Interactive Friction: Watch_Dogs: Episode 7: CALM AND WELL ADJUSTED!

July 15, 2015

Interactive Friction/ Let's Play/ Ubisoft/ Watch_Dogs

“Hopefully we won’t have anymore audio problems that prevent us from posting for a week.”
“Now we’ll have to play the game all over again.”

Oh, past Sam. You have no idea.

The fight at the motel is one of those silly tropes that constantly rears its head in all sorts of generic action movies and video games. Of course, since Watch_Dogs IS a generic action movie, it is compelled to indulge.

There are so many things wrong with this scene that it’s not even funny.Why does Aiden Pearce have a bomb ready to blow up his apartment? Where did this bomb come from, and is he even remotely concerned about the potential harm that could come to his next door neighbors? What about his landlord and the costs that they will have to pay to fix that building? In the event of armed intrusion, is this seriously the best plan that we have?

And as for the guys who broke in to kill Aiden: Why didn’t they just wait outside the door, because he only had one way out? If they had all been in the hallway, and just waited for Aiden Pearce to leave, he’d be screwed. Even that stupid bomb of his wouldn’t be able to help him. Hell, you don’t even need to have them right in front of the door. Just have them train their sights on it, and fire when it opens. They have more than enough men to surround the building and stop him in his tracks.

In order for this scene to work, everyone aside from Clara has to be stupid. None of this makes sense, and it should have ended with Aiden Pearce’s bullet-riddled corpse on the balcony.

Interactive Friction: Watch_Dogs: Episode 4: Bad Boy… 17?

June 15, 2015

Interactive Friction/ Let's Play/ Ubisoft/ Watch_Dogs

In this episode, I poke fun at Sam’s usernames.

We spend most of this episode complaining about this game’s setting, and for good reason. Watch_Dogs straddles this uncomfortable line between a modern world and a distinctly Cyberpunk future. There are a ton of interesting concepts that they bring up in this context, like CTOS, Fixers, and cyber-terrorism. Unfortunately, it doesn’t delve into ANY of these concepts.

We talk about how the gov’t is using CTOS to monitor and record information on every single person in the city. Every crime, every phone call, every undocumented citizen, every raunchy or politically-charged internet post is being observed by a cold, calculating machine. Well, except for Aiden Pearce. He has super immunity because his name, face, and records are magically obscured from CTOS. That means he can do whatever he wants without fear that he’s begin monitored.

There are these mercenaries called Fixers. In the digital age, these modern soldiers of fortune work for clients to pull off missions that ordinary people would have difficulty completing under the surveillance of CTOS. Except these guys are nothing more than targets for Aiden Pearce to shoot at for consequence-free violence. There’s no exploring how they might be able to exploit CTOS, what makes them different from any other mercenary, or how they manage to stay off the grid. They are just amoral and objective evil people we can gun down without mercy or remorse.

This is basically the Bioshock problem. The story takes place in an objectivist’s (or ultra-conservative) paradise, but we don’t explore the ramifications of that. It is merely a backdrop for a different story. Watch_Dogs is much the same way. The game claims to be about the surveillance state and the dangers of being constantly monitored, but we don’t go into that in any significant detail. Instead, we get a standard revenge story.

It’s so disappointing to see this happen time and time again. If they had just focused on any one of these aspects, I’d be a lot more charitable. As it stands, it’s get really hard to care.

2 Comments


Kelerak
July 16, 2015 at 10:43 am

If I'm getting this right, it sounds like Yoko Taro is essentially Goichi Suda if he had a lot more creative freedom?

newdarkcloud
July 16, 2015 at 11:44 am

There's a lot of truth to that.

Now that I think about it, a lot of the big gaming auteurs come from Japan.

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