Fewer Guns
Watch Dogs 2 needs fewer guns. The first Watch Dogs felt like its gigantic arsenal of machine guns, shotguns, RPGs, and submachine guns existed only to be like Grand Theft Auto, and actively worked against the stealth and hacking espionage the rest of the game excelled at. It was unnecessary and made little sense for the experience. Aiden Pearce was a low-profile anonymous hacker… who would occasionally pull a RPG out of his jacket pocket and blow up a few police cars. It was ridiculous.
Watch Dogs 2 would be better off downplaying guns in general, and focus more on being a stealth game. Infiltrating a compound in the first game while leaving no trace (physical or digital) was immensely satisfying, especially when Aiden’s hacking prowess meant he hardly had to take three steps into the place to do so.
A Protagonist Worth A Damn
It’s pretty well documented that this point that Aiden Pearce was one of the dullest protagonists of our time. His grizzled voice and damaged guy demeanor felt tired and boring, and the story of Watch Dogs did him exactly zero favors. Just like his low-key clothing, Aiden was great at blending into the crowd of straight white male protagonists in video games.
What Watch Dogs 2 needs above all else, is a character worth caring about: someone with interesting traits that can dynamically change throughout the course of the story. It needs a story that can support and keep the players interest from mission to mission, and keep away from the convoluted mess of the original game. And Ubisoft seems to know this, as we can see in a possible early look at the protagonist of the new game. Assuming this is true, it’ll be nice to see some gender and racial diversity in Watch Dogs’ sophomoric entry. Now we can only hope that they’re a good character.
Non-Lethality Options
Sneaking up behind somebody in Watch Dogs and taking them down with an extending baton felt so satisfying. It presented Aiden Pearce as someone who knows how to take get the drop on someone, but doesn’t need to senselessly murder simple security guards hired to guard a tech company’s building, and it was way cooler and faster than the chokehold seen in most stealth games.
But with regards to non-lethality, that’s as far as his arsenal went. Any other enemy takedown involved lethal shocking from electrical panels, dropping pallets of cargo onto patrols, or the ever-expedient bullet to the head. The game made a laughable attempt to frame security guards as bad people who deserved to be murdered through displaying less than glowing details of them on Aiden’s profiler, but that’s hardly close to a proper justification.
Watch Dogs 2 could take on an approach of non-lethal options and really roll with it. If our hero is truly a vigilante, arm them with tasers, stun batons, and other tools to incapacitate foes. Instead of just hacking their phone to steal their savings, let us send security guards texts and phone calls that fake emergencies to get them out of the way. There are plenty of ways a potential conflict can be avoided without dropping cargo on their head or filling them with lead.
Better Stealth
As it stands, Watch Dogs was a pretty good stealth game. But similar to other issues with it, all of the guns and explosions really got in the way of what could have been a genius stealth system. With a few tweaks, Watch Dogs 2 could be a game that you never even have to ever break stealth to complete.
The best stealth games make the player feel in control of the situation while rewarding inventive and precise play. The first game did this job excellently with the wealth of cameras that were instantly accessible and kept the player in the know of enemy locations and objectives. Watch Dogs 2 simply needs to take this ideal of stealth further (and copy MGSV in every way possible). Allow for the dragging and hiding of bodies, let us lift helpful information off of guards through their phones (or maybe more direct means), or even cut off their communication lines so that they can’t call in reinforcements. Just give the player myriad options that needn’t result in a fight.
More Inventive Hacking
We’ve already touched on a few opportunities Watch Dogs 2 could use to make hacking more interesting, but it should blow out the gimmick of the first game to new heights. Make hacking more than a holding of a button, and incorporate not only strategy, but skill into the mix.
Simple tasks like stopping traffic or accessing a camera should probably still be as simple as a press, but everything else should not be so simple. The first game often played around with this idea by making the player bounce from camera to camera, and those missions were some of the coolest. But as we’ve been saying, choice is paramount to a good stealth game, and Watch Dogs 2’s hacking could be the toolbox of options to make this happen. Games that focus on hacking like HackNet make the player legitimately memorize commands and directories that actual hackers have to learn. Watch Dogs 2 could do something similar, though perhaps without going quite that far. The game could also get more creative with what in the world is hackable: hack a self-driving car to ram a pursuer, hijack a drone someone is flying in the park to spy and meddle with targets, or even hack phones to call in bomb threats to clear an area of civilians. The possibilities are limitless here.
What do you think Watch Dogs 2 needs? Let us know in the comments.
MORE WATCH DOGS 2
- Ubisoft E3 2016 Lineup Revealed, Includes Watch Dogs 2
- Ubisoft is Sending Out Watch Dogs 2 Ray-Ban Glasses, Game Still Unannounced
- Watch Dogs 2’s “New Tone” Will Surprise Players, Says Ubisoft
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