By pressing ‘Z’ Aiden activates profiling, which pulls up every single citizen's personal information, such as age, sexual orientation, interests, and criminal record. On top of this, a skill tree - with categories Hacking, Driving, Combat and Crafted Items - offers new hacking techniques in exchange for skill points, such as performing blackouts or overriding the L train circuit, and the ensuing chaos resultant from hacking traffic lights mid car chase never gets old. In doing so, obtaining security information, such as passcodes for locked doors, can be hacked directly from patrolling guards. This can be used in a variety of ways to help Aiden through missions as hacking security cameras can facilitate the exploration of previously unreachable areas, and performing a chain of hacks allows further reconnaissance, providing other cameras are in view. By holding ‘Q’, Aiden can use his mobile phone to hack security systems, cameras, secure-entry gates, car alarms, traffic lights, electronic bollards, and essentially any technology that is powered by the mainframe.
Although in many respects a seasoned criminal himself - a maverick hacker and murderer - Watch Dogs paints Aiden more as an anti-hero, with whom we are expected to sympathise with.Īs has become quite clear over the course of the the game’s marketing campaign, manipulating the ctOS network is Watch Dogs’ most unique and most interesting feature. The player takes control of expert hacker-cum-vigilante Aiden Pearce who has an axe to grind with the city’s corrupt bourgeoisie, and underworld gangs following the kidnapping of his family thus portraying, in essence, a fairly generic tale of retribution. In the not-so-distant future, Chicago has been transformed into a smart city powered by the ctOS system - an interlinked surveillance mainframe which sees the town overrun with technology and CCTV cameras strapped to every building and street corner. Although it looks very pretty it, unfortunately, fails to master either. Entering the modern market off the back of such hype, Watch Dogs’ biggest challenge was always going to be how it managed expectation and identity. Needless to say in the year which followed until now, expectation levels have steadily increased but such is the way with big budget blockbusters. Fast forward to the Ubisoft press conference at E3 last year and anticipation had reached fever pitch: Edward Snowden had brought Watch Dogs bang in line with reality that an Orwellian censored society could be more real than we had ever realised.
The level of open-world interaction the game promised, coupled with the real life fear of a surveillance enveloped state was truly promising, and Ubisoft’s fictitious futuristic interpretation of Chicago looked stunning. When Watch Dogs was first teased at E3 2012 it caught everyone’s attention.
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