Watch Dogs is now out; here’s our Watch Dogs review.
A couple of weeks ago, Ubisoft sent me an email reminding me to complete Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Over tens of hours, I’ve filled the oceans with enough driftwood to sink the whole West Indies beneath the waves. I’ve watched Blackbeard’s facial fuzz grow from bumfluff into that famous chin-tree. But that’s left me just 39% of the way through, according to Abstergo’s metrics.
Expect a similar relationship with Watch Dogs – which has story missions enough to last you 35 to 40 hours, and enough everything else to last you 100.
Watch Dogs creative director Jonathan Morin tweeted over the weekend that the “average” player – namely, those who free roam at least a little bit – will reach the end of the game within a 40 hour span. But “doing everything”, he says, will bring you closer to 100 hours.
That’s before considering multiplayer shenanigans. Watch Dogs will support open world meandering in sports cars for up to eight players.
Naturally, story missions won’t be the bulk of what Watch Dogs is. It’ll be a Ubisoft Montreal open-world game in the mode of Far Cry 3 and Black Flag – about infiltrating substation-cum-mobile-phone-shops to make another segment of the map viable for wireless manipulation.
I really think the success of the game will lie in just how satisfying that loop is, rather than how watertight Bandit McGrowl’s revenge motive turns out be. That’s the primary reason I’m not worried about last week’s lacklustre Watch Dogs story trailer – though our Tim is, as he explained at length on the inaugural PCGamesN podcast. Where do you sit on that spectrum?
Cheers, CVG.