Watch Dogs Reception?

[Proverbial Jon]

It looks very interesting, but it has 'convoluted conspiracy' written all over it.

It'll be Assassin's Creed all over again.

I had high hopes until I saw it was developed by Ubisoft and then I started thinking like you.

What's the betting it will be a trilogy which spawns many identical, generic and pointless spin-off inbetween series entires and eventually a new and innovative idea becomes stale and souless?

Sorry, what game were we talking about again?

 

[Zaik]

Shooting looks very similar to Max Payne, and that's not really a bad thing at all. Maybe a little too similar, even going as far as to use a slow motion mechanic to give you the upper hand, but given it doesn't seem to be the primary attraction I can forgive it.

I'm left wondering if this will end up being Deus Ex-ish where you set up a character to progress one of multiple ways and rarely(if ever) run into a situation where you can't apply that to progress. It could be, or it could just give you all the tools right from the start and you figure it out from there(having trouble thinking of something to compare it to...maybe Thief? Been too long since I played one).

Either way, definitely going to keep my eye on it.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Personally, I like 3rd person cover-based shooting, at least more than FPS games (playing as a floating gun camera never really did it for me). However, I'd say that regenerating health is an issue. Looking at Watch Dogs, I'd say that the game would work great without regenning health, forcing you to be careful about what fights you get into. Letting the player heal up in illegal clinics (going with the theme of the game), maybe heal up to half health out of combat using first aid, it would provide incentive to avoid fights, at least open gunfights against multiple enemies.

Yeah, if it had realistic health mechanics (one bullet wound = life-threatening) that would at least be an interesting twist on the formula. I think that Thief is a good analogy for how combat should work in a game like this.

It looked really cool until the protagonist pulled a gun and crouched behind a chest-high wall.

will people stop with the whole cover-based shooter thing already

think about this, your character his tasked with killing this dude. you hack the traffic lights so he's involved in a collision hoping it will kill him (make it look like an accident) however you didnt take into consideration his goons are following him a few cars being. now they get out their cars and recognise you so they instantly (and rightly so) start shooting. your character has a gun, are you not going to shoot them?

Cover-based shooting as implemented in 90% of cover-based shooters is a terrible combat system, and there are more interesting ways they could have taken this than yet another assassination game.

 

[wooty]

I liked the idea and the concept of it, the interactions look pretty cool aswell.

I'll have to keep an eye on this one and see how it develops.

 

[shrekfan246]

I've just never seen a reason why. I see tons of complaints about it everytime a new game comes out.

I'm sure there is something, like it is badly designed so rooms telegraph their intentions or something. But otherwise I just can't imagine a situation where I'd be in a gunfight and think "Time to stand like Duke Nukem and fire blindly."

I've played paintball before, I very much appreciated cover. I'm sure if the bullets were lead I'd be even more in love with my cover.

"Concrete slab I'm gonna marry you if we get out of this alive."

On a related note, I get the development reason for regenerating health, but that is the particular field I'd love to see work done on. I really have no alternative suggestion for it, but that's basically been the only thing that's ever bothered me.

Because obviously cover-based shooting can never be done well, ever, ever, ever, ever, not in a million years, and it's always boring and bland and brings down the overall quality of any game it's implemented in!

Also, there's a real problem with anything resembling "realism" being put in games, because hey! It's a game! Why do I want it to be realistic? Get that gritty brown off of my screen, I want blinding neon pink instead even if it doesn't fit the overall aesthetic of the level I'm in!

OT: It looked pretty good to me. I'm not going to write off a new IP just because it's using mechanics that have been done before. Because, you know, that would give publishers the impression that I just want to buy the next Call of Duty or Gears of War instead of actually getting something slightly new every now and then.

EDIT: You know, I want to re-write that paragraph, but I just don't know what else to say. Apparently people expect every single new game to completely remake how we view video games as a whole, which if true is naive and ridiculous, or else they're becoming the new hipsters and thinking "Video games were better back when only I knew about them" which is, again, naive, arrogant, and ridiculous. High-budget titles can't be niche titles. And if you're not trying to be a niche title, you pretty much have to base the game-play around something that's been done before. Hell, I like third-person shooters, so I'm looking forward to this, no matter how gimmicky the hacking turns out to be and how much it relies on the shooting instead.

Yeah, it could be doing a little more to make itself unique, but this is Ubisoft we're talking about. You know, five Assassin's Creed games (just for the main consoles, not even including spin-offs and things outside of video games) in as many years.

 

[Xiroh86]

the gameplay intrigues me and it looks good, but to be honest i found it cooler because i live right outside Chicago and my son's name is Aiden

 

[Kahunaburger]

OT: It looked pretty good to me. Unlike apparently a large section of the user-base of this website, I'm not going to write off a new IP just because it's using mechanics that have been done before. Because, you know, that would give publishers the impression that I just want to buy the next Call of Duty or Gears of War instead of actually getting something slightly new every now and then.

EDIT: Yeah, it could be doing a little more to make itself unique, but this is Ubisoft we're talking about. You know, five Assassin's Creed games (just for the main consoles, not even including spin-offs and things outside of video games) in as many years.

Wait... so the plan is to buy games with samey mechanics to convince developers not to make samey games? I think I'll stick to my plan, where developers make whatever they think will sell and I buy games based on whether they look like they'll be any good.

 

[shrekfan246]

Wait... so the plan is to buy games with samey mechanics to convince developers not to make samey games? I think I'll stick to my plan, where developers make whatever they think will sell and I buy games based on whether they look like they'll be any good.

I've been trying to think of a better way to phrase what I was trying to say, but it's not actually working. My problem is with people saying things like "Cover-based shooting? Nope, not interested anymore." regardless of whatever the overall quality of the game is going to be. As if using cover-based shooting suddenly makes the entire game absolutely terrible because it's using that mechanic. Yeah, I get that if you don't like cover-based shooters then you're not going to like a game that's centered around cover-based shooting, but it frustrates me when something that might actually attempt to be new or different gets written off just because it happens to be using the same base that's been done a thousand times before.

I have the same problem with people who complain about "brown and grey" shooters and "generic fantasy" RPGs.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Wait... so the plan is to buy games with samey mechanics to convince developers not to make samey games? I think I'll stick to my plan, where developers make whatever they think will sell and I buy games based on whether they look like they'll be any good.

I've been trying to think of a better way to phrase what I was trying to say, but it's not actually working. My problem is with people saying things like "Cover-based shooting? Nope, not interested anymore." regardless of whatever the overall quality of the game is going to be. As if using cover-based shooting suddenly makes the entire game absolutely terrible because it's using that mechanic. Yeah, I get that if you don't like cover-based shooters then you're not going to like a game that's centered around cover-based shooting, but it frustrates me when something that might actually attempt to be new or different gets written off just because it happens to be using the same base that's been done a thousand times before.

Well, I'm not convinced that Watch Dogs is actually trying to do something new. It seems to me more like some suits had a discussion on how to best capture the markets for Human Revolution, Assassin's Creed, and GTA with the same game.

And I'm also not sure what's wrong about disliking a bad set of mechanics. Lots of games have shooting, lots of games have cover, but "cover-based shooter" is a term generally used to describe a specific subset of these that are basically whack-a-mole simulators. That's different from, say,

I have the same problem with people who complain about "brown and grey" shooters and "generic fantasy" RPGs.

...issues people have with aesthetic or setting.

 

[Lord Beautiful]

There are a lot of good ideas. If the game ended up being open-ended in its problem-solving, refrained from making solutions to said problems being terribly obvious, and scripted sparingly, it could be goddamn awesome.

Or it could excessively linear, scripted, and waste all the good ideas it presents. Not sure how it'll turn out.

That said, I'm a little less put off by it being having cover-based shooter mechanics and a little more put off by it being a modern AAA game. Oddly enough, even in the days before cover mechanics, I played shooters by finding cover and winning through pop-and-squat, so it really isn't an issue for me.

 

[shrekfan246]

Well, I'm not convinced that Watch Dogs is actually trying to do something new. It seems to me more like some suits had a discussion on how to best capture the markets for Human Revolution, Assassin's Creed, and GTA with the same game.

That's a fair enough assessment, and a reason to be skeptical that I can agree with. But how many times have those three games been combined before?

And I'm also not sure what's wrong about disliking a bad set of mechanics. Lots of games have shooting, lots of games have cover, but "cover-based shooter" is a term generally used to describe a specific subset of these that are basically whack-a-mole simulators.

I typed out a big post meant to keep this going, but I'm just going to bow out because I really don't have it in me to get into a long-winded discussion about this. You don't care for "cover-based shooters", I don't mind the mechanic nearly as much, so I'll just say I disagree and I suddenly don't mind anymore about people who are might be writing this off because it might be based around shooting EDIT: from behind cover.

 

[Enverex]

Am I to presume that everyone around here would stand up and shoot at people?

If you look at most of the firearm threads you would easily be able to see that 90% of the escapist forum goers couldnt tell a black painted stick from a gun from how much they whine about them, so they would likely run away crying from anything to do with said items much less shoot at people.

But yeah, I much prefer a protagonist that drops back behind cover to one who stands in the open and takes more of a pounding than the entire Nigerian army could dish out on a good day before walking away to go do something else.

I've just never seen a reason why. I see tons of complaints about it everytime a new game comes out.

I'm sure there is something, like it is badly designed so rooms telegraph their intentions or something. But otherwise I just can't imagine a situation where I'd be in a gunfight and think "Time to stand like Duke Nukem and fire blindly."

I've played paintball before, I very much appreciated cover. I'm sure if the bullets were lead I'd be even more in love with my cover.

"Concrete slab I'm gonna marry you if we get out of this alive."

On a related note, I get the development reason for regenerating health, but that is the particular field I'd love to see work done on. I really have no alternative suggestion for it, but that's basically been the only thing that's ever bothered me.

The point that people complain about and what I hate, is that you can't just duck and move behind cover, no, we're clearly all too stupid to do that ourselves. We need to press a button that activates some sort of local gravity field from the nearest chest high object and sucks you against it, glued alongside it unless you break yourself free again.

God help us if we ever considered just running up to something and ducking, that's clearly a silly idea.

 

[Lethos]

It does look very cool, but I'll wait for more info before I begin to hope.

 

[Eamar]

I obviously don't have enough information to make an informed judgement, but I like what I've seen so far. It's on my radar and I'll watch its progress with interest.

 

[the_dude_abides]

What I would prefer is for the Michael Bay effect to be taken out of the equation. I don't know, the explosions, car crashes and general mayhem didn't fit in with the impression I got from the first half of the gameplay footage.

I'd really like if I could bring down enemies using more covert methods. Breaking into offices, hacking into computers that sort of thing.

But seeing as I really don't know enough about this game I won't judge it too harshly one way or another. Be interesting to see how it pans out.

 

[David Bjur]

snip

Wait, what? OP asked for our opinions, and we shared them. Did we do something wrong?

 

[CityofTreez]

snip

Wait, what? OP asked for our opinions, and we shared them. Did we do something wrong?

No, and I never said you did.

 

[David Bjur]

snip

Wait, what? OP asked for our opinions, and we shared them. Did we do something wrong?

No, and I never said you did.

Then why did you quote us?

 

[Soxafloppin]

Its hard to explain, it looks interesting, but not fun...which is how I felt about Heavy Rain (And I loved Heavy Rain).

 

[Woodsey]

I used to find that kind of demo would get me excited, but one of the RPS writers pointed out that actually, what everyone is excited by is what's in their head.

Half the demo was a guy walking slowly down a street, then standing in a room. Then he took cover and shot some people. I mean sure, they quite blatantly teased a lot of powers, but it is incredibly difficult to judge how open and flexible it actually is.

I still remember the impression Assassin's Creed first gave off when it was demoed, and then what it was like to actually play.

More interesting were the conspiracy theories about what it was running on. (A PC.)