Watch Dogs Review - No Hack Job

[WarpZone]

Ubisoft has done "little to discourage" the impression that Watch Dogs is some kinda next-gen ubergame? Hah! Nice one, Jim.

Near as I can tell, this has been the conversation surrounding Watch Dogs so far:

Ubisoft: "Let's make a hackery open-world game!"

Gamers: "Hey, that does sound pretty cool!"

Ubisoft: "And let's pump ALL the money in the world into it, so we're completely screwed if it's not the biggest selling game in the history of time!"

Gamers: "uhhhh? that doesn't sound like a good idea... remember what happened with-"

Ubisoft: "Hey, let's do 50 exclusive pre-order bonuses and the most draconian press embargo of all time!"

Gamers: "You're scaring me. Please stop."

Ubisoft: "LIKE OUR GAME! DEAR GOD PLEASE LIKE OUR GAME!"

Gamers: "Uh? maybe when?"

Ubisoft: "DON'T SAY IT!"

Gamers: "I might check it out after?"

Ubisoft: "DON'T YOU DARE!"

Gamers: "...a-after the reviews or when..."

Ubisoft: "ONE MORE WORD, ************! I'LL DO IT! I SWEAR TO GOD, I'LL FUCKING DO IT!"

Gamers: "...when the price comes down?"

Ubisoft: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

*millions die*

This is also, with a few small alterations, the conversation surrounding the release of every AAA game ever.

 

[major_chaos]

Glad to see the positive reviews coming in, I have been looking forward to this since Transistor turned out to be highly disappointing. Now the only question is whether I wait and get the PS4 version once I get a PS4, or get the PC version now and risk performance issues.

 

[purf]

Might be one to get when the nextGen of myPC comes around. It's the only review I've seen but I've found that Jim's opinions are usually worth trusting.

One thing, Escapist, about your reviews. And, no big deal, really, as they are informative and everything but I had the impression today that I'm having this thought again so here it goes: I'm not really sure why I'm even watching the *video* when all it does is to give an audio track to the article's words, accompanied by what mostly amounts to disjointed bits of "look, there are graphics and pixels, too". As in, at best a review writes (and then talks) about car chases, so someone does a Fraps of a car driving around... "meh"

 

[NLS]

Jeah.. bought it, found out neither Uplay nor the game itself works and now i'm currently writing a ticket to the Steam Support to trade in the game for steam-money or another game i want.
Because they clearly sold me a product which is not working at all. Double so, since AMD cards are not supported at all - without a single lable providing information about that.

Meh, got proven right once again: Stay away from Ubisoft. The only company i consider worse than EA.
Back to Transistor it is.

What? I have both AMD processor and GPU, no problems. I did have some trouble logging into uPlay the first few tries, but that's because everyone is trying to get in at the same time. It worked again after 10 minutes or so. Been playing it for an hour without any problems.

I suggest you just wait a few days for things to settle down, and it'll probably be solved by less pressure on uPlay and maybe even a patch or two. Pretty much "all" games nowadays have launch issues the first few hours, demanding a refund when the game probably works the next morning is a bit harsh.

 

[Laughing Man]

Be interesting to see Jim's take on Uplay being down for several hours now preventing people like myself from being able to log in to redeem their purchased keys and download the game. If Ubisoft had stopped being such bellends and allowed the likes of GMG to distribute keys a day or two early then I could have preloaded the game and gone offline and played, instead here I am sitting in 2014 with a 30Meg Fibre connection and a PC powerful enough take on Skynet and I can't even get to a situation where I can download the game, 15 years ago I would have been playing the game for several hours by now, progress ain't it wonderful!

 

[Azaraxzealot]

Your review here made me briefly say "huh, guess I'll pick it up at the summer sale for 20 something percent off." Then I heard how insulting the pc port was (especially to those of us who didn't drop the extra dough on fancy nvidia cards) and now I'm back to "wait until it's 66% off or more mode". They better add proper support for us radeon users by that time.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Definitely sounds and looks like a game I will pick up, but not at launch or for launch price.

As for Aiden's lack of any real defined personality, I'm mostly okay with that. I'd rather play a character that I feel I've played as before than a character (or characters) that are defined in a way that totally turns me off from even playing the game as in GTA5.

 

[Darth_Payn]

SO glad to hear this game's good! I expected nothing less than awesome from its approach to hacking and the many, many, MANY extras there are. I just forget which version I preordered, it was almost two months ago.
And once again Jim rips into the hat. I have no problem with them making a hat as merchandise for the game, just making it a preorder bonus.

 

[RicoADF]

Jeah.. bought it, found out neither Uplay nor the game itself works and now i'm currently writing a ticket to the Steam Support to trade in the game for steam-money or another game i want.
Because they clearly sold me a product which is not working at all. Double so, since AMD cards are not supported at all - without a single lable providing information about that.

Meh, got proven right once again: Stay away from Ubisoft. The only company i consider worse than EA.
Back to Transistor it is.

What? I have both AMD processor and GPU, no problems. I did have some trouble logging into uPlay the first few tries, but that's because everyone is trying to get in at the same time. It worked again after 10 minutes or so. Been playing it for an hour without any problems.

I suggest you just wait a few days for things to settle down, and it'll probably be solved by less pressure on uPlay and maybe even a patch or two. Pretty much "all" games nowadays have launch issues the first few hours, demanding a refund when the game probably works the next morning is a bit harsh.

The game should work out of the box, their even legally required to sell a working product. If it doesn't work he should get a refund, hoping it may be fixed later would be stupid. This whole reliance on the net to run bullshit needs to stop.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Great, I can't wait to start playing some Watch_Dogs.

I watched TB's WTF is on it and I'm glad I did. Holy shit this game looks boring to me. It looks like a slow GTA with a clunky cover shooter glued together.

GTA & RDR are very clunky cover shooters.

And, frankly, if the default input device for the format in question feels unplayable, then, in my subjective and reviewing opinion, that would be "Abysmal".

When the default input device wasn't designed as a game controller, that's what you get most of the time.

 

[Weaver]

Great, I can't wait to start playing some Watch_Dogs.

I watched TB's WTF is on it and I'm glad I did. Holy shit this game looks boring to me. It looks like a slow GTA with a clunky cover shooter glued together.

GTA & RDR are very clunky cover shooters.

To be fair, the last GTA I palyed was 3 and I don't think they had cover mechanics in it
But yes, the shooting in the GTA series has always been kind of crap (IMO).

edit: I did play GTA 4 for like 20 minutes but I got bored and never played it again.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

To be fair, the last GTA I palyed was 3 and I don't think they had cover mechanics in it
But yes, the shooting in the GTA series has always been kind of crap (IMO).

edit: I did play GTA 4 for like 20 minutes but I got bored and never played it again.

I played the first 3rd of RDR (because it's supposed to be so riveting and awesome). Every mission was just very subpar cover shooting, like PS1 bad. Once you cross that imaginary line, every enemy knows where you are and it just plays out like whack-a-mole. The tutorial mission of Watch Dogs was better than anything in RDR or GTA.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Unless you're one of those people who cry about sub-60FPS (which means you apparently ignored all gaming up til a few years ago, but hey.)

As this is a review of the PS4 version, yes, sub 60 is to be expected, as consoles have made 30 fps their standard.

On the PC though, 60+ fps has basically been the standard since it became regularly achievable. And, as far as I know, 60 Hertz monitors have been around for about 30 years. And, as such, fps is very relevant when discussing the PC version - as that would make it the standard for PC gaming since at least the late 90's.

Though, admittedly, having been primarily a console gamer for most of my gaming the past few decades, with only the occasional PC title here and there, I can only guess that 60 fps became the PC standard around the time Quake 1 (edit: or similar fast paced titles) where able to run at 60 fps for most PC gamers.

Anyone more knowledgeable on this is free to correct me, as this is, at best, an educated guess on my part. And I'd really like to know when 60 fps actually became the PC standard.

It's been "the standard" as it were since the prevalence of LCD monitors, about a decade or so give or take. CRT monitors generally had higher refresh rates, anywhere from 75-120Hz+ typically (some went much higher). LCD screens however took up less space, had flat screens, etc but lower refresh rates.

Most LCDs, even today, are around 60Hz. Some are 75Hz and there are current (TN only) screen models that refresh at 120Hz (this is mostly so that they can show 3D stuff at 60Hz per eye, though 2D @ 120Hz is also a bonus). The reason for wanting 60FPS in the game is so that it matches the screen's refresh rate. If matched perfectly, a game will look and play silk smoothly with no screen tearing or lag. Lower frame rates means some frames have to be duplicated. Some games go so far as to "step down" completely from 60 -> 30 if 60 can't be maintained as then each frame can be doubled and play can continue, albeit (arguably) less smoothly.

At an in between number of frames, the game will look disjointed and there will be frequent screen tearing. Triple buffering and VSync both help in that regard. In an ideal world, a game's FPS would precisely match the refresh rate of its screen. Since consoles generally can't maintain 60fps, they are stepped down to 30fps with each frame doubled for 60Hz screens (the most common kind). Just know that if one's screen had a 75Hz refresh rate, 60FPS games would also suffer screen tearing and artefacts during fast scenes, so one would want to play at 75FPS ideally. I can only dream of how great games would play at 120FPS on a suitable screen (albeit a TN display), but my most recent screen is a 60Hz IPS monitor.

Last point of note is that it's only really consoles which lock frame rates in games since PC frame rates are essentially "unlimited" and variable, dependant on the power of the PC/graphics card (and obviously the monitors ability to display it). Hence we get graphical settings to tweak for the right balance of visuals vs. performance with the top end cards generally powerful enough to max out everything and still have the grunt to maintain high FPS.

 

[PhiMed]

Jim dug an Ubisoft game...

This game must be AWESOME.

 

[Bat Vader]

Loving the game so far. Only real issue I have with it is that the driving feels kinda wonky to me. Even with a car that has really good handling I still find it really difficult to stay on the road.

 

[sXeth]

maybe someone can answer me this:
angry joes interview, the dev guy said that other players can join the campaign. jim didnt mention any of it. did i misunderstood that guy in the interview?

I"m not sure exactly how its triggered (I got one by hacking a random NPC AFAIK), but you can end up with contracts on you that let another player invade you for a bounty. Its kind of a crap system though, you have to run around an area scanning NPCs to find out which one is them (generally the one trying to hide), then kill them, or they escape ad keep however much of the bounty money they hacked before you found them. You can turn it off anyways, at the cost of some potential unlocks.

There's some standardy multiplayer fare outside of that, races and stuff.

 

[J Tyran]

Per usual though, the PC port right now is terrible, at least for the majority of people it seems. Playing with my 780ti, I get horrible stutter, significant frame rate drops and screen tearing, making the game pretty much unplayable right now. Looks like I'll have to wait for a patch for a new game...again.

Have you updated your graphics drivers? That apparently fixed most issues I had with the graphic performance. That or it was the thirty pounds of dust motes I brushed out of the cooling fans.

I updated the drivers before I even downloaded the game. Still have the problems.The only solutions I've had were to either lock the FPS to 30, or play in borderless, the latter of which only sort of fixes the problem.

If you haven't already tried it go into your drivers and enable it to override application Vsync with Nvidia "adaptive Vsync", it adapts the Vsync to deactivate it if the frame rate is in danger of chugging so it doesn't tie up resources when there is no danger of screen tearing.

It solved the problem for me and I only have a slightly OC GTX 780.