Have you seen Chicago's bean? It's pretty cool, and or cheesy depending on how you feel toward modern art. It's a giant, metallic...thing that looks like what would happen if the T1000 from Terminator 2 passed a 10 foot high kidney stone. In Watch_Dogs it resembles a shiny fruit loop. When making a game that exists in a real place people actually live, these kind of smudged-over details are infuriating, and Watch_Dogs is rife with them. The Chicago that Aiden Pearce exists in is a strange place, where the entire North Side has been shifted west, there's only one baseball team in town in a totally incorrect geographical location, and The Chicago Theater, Music Box Theater, and Navy Pier's Ferris Wheel are either missing or renamed. Even the infamous face fountain has been replaced by interconnected square-looking things and despite still having the same name. It's understandable that getting the rights to a lot of these locations and landmarks could be expensive, but at the same time what's the point of setting your game in a specific place if you're not going to get into specifics about that place? There's a reason Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row make their worlds analogies to real places, instead of the real places themselves - it's easier to forgive Liberty City for shafting your favourite part of New York City because it's not actually New York City. Worse is that the game deliberately rubs your face in the anachronisms. There are a bunch of landmark hotspots spread throughout Chicago, and if you 'check in' at one you'll be greeted with an informative little blurb about the thing that's actually supposed to be there, tied to the fake name, which will surely confuse non-Chicagoans and infuriate natives. But don't worry, Ubisoft secured the ability to refer to The Willis Tower by its proper name - which precisely zero percent Chicago residents actually refer to it as.
