I do have the drone. When you say use the drone to stun, you mean by hacking the items that shock people, right? The drone doesn’t have a direct way to stun (like the stun gun), correct?
I don’t have the gang / cop call abilities. I’ve been focusing on the main missions, so I don’t have a lot of extra skill points.
I think I may be able to get the robot hack, I think I unlocked the prior one and may have a couple points still ready to spend.
It’s kinda crazy that the game doesn’t let you drag bodies. It’s like they don’t want it to be viable to remain stealthy. I’m not sure how long I’ll last with the game. I know once I stop I probably won’t go back. Is there a particular mission you think it’s worth playing up until?
The map / environment is really great, but so far that’s the best part. I was hoping the story would be good, but the characters are way to willing to do bad stuff to make their point and probably worse than the corporations (at least at this point in the game). In GTA V, the story was kinda fun because, well Trevor. He was so screwed up it was fun to follow along for the ride. Saints Row IV was just too damn funny. Watch Dogs 2? I just doesn’t have anything lie that going for it.
The drone doesn’t have a direct stun power until later in the Remote skill branch. Later, you can unlock the ability to drop electro-shock or explosive bombs from the drones. It’s basically a “press X to win” superpower.
I would try to rack up some skill points by doing the ScoutX photo opportunities. They’re easy to do and while you’re roaming the city, you’ll spot more unlock points, money drops, and other goodies around town.
The way I attack most infiltration areas is to park my butt somewhere outside of the red zone, then use my drones to do as much as possible. I spot all the bad guys, then figure out which ones I can take out quickly with car hacks, (run them down) blow up with their own grenades, or sic the cops or a gang on them. I’ll mop up the final few with environmental explosions and stuns. When everyone is down, I’ll tap everyone with “ZZZZ” signs with my silenced handgun because I’m not dealing with them getting up while I’m trying to figure out a puzzle or whatever.
I think I’m about somewhere in the middle of the campaign. The plot is weird because they’ve broken up the storylines into separate “main story” mission branches that I’m assuming come together by the end. They all seem related by their connection to Nudle, the in-game evil Google, but so far they’re essentially like different episodes of a TV show.
Relying more on the drone and jumper has definitely made the game more manageable. I think getting the ability to disable security systems may be useful too.
How do you people rate this game? Really good? Ok? Meh? Is it a fun ride to the end or at some point you just want to finish it to see the ending even though the game-play has gotten stale?
The problem is not the game-play, it’s the disconnect between the narrative and the game-play. I just executed 5 security guards on a construction site so I could gain access to the ducts on the newly constructed building to obtain a training point in the sub-basement. The truth is the guards had it coming because any one of them will shoot you just for being on their sidewalk. There are just too many of these type of narrative shifts to count. If you can ignore that, the game-play is pretty damn good.
Like in The Division where you kill people for looting dead bodies… and then you loot them.
Man, I am really pulled in two directions with this one.
Likes:
Virtual Bay Area. It’s colorful, large, and crammed with interesting stuff to see. Lots of really satisfying exploration. Rewards are solid in-game stuff like money, special clothing, unique vehicles, skill points, and sometime just cool little bits with pedestrian NPCs. There are good reasons to just wander.
Story characters. Marcus is a great person. He’s funny, charming, not too nerdy, not douchey, and he puts others before him. He’ll crack Star Trek and Dr. Who jokes, but he’s socially adept enough to drink at parties and get lucky. His race is never an issue, although it gets highlighted a couple of times for humorous effect. DedSec is a terrific cast of buddies (except one, but I’ll get to that) that features a believable set of relationships. Even Joshua, the DedSec guy that’s clearly on the spectrum, is handled sensitively. He’s not the butt of jokes, but his impairment is a source of some humor in the story just due to the way he interprets things, but everyone in DedSec treats him with patience and love. The main bad guy is exactly the kind of smug, douchey, self-satisfied tech billionaire you picture using people as commodities.
The drones. Both the flying drone and the RC jumper are wonderful tools. You can hack, traverse jumping puzzles, distract guards, and later on you can directly stun them with the drones.
The stealth gameplay. Once you get a handle on the drones, and how you should not really be bringing Marcus into the security areas until absolutely necessary, the stealth stuff is great.
Openness. After the initial mission, you can go just about anywhere in virtual SF and tackle the landscape areas in whatever order you’d like. You can even go at the story missions in staggered order because the game breaks them up into stages that can be done one after the other, or you can jump back and forth on them. Ubistuff is everywhere, but it doesn’t clutter the map.
Multiplayer. Hacking invasions and the co-op stuff is great. I actually think this may be some of the strongest stuff in the game. Hacking is tense, rewarding, and it really feels good when you either get away with a hack or you foil one and zap the hacker. Co-op missions are harder to get going, but once you do, they devolve into the kind of emergent chaos that makes for hilarity.
Dislikes:
The game does a terrible job of teaching you how to use the drones effectively. The very first mission in the game has you running around shooting guards and manually knocking them out with the pool ball weapon, when that’s exactly what you should not do in most cases. Even worse, the game denies you the flying drone until you collect $67,000 to print it out, when it should just give it to you right away. There’s no reason to hold it back.
Tonal disconnect. You’re given incentives to act like an immoral dick, but Marcus and DedSec are supposed to be lovable hackers. Your phone still hoovers up money from random passersby. You don’t have to do it, but you want to buy all the guns and clothes and cars right? You want that $67,000 for the flying drone? Screw those people. Just rob their bank accounts! Also, why bother inching through an area, stunning guards one by one with a taser, and risking mission failure just to save lives? Fuck those innocent guards. Blow them up with steam pipes. Run them over with remote controlled cars. Shoot them with a shotgun. Frame them for murder or call a rival gang to kill them for you. It’s less risky for you and killing them gives you more time to actually solve puzzles in the environment. Keep in mind that your overall goal is safeguarding privacy and taking down a jerky billionaire. This should be like Hackers, where the worst punishment is arrest, but instead it’s like GTA V. Cops will shoot you for the most minor of infractions. Security guards are trigger-happy killers. Street gangs (lolwut?) will blast you. Your basic melee weapon (the pool ball on a rope) kills enemies instead of stunning them. It’s the single biggest WTF for me.
Driving. They said driving was improved from the first game. It is, but it still sucks. It’s just too floaty and the camera doesn’t follow you in turns correctly.
Sailing races. Yuck. Seriously. Just yuck.
Horatio. He’s a member of DedSec and one of the first of the crew you meet. He’s the other black guy on the team. He’s not featured in most of the cutscenes. There’s a reason for that.
I really hope Ubisoft has the balls to completely do away with lethal firearms and killing in the next game.
I think Telefrog’s post is pretty darn accurate. I’m not as in love with the characters and the story, probably because I’m just not into this type of story a lot. Maybe it’s also because of Telefrog’s negative point #2, in that I’m probably not differentiating between Marcus in the cut scenes and Marcus the killing stealing machine that the game seems to want you to be. It just doesn’t feel right. If Marcus was Trevor from GTA V, it would be a different story.
Once I bought into using the drones and hopper a bit more my enjoyment has gone up. I got the game for free, and wouldn’t think it’s worth a $40-$60 purchase for me, but its a decent game. I haven’t done any multiplayer so if that interests people I can see it’s value increasing more.
Yeah, I decided to try to play the game purely via stealth and being sneaky and only stunning people. It just felt like the right thing to do.
But then I get a mission with a compound full of guards, and they start trying to kill me for just standing in their area. To the point of chasing me down the block to try to kill me. And I haven’t done anyone any harm. That makes me want to find a high spot and pull out my trusty sniper rifle and pick every one of them off. Which completely ruins the kind of role playing I wanted to do in this game,
So far, I’m playing a lot (I tend to play only one game at a time) but there’s just nothing here that will be memorable. I know I’m spoiled after some epic games like Skyrim and Witcher 3 etc. but this has turned into a puzzle solving game.
BTW - has anyone picked up a mission by eavesdropping on a “normal” blue person’s text or phone? It appears to me that you only can get a new side mission from specially pointed out “Orange” people.
And are you require to have the black and white Hacknet or whatever mode on to find a new research point?
Phew, done with the main story line. Is there any other single player content that you’d recommend playing? I skipped most side content. I think I finished at level 20 and had a bunch of unspent skill points since I didn’t find a lot of the items you need to unlock some abilities. I didn’t see any leader boards for the mini games like the races, so I don’t have a ton of motivation for those.
The more I played it, the more I liked it. I even warmed up to the characters more. It definitely does not have a top-tier stealth system - like Blacklist or something. You just need to play it on it’s own terms. The AI could be pretty bad too, and it was kind of laughable how you could walk right by someone after distracting them with their phone. As far as gameplay, the highlight was just figuring out what combination of jumper, drone and distraction skills I use to infiltrate my target. The skills where you could sick a gang or police one someone didn’t seem interesting so I didn’t take them.
It’s crazy how good environments games can have now.
Not a bad bonus for buying a SSD. I may have liked it more than Dishonored 2, it’s close.
Over the weekend, I had about two hours of play in which no enemies appeared anywhere. All the red areas were empty. It was nice being able to just waltz in and take whatever I wanted, but it made the game pretty boring otherwise.
I shut the game down and restarted, and everything went back to normal.
Dude, that sounds like my dream game. “Uh oh, here comes a boss battle! Uh whoops, guess he’s a no show! How about you just take this nice loot and go about your business then? No need to make a big deal about it right?”
I picked this up in the Steam sale, but I’m getting terrible technical issues with it. In 4hrs play I’ve had two BSODs with a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION error (no connection with the game’s name, by the way). I literally cannot remember the last time a game (or anything else for that matter) caused a blue screen crash it’s been so long.
Also the CPU commitment during play is absolutely insane for a console port. It’s completely hammering the CPU to 100% at all times, bottlenecking the graphics card, and I don’t understand why. It’s also independent of any in-game graphics settings. This can’t be normal since the consoles have far, far weaker CPUs than a desktop gaming PC and their games are designed around that. No other game hits the CPU this much. Is anyone else getting this problem?
I’ve been sorta monitoring this thread, on the fence about picking this up. It’s on sale for $40 at the moment for PS4, think I should bite, or will it probably be on sale again in a couple months anyway?
