Watch Dogs 2 - Ubisoft's other open world IP returns

Yea, wandering pass an open gate and they are shooting muthafuckas. I had to put down 3 guards when I stole that KITT car. I don’t feel bad about killing any security guards because they are all packing and they will bust a cap!

I had a funny one. A woman was walking towards a car with a baseball bat mumbling something about some guy cheating on her. She is raising the bat over her head to smash a sports car when I hack her phone and ring it. She drops the bat looks at her phone and then wanders off.

Oh and one more… there is a bag of cash in a little apartment court where there are a bunch of Asian gang members. I blow up the gas main and accidentally kill a civilian when the cops show up. I shoot the first cop that gets out of the car and run through the apartment court aggroing the gang on the cops that follow (it’s an Asian gang red zone). This starts out an all out war that spreads over 3 blocks. The Asian gang pulls enough heat to get SWAT called on them. I grabbed the money when I went through (my heat dropped really fast) and so I went across the street, sent up my drone, and watched the carnage for probably 20 or 30 minutes.

Well, it’s quite a shocker playing this as my first game after being completely immersed in Witcher 3 for months!

I struggled in the very beginning just learning the mechanics of the game, but now that I think I’ve got that down, I’m enjoyed just wandering around doing side missions and exploring. I’ve decided that I’m not going to use a gun, other than the stun gun, for the entire game. It’s made some grabs harder, no doubt, but it has also resulted in a lot more thought into how to get something done when the object is guarded by a lot of bad guys. It’s required a lot of patience, for sure. In one case I found a spot where I could vault a wall, pretty close to the money bag, used my quadcopter to rig a trap, also used my little runner to get their attention, and when everyone ran over to investigate jumped the wall pretty quickly, grabbed the bag, wasn’t able to get out before I was seen but used my chopper to blow up something and slow then down and was able to jump back out.

So far my stun gun and drones and a lot of patience and noodling over the approach has let me get everything I need to get. I’m playing this in a very relaxed, not worried about “winning the campaign” mode and it works pretty well in that mode.

As for driving - I hate driving in all of these games. It’s just too twitchy for me, I run into stuff left and right. My goal it to avoid all races and driving (other than casual driving to get to a location that’s just too far to walk - though I tend to explore and walk everywhere) as much as possible.

I don’t yet get the feeling this is going to make it to my all time classics list, but it’s OK until I find my next classic. ;)

Last night something happened in the main story that’s supposed to be REALLY DRAMATIC. All the beats are there for it to be a super-serious thing and I think you’re meant to be all “Hell naw! Someone must pay!” but Watch Dogs 2 has no idea how to handle an actual revenge story, so it just putters merrily along with pop culture jokes and nerdy humor.

Horatio died. Which I guess makes sense since he was the other black guy in DedSec, and God knows there’s only room for one black guy in the group, right? They even lampshade this in the early part of the game when you first meet Horatio.

This thing happens, you get the musical stinger, everyone acts sad/mad for about a minute, then it’s back to graffiti hacktivism and pranking the 1% because CYBERJUSTICE. It’s really weird.

On the flip side, I’m really embracing the madcap goofiness of hacking others and having them hack me. Even the co-op missions are pretty cool.

PC gets another smallish patch today.

Mainly some EasyAnticheat stuff.

On my map, there is a blinking + sign with the words “New Content Available” - what does this mean and how do i acknowledge and turn it off?

You should be able to pull up your in-game phone and see which app has new content. It will have a red and white plus sign on the icon.

Ah - duh, thanks!

Also - why are some people unhackable? I’ll be walking down the street and for some people my phone icon will turn read and when I try to hack them the hacking options are in red?

I also find Ubisoft titles a little befuddling lately. In the Crew, for example, they would throw so much on the screen at once that I wouldn’t absorb any of it. It was only after watching Tom streaming the game and describing various screens and different indicators that I realized what various parts of the interface were showing.

I don’t know for certain, but I suspect it might not be tied to the people, but rather what else is going going on in the game. It prevents you from doing certain things including hacking while there’s mission dialogue, for instance.

Got to play a bit more. Just finished the Ubisoft side mission; fun and easy. I’ve also unlocked the skill to tag someone as a traitor and have a gang attack; hypocrytical for someone who won’t use a gun (other than the stun gun) but a lot of fun when trying to grab something surrounded by bad guys. I just grabbed a Key Research Data in an area by tagging someone, and as the bad guys fought each other, had my jumper sneak by them and grab it. Then I just watched the fight via my copter.

I didn’t realize this was such a puzzle game. Lots of scratching my head. One I still can’t even conceive of how to get - the package is under a floor of what appears to be a construction area, but there are no vents, no gas tanks to explode to create a hole, there just doesn’t seem to be any way to get to it.

I’m enjoying it more as a fun distraction than a deep immersive role playing game. Which isn’t a bad thing.

There was one that had me really going nuts. The Key data was on top of a 3-story building, but there was no way to climb up to get it, it was too high for a scissor lift, plus it was locked. The ctOS box to unlock it was across an alleyway on top of the neighboring 4-story building, but there was a parkour route to that.

The gap between buildings was too far to parkour, but there was a wooden ramp set up on the roof of the building with the ctOS box. Ah! You have to jump over to the other rooftop with the RC car! Simple, right? Oh, but I needed to upgrade the jump ability on my car first to get up to the wooden ramp.

I found that in another part of SF, upgraded the remote, and came back to this. The car was able to jump fine, but it couldn’t bound the gap! It wasn’t fast enough!

I searched and found the remote speed boost ability. Nabbed that after some judicious gang warfare, upgraded the remote, and jogged back to the puzzle. Now my car could jump high enough and boost fast enough to make it over and onto the other rooftop. Yay!

But there was still a problem: The difference in building height meant the remote immediately blew up when it landed on the other side. WTF??

The Key Data was taunting me on the other rooftop. So close but so far. I couldn’t figure out how to physically hack the point. It was confounding.

I fired up the heli-drone to see if I could get a higher vantage point and come up with another plan. I had to missing something.

Sure enough I was. The Key Data didn’t need to be physically hacked at all. I just flew the drone over and hacked it.

Not enough “D’oh!” in the world.

Ubisoft has announced that the T-Bone DLC will be delayed. It was originally supposed to launch on December 13th for PS4 and January 14th for PC and Xbox One because of a 30-day exclusive deal with Sony. Now, it will launch on December 24th on PS4, and everyone else gets it on January 24th.

[quote]
Watch Dogs 2’s 1.06 title update has just been released across all platforms. This and previous patches were an important step towards stabilizing Watch Dogs 2’s seamless multiplayer functionality, and other core online features, before releasing any new multiplayer content. Since these updates required additional development resources, we’ve made the decision to adjust our release schedule for that new content.[/quote]

What happens if someone pops into my game and I get the “stealing your data” message and he/she steals my data? Can I just ignore these?

Also - I HATE driving, I weave all over the road, I need the sensitivity to be turned WAY down! So I loved it when I had to stay close to a CFO and a CEO to hack into their data, and rather than chase them in a car or motorcycle, I just jumped on their cars and held on for deal life! And it worked! ;)

You can ignore it. It doesn’t really impact you in any way.

That said, you should try to participate at least once and try to find the hacker. Turn on your hackervision and look for the other player among the crowd in the purple circle. Just spotting him will get you XP at the end, even if he runs away successfully.

OK, I suck at driving, so I was dreading the Cyberdriver mission. I read where you should take side streets, try to hide under an overpass, etc. but I just kept running into things and so I just kept driving and hitting cars and driving forever. At one point I basically had the frame of the car and that was just about all that was left! I think the game felt sorry for me, because at one point I hit a straight stretch and suddenly the map had the yellow escape theme, I just kept going and it let me escape. I expected the guys in the garage to tell me the car was worthless, but fortunately it somehow repaired itself when I pulled in the garage.

Then the driving through the markers - even though I hate driving in these games, I actually had a blast with that one. It took me 5 or 6 tries before I completed it but I did. Very cool.

I think cities really need to keep tighter controls on their lifts. They seem to park them all over the city.

I can see why you guys have said the story doesn’t hold up. We’re supposed to be sympathetic to their cause, but damn they know how to burn good will.

Credits roll, on to Mafia 3. Not sure I will go back and do many side missions or DLC. I might do the Zodiac one…

I’m finding it pretty difficult to remain stealthy through a lot of the main missions. It seems it always gets noticed when I hack a device to stun someone or pop someone with the stun gun. Is there a better method to take someone down stealthily that I overlooked - like melee from behind?

Stealth in the early parts of the game is hard because so many of the stealthy stuns are actually really noisy and bad guys have a teeny window of opportunity before setting off alerts for everyone in the area.

  1. Do you have the flying drone unlocked? The easiest approach for many missions is to alternate between the drones to stun guards and hack systems without even stepping foot into red zones.

  2. Do you have gang or cop call abilities unlocked? This is another cheese approach, but calling the gangs or cops to come in an do all your dirty work allows you to remain outside of danger zones until you thin out the opposition.

  3. Do you have the robot hack unlocked? You can hack the R2D2 looking robot sentries to kill guards by hacking them and hitting the heart icon button. Robohugs are deadly and allow you to stay out of danger.

  4. There are a couple of guns with silencers available in the 3D printer. DO NOT RELY ON THEM TO REMAIN STEALTHY! They’re even noisier than the stun gun and will draw bad guys from all over.

  5. Finally, the only surefire silent method of takedown is the melee hit. If you can’t sneak up on a guard with his back to you, a way to get him to not alert everyone when you run up is to hit the phone hack to make his phone buzz. It will distract him and give you time to bust him in the face with the pool ball. Just be careful, because other guards can still spot you and sound the alert, and of course you have no way to move bodies.