Ya know, after a couple days of this game I think I’ve decided I’m kind of over these open world sandbox games. There have been alot of “good ones” the last couple years but they all feel the same to me. This is a good game and has good controls but my god it feels just like Sleeping Dogs, GTA, Saints Row, Infamous etc… I think we’ve gotten to the point of too much of a good thing. At least for me.
I suspect I won’t be finishing this game. I need to stop buying games for a while.
Playing some more, I hit the single-multiplayer game last night. You can be playing your campaign and then get alerted that someone is trying to hack you. The game shows a circle on the map that the hacker is located in and you need to identify him (or her) before they finish their hack of your phone. The kicker is that the other hacker is a real player who is in your game. They have a normal civilian skin (as opposed to a goofy trench coat) so they’re trying to look nonchalant or stay slouched down in a parked car or crouch behind some trash bins while you’re racing about, scanning people and trying to locate them (the closer you are to fully hacked, the more the circle shrinks to help you locate them). Once you find them, they’re alerted and take off running and you chase and gun them down. It’s a fun diversion and largely voluntary – you find NPCs from “Blume Corporation” and hacking one makes them put a hit on you which is the other person’s entry into your game. Winning and losing moves a separate pool of “points” you can use for some extra perks that aren’t necessary to the campaign game but probably entertaining like anti-vehicle ammunition.
I’m 3-1 for defending myself. The lost one was a little ironic and frustrating because I was JUST on top of the building in his hiding spot thinking “This would be a great place to hide for a hack”. Then when the hack came from that basic location I was too unsure of how to get back up and didn’t want to waste the time trying to get up there when he might have been on the ground. My best time, I got into an underground loading dock before the hacker even scanned me to start and hid behind some pallets, using a hacked camera to survey the area. He came down looking for me, I saw him first and – bam – shotgun to the chest.
There’s other games too, mainly racing variants. Haven’t tried them yet. My verdict is still the same (fun game but no reason to drop sixty bucks) but I thought the “intrusion” mini-game was worth mentioning.
Cubsfan, agreed that it’s very much in the same open world modern crime genre. Fortunately, I hadn’t played one in a while so I’m not as burnt out with the genre as you seem to be but I know exactly what you’re talking about. I once played Far Cry 3, then Hitman: Absolution and then started Dishonored. After an hour of Dishonored I realized I had as much stealth crouch-walking as one man could reasonably take in video games and abandoned it. Plus I can’t say anything glowing about the campaign plot in Watch Dogs so far so if the open world shenanigans aren’t working for you it’s probably time to cut your losses.
Oh, and from a local note, I was tickled to see the Marshall Fields clocks mounted on a building and loved the pseudo-Cloud Gate that looks just like the original from the right angle and has a tag “Has Bean” (the artist is all possessive of the design image and hates the ‘Bean’ nickname).
On the other hand, at one point I was looking over the river at the game world boundary and it was high rocky hills with a wind farm :dubious:
Windows 8 and 8.1 are supported.
Surprised you have a 32-bit operating system though.
The problem with that is Watch Dogs specs require at least 6GB of memory and with a 32-bit OS you can have no more than 4GB in the whole system (well, you can have more but the PC will not see it). This includes ALL RAM which means video card RAM plus system RAM adds towards that 4GB cap.
64-bit OS gets you past that restriction.
My problem with the game is the keyboard/mouse controls. Driving is super sloppy and mushy feeling. If I use my controller the driving is a lot better but then shooting sucks.
You also get really weird mouse behavior in menus. Like really bad mouse acceleration going on or something. Very annoying but then just the menus so not all that big a deal.
I’ve gotten more used to KB+M driving (though I agree it’s not great) but I do like the seamless switching between controller and keyboard. I know some people who just play KB+M and pick up a controller for the driving portions. More work than I’m willing to put into it though – I just fishtail into a lot of bike racks and newspaper machines 
I’m about ready to take back all the nice things I said about Watch Dogs’ depiction of Chicago after hitting the fictional northwest suburb of Pawnee. The rural mountainous suburb with a thriving logging industry. You know, a couple miles outside of the city that was built on a prairie swamp.
I bet the folks in real life Des Plaines would be surprised.
Pawnee is a real town outside Springfield.
Is it a mountainous logging town? 
It just boggles my mind that they’d go through the detail of putting up the Fields clocks, for instance, and then add in a region that defies all geography and reality. I mean, if they wanted a rural town they could have modeled one off the umpteen exurbs and slapped it into a cornfield. It wouldn’t have been “correct” in regards to distance outside the city but at least it’d be consistent with basic geography.
Also, the (real) Pawnee town website is “expired”. Are we sure the town still exists? 
Population 2700. I only remember the town because my aunt lived there I would go visit her in the summer.
It’s one of those rural-ish towns that’s only kind-of a town anyway.
I’m really late to this party, but I just got this yesterday. I was waiting for another Steam sale to pick it up, but someone bought it for me.
This game is awesome. Runs great on my computer, haven’t had any of the performance issues I’ve read about (granted, I have a brand new computer). Looks awesome. The weather and lighting effects are impressive.
As for gameplay, I’ve read all the reviews, heard all the criticisms, and while it’s almost all true (“derivative,” “one-dimensional characters,” “boring protagonist,” “‘floaty’ driving,” “weak story,” “glitchy”) none of that bothers me. At all. It’s fun. Have I seen all of it before? Sure. I enjoyed it before, and I still enjoy it now. Was it everything it was hyped up to be? Of course not. It’s been compared to a lot of other open-world games, but I think of it as an open-world Hitman, which is something I’ve always wanted out of that series.
It was a fun game. My main plot criticism isn’t so much about the nuts & bolts of the story but rather it falls into the “How can we stretch this out?” traps especially towards the end. You know the drill:
“You need to hack into the main terminal. That didn’t work so you’ll need to locate and hack into each satellite terminal separately. Oh, and each satellite terminal needs a fuse which is naturally located no where remotely close to the terminal. And each fuse is behind a locked door, each requiring the passkey of a separate security officer who is each on vacation in a different part of the country…”
I can handle a lot of weak plots for the sake of going along for the ride but that kind of jerking around always sticks out unfavorably for me.
Errant Signal had some pretty unpleasant things to say about it, but more because it just didn’t live up to, or even try to live somewhere in the same zipcode as, its hype machine.
I don’t believe anything could have lived up to the relentless marketing campaign and the massive ensuing hype. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, it’s just not a great game, and people shitting on it just because it didn’t live up to that impossible level of hype, AFAIC are just as dishonest as the shills getting paid off to write glowing reviews. You have to give them credit; the marketing campaign was remarkably effective. I was drooling over the game as soon as I learned about it, and even though it’s not everything I imagined it might be before I had played it, I’m still enjoying it, and I’m not all butthurt about it not being the greatest gaming experience of my life, and anyone who is, that’s on them, not the game developers.
It seemed like a half-baked GTA. I enjoyed it, I guess. I sold it back to GameStop happily after getting maybe a third of the way through it.