Watch Dogs Message Board  

Gameplay graphics, characters, and setting are all solid

the problem I find is the story is a tad bit lacking but they definately left this game open for a sequel since only minor villians are knocked off.

Only thing I'm curious about is that they don't delve into the main character's history too much as to where he gained his hacker knowledge or why his wife or ex-wife whichever that may be is never mentioned.

Personally I think the game is overrated. It's not what it's supposed to be. There are dozen of weakness in the gameplay mechanism. Not only that hacking is only fun while playing a story mission the hacking elements itself are too limited, you need a single hand to count what can be hacked only.

Moreover if one of the civilians calls the cops it doesn't matter how stealth you move away, as soon as the call has been finished the police starts searching for you exactly where you currently are, pretty annoying.

It's a triple A title so it makes fun but from all the hype I've expected more. From the system requirements I've expected a smoother gameplay and a better graphic. The story is also not very interested. A man's daughter died, he is on revenge and so on.

I don't know about the graphical performance of Watch Dogs (still have to wait for my uplay pre-order to appear)but today I've updated the drivers to my GTX 760 and release notes said that the drivers have been Watch Dogs optimized.

It's not the driver that needs to be optimized. If you play the game you get an idea why the system requirements are that extremely high, because the game is clearly not optimized. I've been playing the game on ultra settings and got a decent computer and from my personal opinion the game looks like GTA 5 which runs on xbox 360.

I don't want to say the game is bad but it's a fail when you think of all the hype the game has built up before release. Clearly everything of the game isn't fully finished or something you would remember of. It's all about "I have seen this before" and hacking which is the main goal of the game becomes after a while annoying because you have it repeats itself. Everytime you need to switch to a security camera to activate a panel to unlock a door....

And this game already had a delay of 6 months because the developers weren't happy with the state of the game. Well well, it's still worth the money and I'm sure people can have a lot of fun with the game. Don't want to talk too bad about it.

Here's what I wrote elsewhere:

Opinion based on a few hours of play:

Graphics are pretty good, but nothing revolutionary. Running on medium at 1200p with an i7-4770 and an HD 6950 with no issues aside from one area that randomly dropped to 20-30 FPS. Beyond that everything is smooth and playable.

One thing that I really liked was that there's so much little detail in the world. The streets are lined with all kinds of little things like mailboxes, trash, etc that make them feel alive. The rain/storm effects look really nice, and you can recognize the actual city of Chicago pretty easily.

Gameplay-wise, it's a solid open world cover shooter with hacking as its gimmick. Gunplay is satisfactory, though nothing particularly exciting. Most missions could be solved going in guns blazing, but you're pretty squishy before leveling up a bit and it's often easier to hack your way in instead. For some missions, you can literally sit across the street perfectly safe while you jump from camera to camera, messing with guards and environmental objects until you reach your goal. There was one mission where I had to hack a door to step foot on the property, but after that I sat in a corner. First I had to look for a specific guard to steal his passcode from his phone, then I had to hack the server with it. I jumped from camera to camera and eventually got the guard's code, but there was no camera that pointed deeper into the building. One guard sitting next to the server had a camera on him, but he was facing the wrong way. So I tripped an alarm to make him face the server, then jumped to his camera, then onto the server itself. It was pretty neat.

Driving is... eh. The best comparison I can make would be to GTA 4. All but the lightest sportscars feel very hefty. They're slow to turn, slow to accelerate, and easy to spin out. There's a fair amount of driving in this game between dedicated car missions, driver side missions, and missions where the police or gangs chase you after you did something to draw their attention. It's pretty ****ing hard to shake cars off your tail just by driving. There were several times where I found it easier to stop and get into a shoot out with 10 guys rather than trying to shake them off my tail.

There seems to be plenty of stuff to do. The main plot looks like it will be decently long, with 8 acts. The first act has 9 missions in it. Beyond that, there's side missions like stopping crimes, taking out gang leaders, intercepting criminal convoys, and doing driving/fixer misisons. Then there's the ctOS servers to unlock, the ctOS towers to unlock (think viewpoints in AC), and all the collectibles and ****. Then there's the digital trips. And then there's multiplayer.

Overall, if you like open world games that offer a wide range of activities like Assassin's Creed or GTA, you'll probably like Watch_Dogs. If you were looking for something revolutionary, this isn't it. The hacking is a pretty decent gimmick that's a welcome addition to the regular shooting and driving gameplay, but this isn't primarily a hacking game.

Think will wait awhile, after reading the reviews on the game, mostly the positive reviews, majority were stating that AMD systems were having problems running the game...

@techowl

Most of the guys here have top of the notch pc's, so for the last time stop blaming the "rig".
You dont have issues maybe because your pc's are too weak, have you thought of that? and playing with max settings is'nt the max settings that a guy with sli gtx titan's have!
I have a gtx770oc'd and core i5 4670 oc'd haswell+16 gigs ram and that's more than enough to run this game on max settings.
I get 70-60 fps on ultra settings but also suffer from micro stutter here and there while driving.
Yesterday Nvidia released an update that includes optimization for this game, lets see if it helps, if not I'm sure a patch will arrive soon.

Edit: So I installed the new optimized Nvidia driver and I must say the game runs super smooth now, also the graphics seem to be much better.

From Nvidia: "New in GeForce 337.88 Game Ready WHQL drivers
•Game Ready - This 337.88 Game Ready WHQL driver ensures you'll have the best possible gaming experience for Watch Dogs.
•Performance – Introduces key DirectX optimizations which result in reduced game-loading times and significant performance increases across a wide variety of games compared with the previous 335.23 WHQL. Significant CPU overhead reductions in the driver result in performance gains that will often favor CPU-bottlenecked situations. Per usual, results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings."

I really recommend this driver for anyone with Nvidia card that have issues.

[Edited by kingkob, 5/27/2014 1:01:12 AM]

Hmm, my specs are below. Runs perfectly smooth with all settings maxed. No stutters, no problems. Great game, worth the money even if it's not worth the hype. No game run on a timeline and a budget will be perfect; and the more time and the more budget you give, the more human nature will stall progress. For the price of 4 large pizzas, I got this here epic game, which to me is a win. The pizzas would have just made me fat, and I have plenty of ramen anyhow.

Intel Core i7-4700HQ
24 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M