Aiden Pierce isn’t your typical videogame protagonist.
“Aiden is a man with a dark past who has made questionable choices,”
Lead Story Designer Kevin Shortt explained in our first live gameplay
demo. Growing up in Chicago, Aiden used his technical prowess to
infiltrate bank accounts and access surveillance systems, becoming
something of a vigilante. Naturally, these pursuits earned him some
powerful enemies on both sides of the law. As you play Watch_Dogs, you
won’t be choosing between stark extremes on some binary morality scale,
but defining where Aiden resides on much murkier spectrum of
acceptability.
Chicago isn’t your typical videogame city.
We’ve all played open-world action games where cities feel more like a
collection of giant painted boxes than a living, breathing urban
community. Watch_Dogs’s densely detailed Chicago feel less like a pretty
façade and more like a densely populated city. Alleys are riddled with
rotting cardboard boxes and detritus and parking garages are honeycombed
with gloomy staircases — hack the right device and you may even find
yourself peering into the living room of a Chicago citizen.
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You can hack almost anything.
Thanks to Chicago’s Central Operating System (ctOS), the city’s
expansive (and invasive) technology is constantly at your fingertips.
Take control of a nearby security camera to map out the positions of
guards in a well-fortified area, raise a garage door or forklift to
confuse and distract your would-be enemies, or — if you’re in
particularly dire straits — tamper with the traffic grid and cause a
multi-car pileup. These aren’t scripted scenarios, but dynamic and
occasionally unpredictable events that can change the course of an
escape in a nanosecond.
Stealth and no-holds-barred combat are viable options.
Aiden is no sedentary computer geek — he’s quite capable of dispatching
his enemies using lethal and nonlethal force. The stealthier player
will value misdirection and surveillance, using remote cameras to tag
and monitor enemy positions while skirting past trouble. Brute-force
players will have a wide range of armaments to choose from, but you’ll
want to keep civilian casualties in check lest your reputation suffer.
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Multiplayer and single-player will overlap.
Watch_Dogs will feature a full-blown multiplayer mode set in the mean
streets of Chicago, though final details are still under lock and key.
More intriguing is that multiplayer and single-player will “seamlessly”
overlap, an effort by Ubisoft to demolish the wall that has divided
single-player gaming and multiplayer for decades. This interconnectivity
will extend to a companion experience on mobile devices, though details
remain scarce.
Voyeurism is more fun than it sounds.
Connecting to “FREE PUBLIC WI-FI” is risky business in the real world,
so you can imagine what’s in store for anyone foolish enough to hop on
an unsecured network in Aiden Pearce’s city. Aiden can activate Wi-Fi
hotspots around the city, then hack into any device that connects to it
granting him access to, among other things, a webcam on an unsuspecting
citizens’ computer. This enables you to score valuable data, but also
peer into the strange domestic lives of Chicago’s apartment dwellers.
The side quests are novel and varied.
Once you hack into a district of Chicago’s ctOS, you’ll find yourself
swimming in an ocean of data including the city’s crime prediction
algorithms. If you want to go full-on Batman, you can use the crime
prediction data to track down potential “victims” from the passers-by on
the street, then intervene before their lives are cut short by a hail
of bullets or a baseball bat to the head. Other side missions are less
grim; one of our favorite was NVZN, an augmented-reality arcade game
that tasks you with blasting marauding aliens with ray guns.
Original Article can be found in play-station blog
