Posted in: Movies | Tagged: entertainment, games, watch dogs

The Facepalm Festival That Is Watch Dogs – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 02 Jun 2014 11:30:04 -0500

Adi Tantimedh writes,

Warning: spoilers!

Watch Dogs is the most hyped video game of the last two years, intended to not just launch a new franchise IP, but a flagship title to herald the power of the next-generation game consoles with their boosted processing and graphics power.

It also has the most dreadful writing of any movie, TV show or game this year, a textbook lesson in how NOT to write a thriller.

As you probably know by now, you play Aiden Pearce, a hacker and thief who becomes a vigilante to hunt down the shadowy figures who killed his niece for a heist he attempted that went wrong. To do that, he has to hack, shoot and kill his way through a bunch of missions to get to them. In the meantime, he has hacked into Chicago's new all-seeing computer system that keeps everyone linked.

The writing is filled with humourless clichés trying to be edgy, but its banal dialogue and boring gravel-voiced hero are rehashes from hundreds of movies and TV shows. The plot thinks it's being clever but is predictable and doesn't make any sense at all. Every decision Pearce makes is meant to be hard and cool but really utterly stupid. He has a smartphone that can make calls and hack anywhere via wifi, so why does he need to actually sneak into places to his hacking other than the developers needed some action rather than have him sit on a bench doing pressing commands into his phone. Why do people who want to meet lead him on elaborate chases when they can just call him on his phone? He keeps saying he needs to remain anonymous when the authorities and the media already know his name and mention on the news all the time. He doesn't want to get arrested, so he gets arrested in order to break into prison to intimidate a witness there who can identify him even though the police already know who he is and are after him. When he finds a white slavery ring, why does he bust in and beat them up before the police show up to arrest them when he could have just phoned the police and have them show up to nab them? He's Batman… if he was a murderous moron. The story is also horribly, unthinkingly sexist, where every female character is either a victim or a hostage. Richard Cobbett has a brilliant dissection of just how epically stupid the writing in this game is, beating me to the punch.

Pearce is a walking cliché written without irony or a single original line of dialogue. He also looks oddly like Steve Carell, so henceforth I shall call him Sociopathic Steve Carell because that makes him slightly less boring. There's a female hacker in a Mohawk, tattoos and leather that's so overtly a rip-off of Lisbeth Salander from the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels that the only reason the rights owners of the books didn't sue is because they didn't know this game was in development.

The problem is, the game doesn't seem to realise the hero is an irredeemable sociopathic shithead. It insists on regarding him as the hero when in fact everything he does is utterly awful. This is even part of how you play the game. Everything you do reinforces Sociopathic Steve Carell's character as a scumbag: even when wandering the city, he intrudes on people's private lives and learns their most intimate secrets, then steals money from their bank accounts. Oh, this guy's sister committed suicide, I'll take $200 off him. This woman is recovering from cancer, I'll take $150. When he hacks the traffic lights to cause the bad guys' cars to crash, how many innocent bystanders are getting injured or killed? How many bystanders does he run over when he's trying to escape from the police or the bad guys? The writers think the story is cutting-edge when it's just clueless about how to make a thriller work properly.

That's not to say playing the game isn't fun. It's just not really anything another game like GTA V or Saints Row 4 haven't done better before, and with more with and humour. The basic gameplay design is the same as GTA's, with its open world landscape and shooting mechanics with some hacking thrown in. The hacking is really a button-push to make people explode, and who doesn't want to make people explode with a phone? The game is one of those few where it feels better to ignore the idiotic face-palm of a story and just wander about randomly.

The trouble is, the writing is terrible and the open world exploration is equally uninteresting. You're going around eavesdropping on people, knowing their intimate secrets and stealing their money. The embarrassing text exchanges you read are not that funny, mainly aping what's already in real life with no added layers. The instances where you hack into people's home computers to spy on their private moments are sad, creepy and joyless, offering no insight at all. Even the music you hear on the radio when you're driving through the city is generic and dull. Apart from the innovation of the hacking design, the game doesn't do anything that has not been done better in games like GTA V or the Saints Row series. The difference here is in the writing. Those games' open worlds have interesting things to see and random, unpredictable events to witness and even participate in while in Watch Dogs it's just dull. The makers claim they're dealing with important themes about surveillance and privacy or the loss of it, but there's no real discussion of those ideas other than to throw hot-button issues at the wall in the hopes that something sticks. GTA V and Saints Row 3 and 4 worked because of the satirical humour that informs their worlds and themes. GTA V reinforced the angry social satire even when you decide to gratuitously shoot people and blow things up and Saints Row incorporated the player's violent mayhem into part of its absurd comedy. Watch Dogs doesn't have any sense of thematic integrity. The world is just… there.

I can't really blame the makers of the game for making its basic design so derivative of GTA, especially after GTA V earned over $1 billion in sales. It's just a shame that Watch Dogs is so generic and derivative, doing nothing particularly well. In an era of AAA games like The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite, whose stories directly confront the moral darkness of their heroes, the sloppy cluelessness of Watch Dogs just doesn't cut it anymore. Games are evolving into a medium where players want more nuanced story and Ubisoft have made no secret of the fact that they want to be taken seriously as a company with franchises that can be realised as movies as well as games. That's why they have a writer's department, but the writing problems in their games, including Far Cry 3, the Assassin's Creed series and this one, are not only proof that their writers still don't know some of the most important basics of what makes a story work or a hero who's not a dispicable arsehole. If Ubisoft really wants to go toe-to-toe with Hollywood, they're going to have to step up their game in the writing department, but then trying to emulate Hollywood is one of the things that's crippling AAA games these days.

Hacking stupid plot ideas at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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