose to use them. An important note to anyone who does the same: in order to use the MaLDo textures, you must set your texture detail to High and not Ultra.





It s hard to deny that TheWorse Mod makes Watch Dogs look more cinematic, and when shown in a side-by-side screenshot the standard game seems much flatter, but it s very easy to make a still image look good. What the above image doesn t capture very well is how strong the depth of field is in TheWorse Mod. You can barely see the people across the street from you, as if installing the mod also removes Aiden s contact lenses. The extreme depth of field makes images and videos of TheWorse Mod look phenomenal, but when you are actually playing the game it can be incredibly distracting.

Ubisoft said that this mod could hurt performance compared to the standard game, and right off the bat I noticed stuttering and frame skipping in both versions. Standard Watch Dogs was running at a consistent average of 50 fps, but it would occasionally stutter, especially during fast driving segments. I found that with TheWorse Mod installed, the game was running at around 10 fps slower, averaging around 40 fps. The stuttering was identical during the day, but was also much more common at night and while raining, to the point where it affected my ability to drive well.





Bad weather taxes Watch Dogs' performance the most, and one of the largest changes I noticed in TheWorse Mod was increased rain density and intensity of lighting effects. TheWorse Mod makes almost all times of day darker while bumping up the contrast. It gives all the landscapes more depth, but the darker scenery resulted in the TheWorse enabling streetlights and headlights during rain at any time of day. During the daytime, the game s performance was comparable to the unmodded version, but at night and in the rain there is a noticeable drop in stability.

Based on our testing, Watch Dogs averages a lower framerate with TheWorse Mod 1.0 installed. The trade-off for that performance hit is more dramatic lighting and weather effects and stronger depth of field, which looks fantastic in screenshots but can be overbearing during gameplay. We experienced stuttering playing both vanilla and modded Watch Dogs, but the game may perform differently on your system.

If you want to test TheWorse Mod 1.0 for yourself, it's simple to install (and uninstall, if it doesn't improve your experience). Watch the video above to see vanilla and modded Watch Dogs side-by-side, and let us know if the mod increases or decreases performance on your PC.

So much of the Watch Dogs discussion has been centred around its graphics. Maybe that can now be resolved with this: the final release of TheWorse Mod. Originally designed to enable the visual effects present in Ubisoft's E3 2012 demo of the game, it's since been expanded to offer a full compliment of graphical and performance related improvements. Maybe now we can't talking about what's really wrong with Watch Dogs: its total lack of dogs.

This 1.0 version is a pretty minor update over the previous release. It further tweaks the depth-of-field and bloom setting, and fixes a few of the mod's lingering problems. If you're yet to try the upgrades it offers, now's the perfect time to take a look the mod's as feature complete as it's going to get.

In addition to the main changes, there's also an optional "MaLDo texture" version, which incorporates an Ultra textures fix created by Crysis 2 modder MaLDo. With it, selecting "High" textures will instead provide their Ultra counterparts, but do so without the stuttering experienced by some GPUs with the base game.

I tried out the previous 0.99 version, and it offered a noticeable improvement. That said, the depth-of-field effects were also far stronger than anything I'd want if actually attempting to play the game, (rather than looking wistfully at ports). Still, it's worth checking out if you find yourself disappointed by the look and feel of Watch Dogs' world.