It's been a good couple of months now since Watch Dogs - after a ridiculously lengthy development cycle - finally hacked its way into our lives. Ubisoft's latest attempt at making a franchise seems to have been a rousing success (at least in selling millions of copies extremely quickly) and we're almost certainly guaranteed to be receiving Watch Dogs 2 in the very near future. That's all well and good - the first in the series was a fun romp through an open world Chigago with some interesting game mechanics we'd never really seen before. On the other side of the coin, the game was also flawed in certain places and seemed to somewhat squander its potential. Let us not forget this all happened before; it took a slightly duff first entry in the form of Assassin's Creed 1 before we got to the better experience with AC II (phew, doesn't that seem like a long time ago now?). Both Watch Dogs and AC are both made by Ubisoft, so we're surely hoping that they'll find their feet with the inevitable sequel to their open-world hackathon. But what is it about the original that needs to be improved? There are ten very distinct things that need to be addressed in the sequel which we're going to put right here, for your reading pleasure. We promise to keep the hacking-related puns to a minimum. Be thee warned, there may well be spoilers ahead.
8. Graphics
In the world of next-gen and superior graphics, 60FPS's and dynamic asiotropic parakeet filtering (or something to that effect) being obsessed over by gamers everywhere, Watch Dogs stuck out immensely leading to its release thanks to Ubisoft managing to completely downgrade the graphics significantly compared to what we saw in the original E3 reveal years ago. It doesn't help that soon after release, the talented people playing the PC version almost immediately discovered hidden files in the games' code that could be reactivated with pretty much no bother whatsoever in order to restore high graphical capabilities either. Of course, it's probably likely Ubi had their reasons for downgrading (we sense the word 'efficiency' being thrown around somewhere) but that doesn't really excuse delivering a product that was subpar compared to something we saw absolutely yonks ago. It's not that WD's Chicago looks bad; it's the fact that it could have looked so much better. A lot of people were riding on Watch Dogs as the first real graphical powerhouse released on next-gen and what we got in the end was underwhelming overall. In the sequel, graphical quality needs to be addressed. With more time spent with the next-gen consoles, here's hoping that Ubisoft can pull it around and deliver something that looks even close to the original reveal of the game.
Dan Curtis is approximately one-half videogame knowledge, and the other half inexplicable Geordie accent. He's also one quarter of the Factory Sealed Retro Gaming podcast.
