Watch Dogs 2: Co-op, more hacking and a bigger open world

[MUSIC] All right, I'm Scott Butterworth, here with Mike Mahardy, to talk to you about Watch Dogs 2. Ubisoft has finally confirmed that it is a real thing, it is happening. It is coming out this year. They actually did a live stream just earlier today. But Mike, I know you just got back from Montreal, where you actually got Got to see the game in person. Right. So they showed us all this stuff that they showed this morning. I didn't get to play any of it, but I did get to interview the lead producer, the director, the lead designer, and the lead writer, and they were kind of shedding light on a lot of the different aspects that we saw in the trailers. The biggest change is it was in my mind the fact that it's now set not in Chicago but in the Bay Area and that we have a new hero as well. So how much of the new world did you actually see? So he showed us the new main character Marcus. He's a hacker, an Oakland native, and his parents were activists and he got pushed out from gentrification in San Francisco. See police brutality, see the racial profiling, and kind of leads him to wanna impact society in a meaningful way. And he's a gifted hacker and then you come in from San Francisco and this game world Is two times the size of the Chicago of the first Watch Dogs, according to the director of Watch Dogs 2. It's also much more interactive. They're calling it very hackable, as opposed to the first one. Every single car you can remote hack and back into people or drive shipments of something into the bay. Every phone is hackable, it's not just certain people, so you can still see those little tidbits of information, which I really liked from the first game, but you also can do this mass hack where everybody's phone vibrates for a distraction when you're ready Trying to escape or something. That's awesome, and are the rest of the mechanics pretty similar as well, can you still hijack cars and shoot and all that kind of stuff as well? Yeah, so they also want to refine all the ones they had in the first game. So the driving, which a lot of people complain about in NeaGAF and the lead producer, Dominic, was telling me he went through all those forums and driving was the first thing. It's much more arcade-y now, and that's not to say it's not going to feel so realistic, but it's more like To facilitate fun, whereas the first one was kinda more of a simulator. It was kinda clunky and didn't feel that great when you're exploring. Yeah, they also have ways you can run into other people, right? There's these cooperative elements, almost like The Division, which Ubisoft obviously also worked on. You run into other players in the world. And you can play through the entire game in multiplayer co-op, if you wanted to. You both can explore the city, and, or the cities, I guess, and you'll find DEDSEC logs. DEDSEC being the group that you're part of. They're like Anonymous. You're gaining, the meta game is you're gaining followers, and then the bigger you get the bigger the challenges you're facing. Actually kind of coming up against political and geographical kind of conflicts that have been plaguing the area, and you're actually taking on bigger things than just like, Taking over an advertising space or graffiti or whatnot. So it's not so much the very personal revenge story of AG Pierce seems to be sort of a broader sort of focused on social injustice and things of that nature Right, so that's the the vibe of it itself with Marcus feels different. He's more of a team player. He's also very self-made. His main weapon is a billiard ball with a hole through it that a rope is tied through, so used like a makeshift morning star. He also has a quad-copter, like a scout drone that can kind of see different areas of the city. He has a little remote control jumper, they're calling it. It's just like a car that can navigate through. Maybe you'll get upgrade and have explosives on it or something. Yeah I'd guess there'd be some kind of progression system, cuz there was in the first game. Yeah, there's a full RPG progression system that'll keep you like getting new skills and abilities. Again, I haven't played it. I don't know how many of this is gonna be implemented, but it's all looking very promising and I'm excited for it, because the first game kind of had a lot of these cool ideas. Conceptually, but I didn't really think that many of them came to fruition. In Chicago, it felt kind of lifeless, whereas they think, they're making a concerted effort to make the Bay Area feel alive and vibrant and kind of filled with people and things to do and reasons to explore. So the game comes out on November 15th this year. There's no Assassin's Creed, as you mentioned, so this is like their flagship title for the year. And if you really that we're gonna see more of it next week at E3, given that they're now We're officially talking about the game. Right yeah, they're definitely gonna show off a demo and everything that they've told us so we'll be set to see more of that and see how the game kind of unfolds in terms of gameplay. Yeah, all right well awesome. Thanks Mike, and yeah everybody stay tuned. Come back to gamespot.com next week where we will have more information about Watchdogs 2. [SOUND] [MUSIC]