Watch_Dogs came out a little while ago and I have been playing a lot of it recently. Its a fun game. The game appears at times to have fun with the world via the privacy intrusion minigames, and on the whole the hacking is a nifty mechanic, even if it feels a little dumbed down and it certainly doesn't live up to the hype. Luckily I was not exposed to much of the hype before the game was released (I recieved all of my knowledge of it via osmosis from various reviews) so my expectations did not get to high. I thought it was going to be GTA with some nifty toys and it is. There is one area of the game that seem out of place/odd though.
(Spoilers ahead dear reader, you have been warned. )
The one aspect of the game that kinda pisses me off is the half of the convoy missions and one aspect of the gang hideout missions. By themselves they are fun, and ultimately fairly challenging. When you are dealing with hardcore criminals (and in one mission a corrupt cop) you decide that the best course of action is to stop them mid transit/find their hide out and knock their shit out, thus sending them to the hospital. In theory that should teach them that what they are doing is wrong and that they should amend their way of living life. Yeah, that's totally not how that goes. It doesn't help children, and for the same reason it won't help adults. People who feel powerless will often try to make themselves feel more powerful via an expression of violence. I would think that someone who is more prone to violence already would be more likely to try to get revenge on the vigilante/person who beat them up.
Considering the main story of the game is about the main character going too far during a heist (or at least being party to someone who did) and getting his loved ones hurt in retaliation, you would think that leaving a person with natural violent tendencies alive would possibly end up getting your family hurt (again) if they ever found out who you are; which they totally would, what with the news regularly calling you out by name. Also, the more he does this the more of a name he makes for himself. What if the mafiosi (is that the plural for mafioso?) get together and decide to "kill the bat"? Wouldn't they also go after his family if they ever found out who he is? He leaves people alive, so they might be able to describe his behavior at least. What if they set a trap via a convoy just to lure him out and kill him? Also many of these violent criminals are just that, violent criminals. Is putting them down out of the question for a vigilante who has been doing that the whole game? You can technically knock out every criminal in the game if you want to play non lethally, but that is a player choice. By forcing us to knock people out while we have just been murdering our way through the game you make the game harder, sure, but you also leave a large narrative hole. Incidentally, I loved having to plan my way through how to take out the convoy with out dying horribly when I had to do the knock outs, but that is not my point. It just doesn't make sense for the character I had been playing who would cut swathes through a gang if ever exposed.
This isn't the only game to create this cognitive dissonance in their story v. gameplay. In Tomb Raider you spend a ton of time murdering people and destroying ruins but then in cutscenes get choked up at just the thought of killing a person. Sometimes games actually present a reason for the not murdering that makes sense for the character. In dishonored you play a man accused of a crime he didn't commit and the player has to decide on what justice means for them, and then act upon those beliefs: either by killing everyone who wronged you or by coming up with punishments that hurt them to the core, i.e. you ex-communicate a priest and make some nobles get sold into slavery.
Other than that, it is a great game. Very fun. I think that it might be a little up itself with the whole niece death thing. I would rather have just played a hacker going out to use a company's all seeing OS against them to show why that kind of big brother thing is a morally iffy and ethically fucked endeavor. Instead they chose to create instead of a batman clone in a GTA suit. But hell I played it didn't I?
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