Today was the day we’ve all been waiting for: Watch Dogs 2 has been officially presented to the public. On the reveal website publisher and developer Ubisoft told us more about the eagerly-awaited open world action game in a 20 minutes long livestream.
In Watch Dogs 2 we will be playing Marcus Holloway, a young hacker. The story takes place in San Francisco, contrary to the virtual Chicago of the first part of the series. Again we’re in contact with Dedsec, an infamous group of hackers that pursues the goal of erasing the operating system ctOS 2.0. Being an upgrade of ctOS from Watch Dogs 1, ctOS 2.0 is being used by criminals to monitor every citizen in the Californian city and manipulate their behavior. Everything is connected, according to Ubisoft we will be able to hack right up into the smallest electronic devices in Watch Dogs 2.
Is there anyone who doesn’t remember the huge downgrade debate of Watch Dogs? The prequel looked extremely different if you were to compare footage pieces from the very first presentation and the final release version. Players complained about the drastic gaps between the versions. Especially the lighting and texture quality had been visibly cut back. Having learned from this shitstorm disaster, Ubisoft are now announcing the downgrade for Watch Dogs 2 before they’re even showing us any gameplay footage. According to the reveal presentation the game will look “only half as good” in the retail version.
In the livestream, Ubisoft announced that the company’s main focus for E3 was to make Watch Dogs 2 “look as great as possible”. Several developers had been given the task to create a version just for the Electronic Entertainment Expo whose only purpose is to “mislead as many players as possible into preordering the game”. After E3 the special version is going to be discarded and replaced by the regular edition, which will achieve around 22 fps on consoles. Ubisoft is hoping for customer connectivity by being so open with the announcement:
“We tricked our fans with Watch Dogs. Now we’re announcing the trick, so technically it’s not a trick any longer. At least that’s what our legal department said. And since Watch Dogs has been sold millions and millions of times we suppose that even more players are going to purchase Watch Dogs 2. Did we mention that you can preorder Watch Dogs 2? Why not buy one of our twenty collector’s editions?”
We’re wondering if Ubisoft’s fans will like the company’s new approach.
Watch Dogs 2 is coming to PC, PS4 and Xbox One on November 15th.
