The scene between Aiden Pearce and Lucky Quinn is by far the best scene in the game, aside from those between Aiden and Jordy. There’s a fair degree of subtext and subtlety in their back-and-forth that it’s surprising that the same people who created this scene also made the parts with Bedbug, Iraq, the prostitutes, and every other section of the story.

This is also the one of the few kills where Aiden Pearce may not necessarily be in the wrong. Even if you discount the revenge motivation here (and we have), it’s clear that Chicago would be an objectively better, less awful city should Lucky Quinn and his Chicago South Club fall.
At the same time, one could make an argument that killing anymore is morally wrong, no matter how evil that person may be. It may not make Aiden Pearce out to be the paragon of justice, at least an argument could be made that it’s morally acceptable to kill Quinn.

We have a couple of problems with it in the episode, but that’s less a problem with the scene and more an issue with the context that it was provided in. If the writing is this game was a little tighter, and there was less filler, this would’ve been a fantastic payoff.

This also happens to be the part where the game finally makes the decision to say something. Even if it’s a simple “Information is power” message, that’s more than the rest of the game has been willing to give. Exploring how much someone can do if they know all of your dark little secrets, if they can expose you at the blink of a button: That’s some very interesting stuff. On top of that, it ties back into the central premise nicely.

If the game ended at that point, I would’ve considered it a pretty strong finish to a pretty weak game. Unfortunately, we’re not done yet. Rather than use this point to wrap things up, we still need to deal with Damien. Even worse, we deal in this dumbest way possible.

And that makes me sad.

As many of you know, I have been working on a Let’s Play series with my friend, Sam Callahan. Together, we have been trudging through Watch_Dogs. One of the more heavily advertised features in Watch_Dogs was the ability for players to invade the game of another in order to sabotage them. Fans of the Dark Souls games might recognize this feature, since it also uses player invasion as a game mechanic. Having played both Watch_Dogs and Dark Souls, I realized that I was extremely annoyed by the invasions in Watch_Dogs. On the other hand, that same general idea worked for me in Dark Souls, adding to the game. This is when I began to ponder why this might be the case.
One of the fundamental reasons why player invasions irritated me in Watch_Dogs was that they were almost divorced from the rest of the game. As a player wanders about the city of Chicago, outside of a mission or side-activity, another player may choose to enter their game at any time. Until the outsider is either dealt with or succeeds in their mission to hack the host player, the host is unable to continue the main story or do any side-quests. Even if the host dies while being invaded, the event continues uninterrupted and the invader is able to continue with their objective. In other words, to someone who is looking to complete the game’s story and/or side missions, an invasion is just a needless distraction, rather than a core part of the game. They have to put their game on hold in order to deal with this new problem. Sam and I encountered this ourselves a fewtimesin our Let’s Play. Though we eventually remember that we could turn off player invasions, that further speaks to how separate they are from everything else. With invasions turned off, the game is improved because players can get to the rest of the content without wasting time killing an invader.
This is in stark contrast to Dark Souls, where the invasions are more nicely integrated into the whole experience. Normally, players won’t be in danger of invasions. However, in order to invite other people to join their game and help them take down many of the game’s bosses, they also have to spend a Humanity point and open themselves up to invasions in exchange. Invasions aren’t so much a dedicated feature as much as they are a necessary drawback in order to balance out the act of asking for help. Even if the player is offline, there are NPCs in the world that can take the place of both co-op companions and invaders. In other words, this feature is so core to the game’s fundamental design that From Software saw fit to include an NPC equivalent for those who, for whatever reason, cannot or will not play online. Opening oneself up to the aid of others will in turn open up the possibility that others will attack.
The difference between allowing oneself to be invaded in Dark Souls and the incidental invasion in Watch_Dogs is a very important one. Whenever I was invaded in Watch_Dogs, it was almost always at an inopportune time. Often, I would be about to accept a story mission, when the game informed me that someone had stepped into my play session, locking me out of the mission. It was an irritation that I had no interest in and gained nothing from. While an invasion in Dark Souls can be inconvenient, players must make a deliberate choice to spend Humanity and make them possible. This opting-in subtly prepares the player for the potential threat, which means they aren’t surprised if and when it happens. In Watch_Dogs, player invasions are always surprising because they can happen at anytime. As a result, they will always mess up the player’s plan and cause undue irritation.
Not only are the invasions in Watch_Dogs separate from the other gameplay elements, but they are also removed from the normal character progression. As players complete missions in Watch_Dogs, they acquire skill points which can be spent on skills in the various categories, like Hacking, Driving, and Combat. There is also another category called “Notoriety”. Unlike the other skill trees, players can’t use skill points to advance it. Instead, they accumulate “Notoriety” through strong performances in the various online multiplayer activities, including the invasions. Out of the 6 available skills in this tree, only two could be considered useful to players who don’t play with others. The other 4 skills only affect elements of the online component, by raising the rewards or making it easier to detect an invading player. To put it plainly, almost nothing the player unlocks in the online mode affects them in the main story.
Dark Souls works differently. In order to gain Humanity points, players can enter another’s game and help them defeat an area boss. Even if they fail in the attempt, they can still keep the Souls that they earned while in working with the host. Alternatively, the enter invade another player’s game, gaining Humanity and souls by killing the host. Since they do not lose Souls in the attempt, they are incentivized to take advantage of this ability to gain Humanity. In turn, this Humanity can be spend to allow other players to join their game and hopefully gain an advantage in fighting many of the game’s bosses. Both the aid of other players and the Souls obtained in these multiplayer events have a direct, positive influence on one’s progression in the game.
Again, observe the difference between these two games. To the player who is only looking to complete the main story of the game, the invasions in Watch_Dogs are a waste of time. If they perform well, the rewards they provide won’t help them in their ultimate goal, designed only to be used in online challenges. Dark Souls goes in a different direction. Even if a player only wants to beat the game, there is still a strong incentive to partake in the online invasions, or at least make oneself open to them. The aid of cooperative partners can greatly increase one’s odds of successfully defeating a boss. Furthermore, there is a chance to earn more Souls and Humanity, which are used to further tip the odds in their favor. As someone who rarely participates in a game’s online component, I still found myself making use of it in my journey through Lordran.

When Watch_Dogs was in development, Ubisoft said that while players could disable the option for others to invade their game, they considered leaving them on to be the “best” way to play. Unfortunately, the facts aren’t in their favor. Without a way to prepare for them, or a strong reason to keep them enabled in the first place, it makes more sense for players to not even bother. As Dark Souls demonstrates, it didn’t have to be this way. As rudimentary as they are, if Ubisoft had been a little smarter about the implementation, they could have been a seamlessly integrated and enjoyable aspect of the final product.

This is the point where all of the many criticisms we’ve be directed at Watch_Dogs that to coalesce. Like the game, we start to tie up all of our loose-ends as we head towards the final stretch.

It’s amazing that even after forcing his family to evacuate the city, because his revenge has made them into massive targets, Ubisoft still doesn’t acknowledge how awful Aiden Pearce is as a person. That’s really all I needed. All Ubisoft had to do was show that they were aware of the monster they had created.

I have to applaud Nikki in this scene. As Sam said, she’s a saint for not blowing up at what happened in her life. She did nothing that would justify the need to be evacuated from an otherwise normal city. If Aiden Pearce has just stopped, like Nikki pleaded for him to do, she could just sit back in her house and deal with normal-people problems.

That tragedy is caused by our hero, ladies and gentleman. Enjoy.

It’s interesting to compare the mission in the club here versus what they showed off at the original E3 reveal.

I can see what they were going for in the E3 reveal trailer, even watching it back now. There’s this very clear sense of progression from the club infiltration, to baiting a staffer into calling the boss, to sending a message by killing the owner, making sure to save civilians along the way.

It’s obvious that at some point the script was rewritten and Joseph DeMarco was no longer an important character. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, this mission makes it seem like Defalt only exists so that we can make use of this club in the final game. His first mention is in Act 3, where he is mentioned in passing. He presents himself as an obstacle at the end of Act 3, but we then defeat him very early into Act 4. Defalt exits the story about as quickly as he entered it.

I get the feeling that this game suffered the Uncharted 3 problem. They had developed all of the missions and level layouts first, and then wrote the story around those missions. It’s the only way I can explain all of the filler we see in the middle of the game. It’s why I almost forgot about the revenge story halfway through when I first played Watch_Dogs.

I dislike filler, and I dislike how it really hurt this game.

I really can’t stress enough how absolutely silly it is for Damien to out Aiden Pearce as The Vigilante at the beginning of the episode. There are two big reasons for this:

1.) Aiden Pearce’s identity as The Vigilante is public knowledge.
As we’ve seen repeatedly over the course of this Let’s Play, countless news reports have referred to Aiden Pearce by name when speaking of The Vigilante. I would guess that one draft of the script had it where nobody except for his closest allies knew who we was. However, this is no longer the case. Even discounting the incidental, background radio and news reports as not part of the story, T-Bone knows who Aiden Pearce because of the news reports, which is why he didn’t trust Pearce at first. When Damien tells the world who The Vigilante is, the world should shrug with indifference, because they already had a face and a name.

2.) Damien has no reason to oust Aiden Pearce.
As Aiden Pearce correctly deduced, Damien’s deal with Blume means that he’s reliant of Pearce to give him the data. Otherwise, he’s royally screwed out of the CTOS hacks, and could possibly get a hit taken out on him. If Aiden got arrested because of what Damien did, Damien would be in arguably a worse position than Aiden Pearce. Aiden Pearce will eventually break out of jail, and Damien will have several people coming after him from all sides.
Even if Damien doesn’t like Aiden Pearce (and to be fair, who would?), he’d still need him out and about in order to stay afloat.

Next time, I get to complain about Defalt.

We’ve gotten to the point where neither Sam nor I care about this game anymore. As a result, we paid less and less attention to the story. You can probably spot some of the times when that happened, like our surprise at the electronic door, despite T-Bone literally just saying that he was hacking in for that express reason. I’ll own up to the fact that parts of this episode were phoned in, but I’d argue that it’s the game’s fault for wearing us down so heavily.

I want to point out that we really didn’t need to storm Iraq’s compound. It wasn’t important to our objective. When we made our first hack, Carla and Aiden were already able to figure out that it was blackmail data (despite not being able to read it because it’s encrypted). From there, it would have simple to deduce that the hacker, likely Iraq, was after blackmail information. Then, we could have skipped most of the game and gotten that much closer to the true culprit behind the accidental death of Aiden Pearce’s niece.

Next week, this game shows that it is not done with the filler content. You’ve only gotten a short glimpse of the irritation that is “Defalt”. There’s not much left of the game at this point, which Sam and I are both pretty happy about.

Apparently I was wrong again. Forensic Technologist is an actual title.

This episode just makes me wonder what the hell Damien’s deal is. They never explain what his motivation is for wanting the CTOS hacks. It seems like he’s only doing it because he’s one of the designated villains of the story. In that sense, he’s almost like a cartoon character.

Despite his leg injury, and his inability to be reasonable in any circumstance, he’s appears to be pretty successful given steady employment with a great salary. By all accounts he’s doing alright. That’s not to say that I don’t understand why he’s going after the second hacker: He wants revenge over his broken leg. That’s basically what Aiden Pearce is doing, so it’s par for the course.

But they didn’t really establish why he desires the CTOS access. He’s a good hacker, from what we see in the story. If he wanted to, he could probably get in without any deals whatsoever. You’d think that a hacker like Damien would appreciate that kind of challenge. Instead, we see him pointlessly selling us out for no real reason.

I just don’t get it.

I hate this game.

First off, I actually made a mistake in this episode. “Titular” is a word meaning “in the title”. For example, Garrett the Master Thief is the titular “Thief” of that franchise. However, “eponymous” is the other way around. It is used to describe a thing named after an individual. For example, “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” is Tony Hawk’s eponymous game franchise.

What that cleared up, this episode is another one where neither Sam nor I have much to say about Watch_Dogs. This is where we basically give up and do a podcast in the middle of our Let’s Play series.

Lastly, since one of my favorite pass-times is pointing out how far down the rabbit hole this filler crap goes:

  • Aiden Pearce’s main objective is to find the person who ordered the hit that resulted in the death of his niece. He has already deduced that it has something to do with his last big heist: The Merlaut job.
  • To that end, he traced the IP address of the other person who hacked into the hotel’s systems that day. It led him to Iraq’s compound.
  • Aiden Pearce hacks server in Iraq’s compound and partially downloads the data that was stolen, because that will apparently help us track the person who ordered the hit?
  • Clara gets the data, but can’t hack it because it’s encrypted. Instead of relying on her friends at Anonymous HQ, she figures that the only person who can break the encryption is Raymond Kenney, who created it.
  • Aiden Pearce goes out to the middle of nowhere to find Kenney, and gets beat up in a bar. 🙂
  • Kenney, now T-Bone, will only break the encryption if we do him a solid and hack into Blume’s systems.
  • We have to acquire the materials and the access codes to break into Blume, to help Kenney, so that he will decrypt the data, so that we can read the data, and HOPEFULLY get one step closer to the man who ordered the hit on Aiden Pearce that accidentally killed his niece.
We are so far down the rabbit hole that we can’t even the opening we fell through. These missions are so far separated from our main objective that Aiden Pearce might as well be on a tropical vacation for all the good this is doing him.
I hate pointless wastes of time, and I hate this game.

Now that I’m watching Sam play through this game again, I’m only now realizing just how much pointless fluff is in this story.

At this point in the story, we have acquired a part of the data located in Iraq’s compound. Unfortunately, it’s encrypted with a special encryption that can only be broken by the person who developed it: A former Blume employee named Raymond Kenney. (Blume is the company that made CTOS. Since this rarely comes up, you can be forgiven for not knowing that.)

Ignoring the fact that this data really isn’t that important to our overall objective of figuring out who killed our dead nice, and further ignoring the fact that Clara should be able to get her hacker friends in on breaking the encryption, Aiden Pearce decides he needs to recruit Raymond Kenney to the cause in order to crack it.

At least the prostitution filler had the absolute mercy of being short. This is a entire act, consisting of 6 missions, dedicated to recruiting this guy to crack a code that doesn’t need to be cracked, when should already have the resources required to do it ourselves.

I hate this game.

But on a more positive note, since we mention each of these guys early in the episode, it’s worth linking to them here for your viewing pleasure.
John Green’s Moral Story Through Grand Theft Auto 5
GoldVision’s Grand Theft Auto Pacifist Series

I like the scene at the start of this episode, where Jacks watches Aiden Pearce slaughter several groups of armed men. It pretty subtle compared to many of the other scenes in game, yet that’s what gives it power. Jacks doesn’t need to say anything, just the simple act of pulling away from his Uncle Aiden is enough to convey everything that needs to be said. The psychologist’s threat was just icing on the cake.

And then we get to Bedbug. I strongly suspect that the conversation between Bedbug and Aiden Pearce is meant to humanize Pearce a little bit. However, I personally found that it added more to Bedbug’s character than Aiden Pearce’s. He’s not a bad person. He’s just caught in a very bad situation. It’s very telling that even after Aiden Pearce led Bedbug into a death trap, he still gave Pearce the information that he needed.

Unfortunately, neither of these people are the protagonist. Aiden Pearce is, much to my dismay.

I hate this game.
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