Watch Dogs - Constructive Criticism

While playing Watch Dogs by Ubisoft, I have encountered many game aspects that seemed repetitive and under-developed. It is time to call the fixers for some constructive criticism.


Problem 1: Car chases end up the same way always - hold "Q" when it prompts you to kill off your pursuers with your phone. Its the most effective way by far, not counting the boat escapes, but is quite repetitive.

Suggestion: Allow the player to shoot out of the car - simple and realistic. Also, since you can hack the cars' alarm systems, why not be able to shut down a moving car with a press of a button? Sounds like the most effective way to complete a convoy mission or escape the police. Maybe the developers thought it would make the game too easy, but with the battery resource system in place, it shouldn't be an issue as the player would have to prioritize what they want to do with it.


Problem 2: Gun-play doesn't have much variety either. Sure, there are a bunch of guns but they aren't balanced, which is clearly indicated by the number of stars a weapon has. Therefore, you won't be using most of the guns you have access to.

Suggestion: Balance the weapons and replace the star grading system with a stat page showing attributes like fire rate, accuracy, damage, and range of the selected weapon.

Problem 3: Car delivery app is useless because you have to go and pick the car up somewhere, which is often far enough that you have to take another vehicle to get to it. Furthermore, the app does not work during missions, which is a limitation that does not make much sense.

Suggestion: Make the app functional during missions, and have the vehicle delivered right to you by a fixer or at least significantly reduce the distance you have to travel to get to the delivered vehicle.


Problem 4: The morality system has no meaningful effect on anything. There are also no choices to make in the game aside from the way you approach the objective. A game that has a morality system but no "good" or "evil" choices to make throughout the campaign doesn't really make sense.

Suggestion: There was a mission where you had to save Jacks from surrounding fixers, at the end of which Aiden contemplates whether he is a killer or not. This was a great opportunity to make the mission react to how the player approached the dispatching of his enemies. Specifically, if the player took the non-lethal approach, Jacks wouldn't be scared of Aiden, and Aiden's monologue would change in a positive way. If the player killed every fixer in the area instead, the current cutscene would be presented. More of these cutscenes that react to the player's lethal and non-lethal methods, as well as respective changes to the plot would have made the morality system much more interesting, realistic, and deep.


Problem 5: Dynamically generated crimes have no variety to them aside from location. They always involve one perpetrator and one victim.  The dynamic crime system is completely useless, not to mention boring, after you maxed out your good reputation.

Suggestion: It would have been way better if there were also bank/store robberies, hostage situations, and home invasions that the player could act upon, whether it is to kill the criminals and do the crime yourself, or be the hero and stop the perpetrators.


Problem 6: Looking at personal information of people walking by is also useless, if I see that I can hack the person I do it without reading any of the info that gets pulled up on the person. Why? Because the random personal information has no effects on anything.

Suggestion: Add more persistent effects to interaction with individuals with certain profiles. For example, if you take money out of an unemployed person's bank account when prompted, there would be a high chance that that same person will participate in a future crime or take a gunman job out of desperation. If it was a rich person with a criminal background, then they would hire a fixer to come after you for stealing the money.
Realistically, you should be able to hack way more bank accounts as most of a city's population would have bank accounts. This should not unbalance the game as it does not revolve around you racking up wealth, it focuses on interacting with the digital world and being the vigilante or the menace.
To add persistence and more effect to your digital mischief, the NPCs should not always be randomly generated, many of them should be saved and should re-appear as you go about your business. This will allow for more different interactions with people beyond stealing their money and music, and listening in on their conversations. Something positive like adding money to a less fortunate NPC who is a single mother or someone who can't keep up with their rent. Doing so would affect their lives and how they will appear next time you see them.


Problem 7: There are not enough non-lethal ways to take down enemies. the only non lethal way is to do a melee take-down with the baton. So if you want to be stealthy and don't want to melee everyone, you have to use silenced weapons or explode things in the environment. Non-lethal options at range are non-existent.

Suggestion: Adding something like taser pistols or a rifle that shoots tranquilizer darts would not only diversify your non-lethal options, but add to the morality system as well. Lethal take-downs would negatively affect your morality score, while non-lethal attacks would do the opposite.


Problem 8: Watch Dogs has a strangely limited number of silenced weapons. The most notable two out of the few are the Spec Ops 1911 pistol and Spec Ops Goblin assault rifle. This puts you at a disadvantage if you want to play the game stealthily, as most of the weapons you have access to are quite the opposite of silent.

Suggestion: Making a silencer an attachment that you could put on when you want to on any gun opens up much more possibilities to the sneaky player. Aiden can carry all the 30+ weapons on the go and a bunch of gadgets, it would be no trouble to carry silencers for all of them, that is if the developers don't like the "universal silencer that works for every gun" idea.

Did I miss any other important problems with the game? Have more suggestions on how to fix these problems? Let me and the developers know in the comments.

Take a look at the Reddit discussion of this topic if you are interested.