Time Extend
How Ubisoft resurrected DedSec with humour for Watch Dogs 2
Any job worth doing in Watch Dogs 2 is worth doing to music. And so, the best mechanic in Ubisoft’s hackeraction sequel is Marcus Holloway’s earbuds. Equippable at any time, they pump an eclectic stream of on-demand tunes – from Dizzee Rascal to Anti-Flag, KC & The Sunshine Band to Run The Jewels and more besides – into your ears. You can freely soundtrack any mission (attempting grand larceny while blaring Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is one moment we won’t forget in a hurry) or simply wander the streets of San Francisco to your favourite songs.
One particular track so perfectly captures the philosophy of Watch Dogs 2, it almost feels as if the game was formed around it. We blast Get Stupid as we have Holloway ride on top of a car like it’s a skateboard, driving it remotely via his phone. “Get stupid, it’s what we do good,” Mac Dre raps. “Ghost ride the whip while we dancin’ on the hood.” Virtual Californians look on in bewilderment, and we laugh uproariously. Even Dre seems to admire our efforts, crooning his approval: “Boy, we go dumb,
dude”. Credit to Ubisoft, then, for a tonal U-turn of such epic proportions that it singlehandedly saved a series. Watch Dogs
got stupid. And it worked.
After the 2014 release of Watch Dogs,
something had to be done. It suffered as a result of a now-infamous E3 2012 reveal that, on the cusp of a new generation of consoles, made promises beyond the actual graphical capabilities. The ‘downgrade’, as it was dubbed, was apparent to anyone playing the final game. But on top of that, Watch Dogs didn’t endear itself to players. Its Chicago setting was designed to be cramped and dark, a representation of a city riddled with surveillance cameras and made paranoid under the all-seeing eye of Big Tech. And its lead, Aiden Pearce, had all the charisma of wet cardboard.
Sunny San Francisco is a breath of fresh air in comparison. It’s a riot of colour and sound, where all-glass offices sit around the corner from pastel Victorian houses, and perverse wealth brushes past crippling poverty. Artists and entrepreneurs roam the streets, each convinced they’re a little more like the other. It’s a place that – in art as in life – more accurately encapsulates the tech industry, a sphere infinitely more ridiculous than it is terrifying. Holloway, too, is a fresh take on a well-worn theme: he’s a young, Black, brilliant hacker who has the sense of self to recognise his own oppression as one part of a much bigger problem.
He’s also likeable enough that he can make some friends who’ll help him do something about it. Your mileage may vary regarding the core crew, who often express themselves via corny LED emoji masks and outdated turns of phrase (2010 called, Ubisoft, and it wants its ‘Y U NO’ meme back). But their exuberance was a welcome shot in the arm coming off the back of Watch Dogs: these people are not only not about to take this shit lying down, but they have a sense of humour about it, too.
In turn, it makes it easier to accept many of the game’s flaws as part of its precocious personality. There are, of course, precisely zero realities in which San Franciscans are bombing around on mopeds bumping a playlist clearly composed by someone Googling ‘songs about the Bay Area’. It’s an improvement on the first instalment’s soundtrack, however, which Edge once described as “songs by artists from Chicago, that once lived in Chicago, that have Chicago in the title or are by the band Chicago”. And as part of a fantasy in which you can drain bank accounts at the press of a button, and five kids can afford to rent a hackerspace in the middle of San Francisco? It somehow feels in keeping with the bombastic tone to strut around your home turf, insisting to the seals at Pier 39 that “in the Bay Area we dance a little different”.
Happily, sightseeing is something of which much is made in Watch Dogs 2. This is a developer known for pouring a huge amount of resources (although very few of them human, if the recent stories of abuse coming out of the studio are anything to go by) into its recreations of famous locales, and yet it took until Watch Dogs 2 for it to openly acknowledge the proportion of players who enjoy these games mainly as an excuse to partake in virtual tourism. The ScoutX app on Holloway’s phone flags up several of Frisco’s best-known – and even