When Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs series turned ten this year, reports surfaced that it was “dead and buried”. Happy birthday, I guess. But it was easily the freshest take on the GTA formula we’ve had since Grand Theft Auto 3 stormed onto the scene in 2001 and reinvented video games forever.
Even gems like Sleeping Dogs and Saints Row only added on top of the open world formula, rather than shaking the foundations. Just Cause tried to add a level of interactivity and new means of traversal, throwing in wingsuits and parachutes and outposts littered with a bunch of what were essentially different-shaped explosive barrels, but it’s still just cherries on top. The world isn’t any different. And anyway, there are only so many times you can watch everything blow up before you grow bored of the boom.
Just Cause 3 did have David Tennant though, so it’s the best game ever made by default.
Ubisoft doesn’t shy away from the fact that Watch Dogs was its answer to GTA, following the Driver series with something that better fit into the new landscape Rockstar continues to cultivate to this day. But it wasn’t just GTA with a few bells and whistles like so many other clones we’ve seen over the years, it let us see the world through a completely different light.
The first game had us crawl into the underbelly of Chicago through the lens of gritty vigilante Aiden Pearce, AKA The Fox, who was still reeling from the death of his niece. Tonally, it’s very similar to Grand Theft Auto 4, but putting us into the shoes of a hacker in a world where smart technology has evolved to such a point that entire cities are under one governing system means that we can bend the rules like never before.
Traffic lights can be disabled to cause pandamonium, hurling cars into one another, steam vents can be blown up to throw pursuers offroad, and every single camera becomes a new pair of eyes. Strongholds and gun fights transform from linear A to B shootouts into puzzles that you can solve in myriad ways by exploring the different components making up the world. It no longer feels like a flat backdrop but a living and breathing organism we can pilot as much as our protagonist.
Watch Dogs 2 upped the ante with features clearly inspired by the enormously successful GTA Online. It didn’t have an MMO-style mode distinct from the base game, but naturally wove its ideas into the campaign. People can join your game and lend a hand at a moment’s notice, or they can invade and attempt to hack you, which makes griefing feel more grounded in the world as opposed to the unchecked mass murders taking place in Los Santos.
You also have the multiplayer missions, Watch Dogs 2’s take on GTA heists, which only serve to strengthen Marcus Holloway and DedSec in the campaign.
Legions was a dud, a misstep in every way that lost sight of what made Watch Dogs special to begin with, but one bad game shouldn’t spell the end. Ubisoft wanted a GTA competitor and cooked up the most inventive one we’ve ever seen. It was more than your average clone.
As much as I love Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs, Just Cause, Mafia, Wheelman, Crackdown—the list goes on—they never looked inward at what they were building from. The bedrock of GTA permeated from game to game. There’s always an open world city you gradually uncover as you complete more and more missions which you can’t interact with any more than you can in GTA. You can climb it, blow things up, or play a bunch of minigames sprinkled on top, but at the core, GTA’s identity is untouched.
Watch Dogs took the simple idea of hacking and used it to connect us to the world in such a unique way. CTOS recontextualised the idea of each city as a sandbox by letting us control how they worked, almost peering behind the curtain and pulling the strings like we were in the game dev hot seat ourselves.
You can master your surroundings and carefully piece together the environment bit by bit, taking out strongholds by instigating a gang war, going in guns blazing, carefully knocking everyone out with environmental hazards as you snap from camera to camera, or sneaking in with your RC car and leaving without a trace. Everyone handles each situation differently, because the world allows for that creativity.
Going back even a decade later, nothing comes to how much Watch Dogs shakes up the GTA formula. It might get a bad rap these days, but the first two games were a bold take on one of the medium’s most iconic franchises. These games should be celebrated, not swept aside.
