Thanks for the info. They learned and improved. You have to give them that.
Unfortunately, I saw that it required UPlay so I won’t be buying it. Instead, the UPlay requirement is going to have the opposite effect of what Ubisoft intended.
Basically, yes. If you want to do more than just mess about in multiplayer, and unlock the high-end heists and stuff to do for you and your friends, you’ll have to grind or pay.
Jeez man, that doesn’t sound like much fun or a challenge at all. Next you’ll tell me you’re a Stealers fan too.
Every Ubisoft title requires Uplay these days. All the major ones, at least. That’s not likely to change because the few people upset by it represent a negligible percentage of sales versus the benefits for game updates, multiplayer servers, etc
LOL no. 
I was raised a Seahawks fan. Remember SB 40? 
Anyway, you can only do that kind of stuff late in the game when you’ve maxed out certain skill trees. And it only works in certain areas. Often your mission is to perform some specific goal and you can’t just “god mode” your way through it; you need to put yourself in actual danger. And your character isn’t much of an action hero; you’re a computer hacker with slightly above average athletic ability. Get shot a couple times and you’re toast. So you need patience, imagination, and luck to get through some areas.
The biggest disappointment was the very final mission. I’ll be vague to avoid spoilers, but you infiltrate the big bad guy’s place to sabotage his stuff to free the world (basically) then have to get out alive. I spent hours trying to sneak out, using tricks of one kind or another. Finally after literally dozens of attempts, giving up and coming back more than once, I said “f*** it” and ran my ass out, ignoring all the bullets and just running down steps, past guards, not stopping for anything. And that’s how I finished it. After all the clever stuff throughout the game it just took playing stupid to win. That made it somewhat bittersweet.
Doing all that costs resources, of which there is a finite amount that regenerates; resources can also be obtained from the occasional NPC. All this takes time and can go amazingly bad. I had to get documents out of a gang’s safe; my first try resulted in a huge battle between that gang, another gang, and the cops. One of 'em finally got the idea to throw a grenade into the scissors lift I was using.
After several tries to infiltrate with the RC buggy, I decided to sneak in myself. Took out the rear guards without drawing attention then planted two proximity mines at the back stairwell.