What makes Watch Dogs such a bad game?

I haven't bought this game yet but I have heard a lot of harsh words being directed towards this game. At first I was thinking of buying it after seeing all the trailers and gameplay videos but right now I'm not sure.

For those of you Gamespot users who have bought this game is there anything bad, terrible or disappointing about Watch Dogs?

Awful console visuals, drab colours, uninteresting details on the buildings/lack of detail. No onus to explore.

Invisible walls galore.

Loads of graphical glitches/pop-in etc.

Terrible AI.

Bad dialogue/character development is near enough non-existent. Aiden Pearce is just a hollow shell for the most part.

Repetitive missions.

Pathetic car and bike handling/hilariously bad physics/floating assets anyone? It's funny for the first couple of times.

Annoying submissions e.g. having to to go away and come back to a spot if you fail in chasing down a criminal. Seriously? No auto-restart option? What is this? 1980?

Hacking becomes tedious quickly. There's no satisifaction in doing it because it's a 'one click done'' deal nearly every time apart from some of those pointless home intrusions.

The game, quite simply, sucks. Great concept, but ultimately poorly executed with a sham of lead-up marketing to boot.

I played through the Xbox One version and thought the game was excellent. The driving mechanics could use a bit more work and the online racing was pretty bad but everything else was quite good.

The gameplay imo is excellent. The shooting feels good and the stealth is satisfying to pull off. I suggest playing on realistic mode for the best experience. I think if you like tactical gameplay this game delivers. There's so many ways to tackle a situation. Gang hideouts are the best example of this. The main story missions are also very very fun. Maybe the story isn't that good but hey as long is it gives me reason to go and infiltrate a hideout then I'm all up for it. There are many many side activities. And unlike gta 5's side activities like tennis (yawn) these side activities are actually fun! Digital trips like Alone for stealth lovers, Spider tank for the sheer awesomeness etc. Even end game chess! (Its fun trust me) Oh and did I mentions gang hideouts? They are awesome. Only problem is you can't replay them after u finish :( you have to start new game. (I still haven't finished the game btw but I'm far enough to give decent insight)

On the other hand, the world of watch dogs is bland and doesn't feel like a living breathing world. I don't really care about that though... I just want some objectives and that's good enough...

Nothing, it's pretty good

From what I've seen of the game it's a fairly standard open world game with the hacking mechanic added in. I'd say it's all just shit being spewed by people with issues.

It has a few issues but overall it's a pretty solid game and I had a lot of fun playing through it.

AngryJoe's review seems to hit the nail on the head of the average opinion on the game. It's a fun game in certain aspects, but the overall package, and compared to what was promised, is a huge letdown.

I thought it was pretty good. The story is bland, the cars feel weird, and the cops won't chase you into the water, but everything else is solid and entertaining.

i'm loving the game everything feels good.

It's not a bad game necessarily. It's a good 7/10, slightly above average as a general game, but pretty average as an open-world game.

I bought it on PS3, and the pop-in and jaggies are freakin' everywhere. I have never seen so many jaggies in one place, ever.

There are too many side missions. It floods the map with hundreds of the same copy/paste missions.

The main missions are mostly okay... mostly. There are quite a few bad apples.

It's not bad by any means, but it's just not that great.

It's a typical ubisoft open world game. Passable storyline and a shit-ton of worthless sidequests that feel like busy work and have very little tie-in to the overall narrative. I wouldn't say it's bad...it's just ubisoft following their typical open world template. The only thing that changes with these games is the setting. Gettin really old, but if you're not tired of it yet, you'll probably enjoy it. Cars do drive like shit, though.

It's not a bad game, but it's not an excellent game either. It gets a few things right: the hacking is fun and the gunplay isn't bad. It gets a lot wrong: lame story, bad ai, bad vehicle controls.

Watch Dogs is a rushed game without much detail to compliment to gameplay. The Online Invasion has been exploited and is broken to the point where it's almost pointless to play. Like most Ubisoft games, there's plenty of side activities to keep you busy, but they are all unrewarding and repetitive. Quantity over quality. The gaming world is very static with robotic NPC's who die one shot regardless of where you shoot them. Plus the driving sucks ass.

to sum it up .. Ubisoft developing it is everything that made this unique game such a bad one

This pretty much details what's wrong with Watch Dogs. It's another rushed, over hyped rushed game without much detail to compliment to gameplay. The Online Invasion has been exploited and is broken to the point where it's almost pointless to play.

Like most Ubisoft games, there's plenty of side activities to keep you busy, but they are all unrewarding and repetitive in the end. Including the crap 'single player' DLC missions which add nothing to the core game except new 'outfits' (same clothes in different colors) and one or two useless weapons.

The same formula DLC Ubisoft will rehash for AC Unity and Far Cry 4. Quantity over quality. The gaming world is very static with robotic NPC's who die one shot regardless of where you shoot them. Plus the driving sucks ass.

It's not a bad game at all, actually.

At this point, all I can tell the OP is to simply play the game yourself and see what you think about it. It's gotten a pretty mixed response since launch, so that's my advice. Some of us liked it, others hated it.

some people like it and other dont like it.

It's a good game. Only thing I don't like is the driving mechanics.

It isn't an awful game. It is the fact that it was represented as the defacto game relating to what next gen is about and it ended up feeling like an hd remake of a last gen game.

It's not terrible, but the story was really underwhelming. The Aiden character made absolutely no sense. Also, the "hacking" mechanic mostly boiled down to a simplified takedown QTE and causing explosions.

-Byshop

it's a modern day far cry 2

A friend on Steam said the game was actually a worse copy of GTA. Any thoughts?

I don't know really, saw a lot of hassle, negative and positive so am quite on the I dunno whether to buy or not side :/

It's an ok game, it's just not a great game as it had been shown, for me all this what has been said, is true, they have good idea's but dam it's bland and the hacking it may aswel not be there, with it's one click, but what do you expect of ubisoft, AC has been doing the exact same thing for years and people eat it up

Many things about this game fail to live up to expectations. But overall it can simply be summed up by saying it's just boring as hell.

For the most part true. The game does obviously copy many ideas from GTA, and does not do any of them as well. It lacks its own, unique flavor. It actually feels more like an older GTA, like GTA 3. And of course in true Ubisoft fashion this game does have all the usual repetitive side stuff available to do sprinkled over the map, just like in all their open world games.

People whining about, its not the second coming of video games, it has flaws but its still pretty good.

Seriously, why are people more let down by what the game isn't than what the game is? For what it is, it's still a great game with great commentary and interesting gameplay, with a few flaws that we should all expect games to have by this point. Stop comparing it to GTA simply because it's an open-world game set in a pseudo-modern time. It's not that kind of game.

I thought it was good.

The longer I play the game, the more I'm liking it. This genre isn't usually my cup of tea. Too bad Ubisoft chose Chicago as the setting*. It's a drab city for a game. But, Ubisoft did a good job in capturing its feel, especially the run-down sections of town. It also has the best depiction of rainy weather for a game of its type.

The PC version is unoptimized with stuttering problems for many. I'm one of the lucky ones who doesn't have issues. I mean the game is unoptimized. I can feel it. But, it's smooth enough so gameplay isn't affected, be it driving, running, or shootouts.

*Ubisoft should have chosen a California city by the coast such as Los Angeles or maybe somewhere along the Central Coast. The proximity of the Coastal Mountain Range allows different environments within a short distance ranging from the beach, the coastal city itself, alpine scenery, and the dry desert farther inland.

It's the same with Seattle. It's desert (sagebrush country) on the other side of the mountains which you can see via Google Maps. Too bad Sucker Punch didn't make its world bigger.

After Assassin Creed, I learnt that Ubisoft games normally suck on their first try. So I am anticipating Watch Dogs 2 to be closer to what they wanted for the first game.

For me it was just the banality of the whole thing. I expected Watch Dogs to be just another average open world game, but I didn't expect it to be so boring. Aiden Pierce is the most boring protagonist of the whole year with a personality like cardboard, the hacking barely factors into the gameplay at all and the entire story feels like an afterthought.

Watch Dogs isn't a bad game its a avg. game that fails because its not finished and the developers behind has wasted a ton of time on something i am not sure of what is. The biggest areas are the City it feels artificial and where even a game like LA Noire manages to make the city feel alive, Ubisoft fails.

Not to mention there are all the gameplay elements, no ricochet in water, invisible walls, screened of areas until you reach the point in the story, no exploration, poor driving, small map.

And thats just some of the things that makes Watch Dogs fail to be more than a avg. game.

For me I expected Watch Dogs to be just like a GTA 5,but still this ain't a bad games the missions is good and the gunplay isn't bad, but i think GTA 5 is better than Watch dogs,cheers...... :D

@sandmand12: I still don't understand this. Why did people expect the game to be like GTA? The open-world and freedom to do what you want with a new mechanic? Because if so, then most open-world games set in the modern era should qualify as GTA clones. Explain.

This sums it up pretty well. And I can't stress that second point enough, the amount of invisible walls is simply ridiculous!

Thats some wrong expectations.

The only thing Watch Dogs and GTA has in common is the open world setting.

I have not played it but by most descriptions you would be better off playing any GTA game that you might have missed.

GTA V is much more accomplished in creating an open-world that feels alive. Naturally people are going use the latter as a yardstick and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Watch Dogs has many failings so it's difficult to pick out one key flaw, but I would say the hacking mechanic was not exploited to its full potential and thus the game lacks an identity of its own. I would have excused the horrendous visuals had hacking not felt tacked on and forced in some ways. For instance, a simple example would be escaping a police pursuit. The game forces you to use hacking in a cheap manner to get away. If you have the stealth ninja skills of a master Pikmin and hide in an alleyway police will somehow still find you. It's stupid. I found the whole experience very childish, to be honest. The game simplifies hacking to the point where it's actually kind of condescending and it gives off an eerily similar waft of dude bro, but in a different package. It strikes me as a power trip for youngsters more than anything, nothing particularly demanding or, from what I've played, fun. That seems to be a trend with Ubisoft at the moment. Far Cry 4 looks to be more of the same. Special mention goes out to the testers of this game. They are truly special people.

I actually like Watch Dogs so w/e

All I know is that I've played Watchdogs for about 7 hours total....haven't touched the story outside of a couple of introduction quests and have loved every minute of it.

The online portion is really fun too.

The above is what i find the biggest problem with Watch Dogs is, even games like LA Noire, Sleeping Dogs and the old GTA games have a city that feels alive, feels like that you are in a city that lives and breathes even if you are not there, Watch dogs´s Chicago feels like a place-set, a stage for your character. Not to mention all the bugs, strange design choices like no police boats, no cop cars , no cops at the local diner eating donuts.

And of course the lacking story, the hacking thats mediocre and after the first 20 times it gets stale and repetitive. Watch Dogs is a repeat of almost any Ubisoft open world game, they just cant seem to figure out that what makes GTA´s open world the best in the genre, and thats even small details like shooting into water, has to be there otherwise it makes the point of a open world useless and they could have benefit 100 times more from making it more linear and spend the resources on that.

I love all the side content in WD.