You may be thinking that the ET game in its time was a scandal that ended with the video game, or that Cyberpunk or No Man's Sky was the one that put a new layer of skepticism in the players, but if there is a fraud that I remember quite clearly when we were just seeing the first games of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One generation is all the controversy that was with a certain Ubisoft game and that to this day I still have flashbacks of everything that game promised to be and what we ended up buying the players.
I know, Ubisoft is not exactly the best in terms of transparency with players but at that time they had made masterpieces like the first Assassin's Creed as well as some of the Far Cry that showed that they had a good team for what Watch Dogs proposed, which in essence was going to be an Assassin's Creed with a modern theme, in a city where most of the devices are connected to the network and therefore can be hacked in one way or another, there we entered the skin of a vigilante in what promised to be a tragic story and at the same time quite serious.
I remember very vividly the E3 where they presented the first demo of this game, I think that is one of the moments where several of us realized that we were facing a new generation, that the game had taken a leap beyond what we had had before, the lighting was an absolute marvel and all the gameplay looked great, I remember that what I most wanted to do was to enter the bank accounts of the NPC or see all their history and their attitudes just analyzing them in the street.
It seemed that everything was going well and this game was going to be one of the best of all, but then there started to be rumors, the crunch at that time was not something that was seen badly by the public at least not mostly so news of employees working overtime to get to the premiere or some complaints from their own employees about how they were managing this project, on top of that was also another great release of the moment, GTA V which was not a small game at all and was released 2 months before Watch Dogs...
a hara-kiri on the market
But the game was also coming from a series of delays and many feared the worst, some said that the open world that Ubisoft proposed was too much for its capabilities or that it was necessary to make a huge downgrade to the graphics and animations to replicate Chicago and all its systems in a way that there was no crash in the game engine.
Even Ubisoft took care months before the launch to put all kinds of publicity about the game in the media that got, I still saw with optimism the whole picture, I booked the game for my playstation 4 and waited anxiously watching the reports and criticisms towards the game, which were quite hard and even saw a video where they intended to sue Ubisoft for false advertising and by then I feared the worst.
When I got my copy of the game I was quite excited because finally after all those years I finally had a copy of that game I saw at E3 on my console, the main mission seemed to be fine, the shootouts were very well done, the driving was a bit arcade similar to GTA and the hacking system disappointed me a bit, although you have power over many objects in the game just press a button to use them.
In addition there was also what shone the most in the game, its graphics, butchered by the mediocrity of Ubisoft, there has always been a certain degree of downgrade in video games that come to market but this was another level, not only the downgrade was in the graphics, also in the animations, the weather effects were a mockery of what was seen in that demo and only made me wonder how Ubisoft had come to all this, had they had a cut in staff? no, the answer was that the previous demo was mere advertising, and not a true sample of what we ended up with on the consoles.
The bugs were a whole catalog apart in the first days of release, they released several patches to fix them but quite late when the players, including me, were already looking for other games.
Spending $60 on a game is not a joke, even today I consider it a huge overprice for first line games, and I grew up hating the practices of companies like EA or Ubisoft itself, although Watch Dogs was not a bad game if I fell heavy everything they promised even to show Gameplays to the end the final product was very distant from that E3, Watch Dogs could become a spiritual successor and a new IP that players are willing to wait with enthusiasm but it is safe to say that with each installment are fewer players who expect the Watch Dogs games, and I think that's a shame.
All yours, @slashint - Gamer, Video Game Analyst
