**The Frustrating World of Watch Dogs**

Gameplay is a bit repetitious, which is kind of normal for open worlds. However, it's not okay when the frustrating rules they've placed within the missions are a problem. For example, Mission zones are areas on the mini-map where you must execute the mission. If you exit that zone, you'll receive a warning that you have 10 seconds to get back in there or you forfeit the mission. The issue with these zones is that they don't necessarily expand as you expand your conflict with the enemy. If you're out running an enemy because you need to reposition yourself and start exiting the zone, the zone doesn't expand just because the enemy is right behind you. This can lead to frustrating gameplay mechanics, such as having to turn around and go back in there.

Another problem with the mission zones is that they can feel very restrictive. The game's design seems to prioritize linear progression over freedom of choice, which can be immersion-breaking. When a mission fails, the game reloads you at the beginning of the mission, rather than simply failing the mission and allowing you to continue playing in your open world. This can be frustrating, especially if you've accumulated progress or resources during the failed mission. In some cases, abandoning a mission will also result in losing those resources.

**Hardware Performance and Optimization**

The game's objective hardware performance data and optimization are outright terrible. It's clear that the developers didn't put enough effort into optimizing the game for PC players. The delays to the game were already a concern, but it seems that even after multiple delays, the game still struggles with performance issues.

**Lessons from Other Games**

The problems with Watch Dogs could have been avoided if the developers had taken lessons from other games. For example, the linear gameplay and restrictive mission zones of Watch Dogs seem to be reminiscent of games like Just Cause, where players are given a lot more freedom to play. Additionally, the poor optimization and hardware performance issues in Watch Dogs are similar to those found in Battlefield 4 and Titanfall.

**Conclusion**

Overall, it's clear that Watch Dogs is a game with some significant flaws. The restrictive mission zones and poor optimization make for frustrating gameplay mechanics, while the lack of freedom of choice and linear progression can be immersion-breaking. If you're a PC gamer looking for a good open-world experience, it's best to avoid this title. Instead, consider purchasing games that respect your hardware and gaming abilities, such as those with high-precision mice and better optimization.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone this is Steve from Gamers nexus.net and today we're talking about Watchdogs this is the official review I've already spoken about the PC performance on multiple video cards we've talked about Mouse smoothing we've talked about Crash fixes we've talked about PC optimization and all these things happened because Watchdog in short has been somewhat of a disaster in terms of its release on the PC as a platform so that gives you a bit of a spoiler as to what I think in this review uh the review will contain discussion on Hardware optimization it will go into bugs I've experienced uh me doing ubisoft's QA job for them talking about fundamental design issues unintuitive input dooming the game to user abandonment and then the conclusion so quite a bit of of stuff to go over here today and it's all stemming from one single factor and that is that this game has been hyped to Oblivion and back and it is it's completely unable to achieve any of the expectations set by that hype so that is a fault of the industry and of the consumers but it's not uh not necessarily something we'll dive into too deeply here in this review so that's a lot of topics let's start with the hardware since that is the easiest to discuss putting it short Watch Dogs is the most horribly optimized PC game I have ever had The Misfortune of playing in recent years Titanfall was pretty damn bad Watch Dogs is entirely new levels of bad it was uh I I achieved all of 53 FPS on average when using a 780 Ti in combination with the 4770k and lots and lots of ram that was at a very high speed and the performance is detrimental for several reasons first of all Ubisoft has failed to optimize their game for computer hardware in general I'm sure it run it runs uh more acceptably on consoles but on PC it is totally unacceptable to have 53 FPS with almost Max settings on a 780 Ti which is a $720 video card that has 2,880 cords it's got five Tera flops of raw compute power a 3 GB frame buffer I mean the thing has a memory bandwidth of 336 GB per second so we know we're capable of filling that frame buffer if necessary and yet the game performs horribly on it so why is that well after some research it looks like a lot of it is uh it's really it's twofold one part is anti-aliasing for some reason anti-aliasing is a massive hit to Performance in watch doogs more so than I've seen in every any other game I've ever benchmarked and that's an issue on ubisoft's part failing to optimize it and and probably build anti-aliasing properly into the game uh and this is evidenced by the fact that jumping between msaa 4X and tsma produces almost a 2X FPS increase whereas dropping from ultra settings to medium is about a 10 FPS increase on on the 780 Ti so the the only reason we see a big increase on the 780 Ti when changing settings is when changing anti-aliasing further when testing with a 7870 or 270x or a similar architecture card those are that's basically the same video card with the r series branding I get frame freezes these are actual freezes several seconds long we get stuttering we get frame drops I got frame drops and micro stuttering that was quite severe when using SLI and trying to use Crossfire it was actually uh I I determined advisable to disable both of those and use a single GPU because it was so bad and that's kind of frustrating as a PC user so this all happens because of optimization and it happens regardless of your video kard drivers in fact updating to amd's new drivers produces about a 10% FPS Improvement and you have to update because if you don't you're going to get a blue screen of death when playing the game on 14.4 with certain AMD cards so it's a bit of a mess uh I thought the CPU might be the throttle but changing from a 3570k to a 4770k saw almost no improvement in performance that was noteworthy it was about half a frame per second which is within margin error and the game overall is is pretty underwhelming in terms of Graphics it looks great don't get me wrong but it is not this generation's crisis it is not something that pushes the 780 Ti to its limits so we've got some kind of issue in the software that's bottlenecking the hardware not the other way around but moving on from the hardware stuff because I know a lot of you aren't necessarily as interested in that we have plenty of other wonderful experiences with watch dogs that I've gone through in the last week and a lot of it calls back to my experience working as a test engineer at at Dell and at other companies doing QA so the reason I mentioned this is because uh I've done Ubisoft a huge favor and have classified several issues as severity 1 or severity 2 in my full article that's Linked In the description below and just kind of skimming over some of these issues that ruin the game experience entirely as a gamer we had uh I experienced three different scenarios when ctds crash to desktop would happen regularly one was with up playay online mode simply being enabled so if you wanted to use up playay which I I that makes you a rarity in and of itself if you actually wanted to use up playay and you had online mode enabled it would occasionally and sporadically crashed the desktop another issue stemmed from uh this actually was just completely random I think it was a memory link leak potentially where the game would just crash after some time of playing another issue was a sporadic audio Loop that caused a crash to desktop I was unsure of which audio file triggered this I also got blue screens of death which is 100% inexcusable in software it's not in the slightest bit allowed in terms of uh when when I play a game if I get a blue screen of death I am instantly condemning that game for all manner of reasons and that's because if a bsod occurs first all you're not just losing game data now you are threatening the user's environment in that if the OS is performing some kind of right depending on the OS you could potentially be uh you could be compromising the OS and its stability upon reboot you can also be compromising the Integrity of an SSD if it's performing some kind of uh garbage collection or write function because ssds don't like being shut down randomly when they're performing these functions and neither do hard drives and then we've got the issue of background applications if I have a Word document open or if I have a certain tab open and the the background and it's not saved and I get a blue screen of death from this game I've suddenly lost that data and so the list goes on and it's it's problematic and frankly I hope that other game companies can learn from this because in my eyes it is inexcusable for a game company to put this sort of software out on the market and this doesn't even get into Nat negotiation failures it doesn't get into you plays servers being unable to handle the load of their overhyped game it doesn't talk about servers failing to synchronize cloud data between multiple PCS or even on the same PC when forced to play using local settings uh due to the the server down time and it doesn't talk about uh some of the performance issues we've already discussed and uh and all these other things that are actually frankly so bad that it it's almost laughable and further on the performance side a lot of this is happening because Ubisoft is uh in terms of the the low frame rate is happening because Ubisoft is abusing or misusing the page file I didn't investigate this too heavily but if you disallow page file usage in Watchdogs using steam's properties and you're on a hard drive not an SSD I saw almost no difference on an SSD then uh disabling page file uses usage excuse me will finally utilize a bit more of the ram because for some reason the game does not natively go about above about 1.9 GB utilization which is kind of unbelievable given the era we live in that's actually less RAM usage than Titanfall which is arguably not as goodlooking uh and and does not require as much RAM as a game like Watchdogs would would so they're hitting the page file pretty heavily they're hitting storage pretty heavily and potentially without reason because we've got all this very high-speed Ram going untouched and that again tells me that we've got optimization issues when porting two PC from consoles even given modern console architecture largely mirroring PCS is being x86 and both incidents but now we can talk about fundamental design issues and move along from me doing a QA job for free talking about design I've I've complained about handholding in the past where a game tells you how to play it I find that insulting as a player and off-putting and just really quite unnecessary I mean we used to play Arcade games that had no hand holding at all and you figure it out after a couple quarters that's because people have some reasonable level of human intelligence that should be expected so I've complained about this regularly Watchdogs doesn't necessarily do a lot of handholding but it does have a lot of restrictions and we'll go into that in a second first I want to point out that Watch Dogs does a few things very well it's got a fairly compelling story not necessarily unique but unique within the world of gaming it's it's a story that we've explored in books in movies but haven't gotten into in an environment where we can play as the main character and that is fairly compelling it actually does have a bit of emotional pull as a player the game further has strong central characters with very visible flaws which is always a good thing the backdrop as a sort of cyberpunk dystopian Society or one that is on the precipice thereof is very interesting and fun to to think about the multiplayer drop in Dropout gameplay as a concept is very good when the you play servers are function but all of these things are obstructed by Watchdogs itself Watchdogs in effect is getting in its own way it is uh it is both interesting and awful at the same time and is uh is almost like shinger cat it is it is schinger Schrodinger's Watchdog it is both a good and bad game simultaneously and that's because we can't enjoy the good parts of it because of the bad parts of it so starting with my hatred of the save system as I wrote in the full review linked below the game uses only Auto saving 100% Auto saves you're not allowed to manually save because clearly as a player you are not qualified to make the decision of when you should be saving your content and so the the game only Autos saves when you're completing missions or when you reach a major milestone in some kind of main quest it doesn't really autosave almost ever during a side mission which is problematic and this is problematic for a few reasons first of all just looking at all the things I've already enumerated in terms of bugs if we crash during a mission especially one that I've taken 30 minutes to try and figure out or execute in a particular way that uh impacts my reputation within the game in a particular way and it crashes I've now lost 30 minutes and that's assuming it doesn't crash dur a right and corrupt my save file which has happened before by the way because of this Autos saving you're constantly losing data during crashes if I could manually save or quick save as I do in Skyrim every 30 seconds out of habit because of its crashing issues with all the mods I've installed that is my fault by the way then this would not be an issue but alas they don't let us do manual saving and so we sacrifice data constantly during crashes now maybe your game doesn't crash so much so what's the issue then outside of this well outside of this removing saving as as a function as a manual function from the player suddenly takes away a huge part of an open world game and Watchdogs is an open world game and the huge part it takes away is simply the fact that you should never tell a player how to play within your open world you've provided them you can be open world or you can be railroaded you can't be somewhere in the middle where you're telling them to go down the road but also giving them the tantalizing glimp glimpse of the entire World surrounding them without letting them have their way with it and this comes from me speaking as a veteran DM of tabletop RPGs so so that's kind of my viewpoint of it and the issue here is uh let's take morind back when morind was the game we played I'd often end a play session by going on some sort of uh silly Rampage or whatever out of boredom just to create a challenge for myself you can't do that here because if you do you're doing it on your only file for the character unless you copy p make backups now you're you're potentially changing how your character is perceived Within game so you can't have a splitting reality for your character one with being more anarchistic and one with being more of a citizen and that removes a bit of the fun it also makes it impossible to uh explore different story lines or different Pathways depending on how you execute things because once again you can't manually save once it auto saves it overwrites whatever you had before and it generally just makes things extremely annoying but all of that is a shadow in comparison to the input and controls on PC and this is where we start having issues of user abandonment of the game the game as I've explained in previous videos has Mouse acceleration and mouse smoothing and both uh or acceleration rather impacts both negatively and positively and what these things do and they they exist in Skyrim as well is they produce a very strange unintuitive movement of the cursor across the screen now smoothing attempts to smooth uh I I don't want to say smooth the pixels CU that's not really a correct term but it's if you think of it that way it comes from the days of mice that had the mouse ball when you would sometimes get sort of a a jump or a Jitter in your movement because it would perhaps not track as many pixels per inch so that's where Mouse smoothing comes from it's very useful with analog input devices like controllers but it's awful with high Precision mice and we end up with something that feels like it it feels like you've poured maple syrup on your mouse pad and you're attempting to move your mouse through it it's very sluggish and lags behind almost where your brain is telling you the Crosshair or the cursor or whatever should be on the screen Mouse acceleration is attempting to keep a more consistent speed of the mouse As you move it across theen screen so if you're moving too quickly in its mind uh we'll call it we'll give it a bit of anthropomorph eyes there but moving too quickly and mouse acceleration will try to slow it down a bit that's negative acceleration moving too slowly it might try to speed you up to reach the other side of the screen more quickly this is atrocious on so many levels when it comes to a game where you're trying to shoot things because now especially a game like Watch Dogs where shooting them in the knees has a huge difference from shooting them in the face in terms of gameplay outcome not just uh how efficiently you kill them cuz now we we have trouble aiming at those particular objects and this is furthered by the fact that there is a assy in Watchdogs on the PC which is not only insulting but detrimental to the way I want to play the game and that's just really the start of it so moving from there we've got issues with mouse sensitivity and speed as a whole in different parts of the game Watch Dogs is a game that has various menu and UI elements that change depending on what you're doing the main menu before you start the game has an insanely fast Mouse movement speed which can be cured easily by decreasing the mouse sensit the the DPI in your mouse or sensitivity in the options menu but then as soon as you get in game you realize that the mouse is incredibly slow because you've decreased its speed from the menu and the speed between the game the menu the cameras you hack and the infrastructure that you hack and the smartphone and driving all feels terribly different and although the speed doesn't actually change from being in the game to driving it doesn't execute the same way and this is in part because of acceleration and smoothing but that's sort of the it feels different and that's all that matters as a player it is actually different on an objective level between the menu the camera and in-game movement so if I hack a camera I've got to violently move the mouse to get the same amount of movement uh I would get with a half inch half inch pull of the mouse in the menu and if I'm trying to shoot someone in the game I've got to move the mouse a different amount than when I'm hacking the camera so that's sort of where where I'm coming from there and that's really obnoxious on many levels as a gamer uh to the point where it chases me away and makes me want to play something that makes more mechanical sense like Counter Strike where I know exactly and precisely how the the mouse is going to move every time I pull the mouse it's not ever changing and the sad thing with all this stuff is it doesn't even get into the times that input completely stops working like when enter no longer functions as a key within the game requiring you to restart the game completely or avoid using enter which is pretty hard to do in Watch Dogs since it has horrible design to begin with in terms of controls for PC and uh other than that I have issues minimizing I have to control alt delete to minimize and then when it comes back up it's in uh Window mode so you have to Alt Enter to resume in full screen and the best part I think is when alt gets stuck down for no apparent reason so you jump into a car and just hear the horn for 5 minutes because that's what triggers it so uh moving on from that we've still got gameplay to discuss and this is where I I take the quote from my article and say don't give me an open world and then then tell me how to play in that world that's just it's it's not even it's just teasing the player at that point and I say this because first of all gameplay is a bit repetitious um which is kind of normal for open worlds but it's basically go here hack this kill that or disable that and uh and that's okay but what's not okay is the upsetting rules they've placed within the missions that are in the game whether those are main missions or not so as an example we have something called Mission zones these are uh phys these are like actual circles on the mini map around your character where you must execute the mission and if you exit that zone it'll tell you hey you're exiting the zone you have 10 seconds to get back in there or you forfeit the mission so okay this this I want to stem two topics off of this the first is just that the mission zones are very restrictive feeling and the problem is they don't necessarily expand as you expand your conflict with the Enemy so if I'm out running an enemy because I need to reposition myself and I start exiting that zone and say the enemy is right behind me the Zone doesn't expand just because the enemy is right behind me I have to now turn around do a U-turn turn around go back in there and I can't reposition in the way I want to which is horrible for gameplay uh because I don't I don't need to tell you why if you're all Gamers you know why that sucks it's very annoying and it sort of kills the immersion outside of mission zones we've got issues of mission failure so when a mission is failed and you're still alive meaning you didn't die and trigger a failure maybe because you've exited the zone or or something when the mission has failed it'll actually reload you at the beginning of the mission reload the last auto save so you lose all your progress and that progress may contain things like a vehicle that you've jacked and you maybe decide you'd rather keep that and continue playing without completing the mission or maybe it contains something like a simple map positioning you've reached an area that you'd like to stay in and uh and so what should happen here is if you fail the mission this is similar maybe to just cause if you fail the mission it should simply fail the mission and let you keep playing in your open world and let the bad guys go do whatever they were going to do before inevitably despawning or being killed or whatever instead it just reloads you at the start of it which tampers with how the the player potentially wants to play your open world game you've created then we've got an option in the game to abort or abandon a mission and if choose that it does the same thing it'll reload you at some nearby spawn or autosave and you once again lose anything you've accumulated during that mission in in so far as map positioning and vehicles and things like that and that's just the the start of the gameplay issues I think no matter what whether you agree with me or not on the game play there's really very little room for argument on the objective Hardware performance data and the optimization which are outright terrible and I sincerely doubt will ever be resolved to any reasonable extent uh it's it's just too far along and they already delayed the game several months and couldn't do it then they're not going to do it now they're going to keep making DLC and pushing more content at you for you to purchase so what does this tell us it it tells us that these game development Studios and Publishers really need to learn from Watchdogs they really need to learn from Battlefield 4 they need to learn from Titanfall's abuse of its PC players and I've written articles about that if you're not sure what I'm talking about and overall we need to be more careful of hype this is something that's been touched on for uh as long as the game the game industry's been around um and just I wish Watch Dogs didn't have such lazy game design because I really want to enjoy the story but it is what it is I would strongly urge all PC Gamers to avoid this title save yourself the $60 I bought this game out of pocket normally we tried to get review samples uh but we could not get one in time for this one so I bought it myself did all the Ben benchmarking and I'm now doing this review I would say avoid it go buy something that's actually good something that respects your 50 or $100 Mouse that's got high Precision something that respects your ability to aim as a player and something that respects your ability to make decisions as a human and that's all I've got to say about watchdog's full article Linked In the description below please subscribe if you found this interesting and I will see you all next time peace Fu I'm home standhey everyone this is Steve from Gamers nexus.net and today we're talking about Watchdogs this is the official review I've already spoken about the PC performance on multiple video cards we've talked about Mouse smoothing we've talked about Crash fixes we've talked about PC optimization and all these things happened because Watchdog in short has been somewhat of a disaster in terms of its release on the PC as a platform so that gives you a bit of a spoiler as to what I think in this review uh the review will contain discussion on Hardware optimization it will go into bugs I've experienced uh me doing ubisoft's QA job for them talking about fundamental design issues unintuitive input dooming the game to user abandonment and then the conclusion so quite a bit of of stuff to go over here today and it's all stemming from one single factor and that is that this game has been hyped to Oblivion and back and it is it's completely unable to achieve any of the expectations set by that hype so that is a fault of the industry and of the consumers but it's not uh not necessarily something we'll dive into too deeply here in this review so that's a lot of topics let's start with the hardware since that is the easiest to discuss putting it short Watch Dogs is the most horribly optimized PC game I have ever had The Misfortune of playing in recent years Titanfall was pretty damn bad Watch Dogs is entirely new levels of bad it was uh I I achieved all of 53 FPS on average when using a 780 Ti in combination with the 4770k and lots and lots of ram that was at a very high speed and the performance is detrimental for several reasons first of all Ubisoft has failed to optimize their game for computer hardware in general I'm sure it run it runs uh more acceptably on consoles but on PC it is totally unacceptable to have 53 FPS with almost Max settings on a 780 Ti which is a $720 video card that has 2,880 cords it's got five Tera flops of raw compute power a 3 GB frame buffer I mean the thing has a memory bandwidth of 336 GB per second so we know we're capable of filling that frame buffer if necessary and yet the game performs horribly on it so why is that well after some research it looks like a lot of it is uh it's really it's twofold one part is anti-aliasing for some reason anti-aliasing is a massive hit to Performance in watch doogs more so than I've seen in every any other game I've ever benchmarked and that's an issue on ubisoft's part failing to optimize it and and probably build anti-aliasing properly into the game uh and this is evidenced by the fact that jumping between msaa 4X and tsma produces almost a 2X FPS increase whereas dropping from ultra settings to medium is about a 10 FPS increase on on the 780 Ti so the the only reason we see a big increase on the 780 Ti when changing settings is when changing anti-aliasing further when testing with a 7870 or 270x or a similar architecture card those are that's basically the same video card with the r series branding I get frame freezes these are actual freezes several seconds long we get stuttering we get frame drops I got frame drops and micro stuttering that was quite severe when using SLI and trying to use Crossfire it was actually uh I I determined advisable to disable both of those and use a single GPU because it was so bad and that's kind of frustrating as a PC user so this all happens because of optimization and it happens regardless of your video kard drivers in fact updating to amd's new drivers produces about a 10% FPS Improvement and you have to update because if you don't you're going to get a blue screen of death when playing the game on 14.4 with certain AMD cards so it's a bit of a mess uh I thought the CPU might be the throttle but changing from a 3570k to a 4770k saw almost no improvement in performance that was noteworthy it was about half a frame per second which is within margin error and the game overall is is pretty underwhelming in terms of Graphics it looks great don't get me wrong but it is not this generation's crisis it is not something that pushes the 780 Ti to its limits so we've got some kind of issue in the software that's bottlenecking the hardware not the other way around but moving on from the hardware stuff because I know a lot of you aren't necessarily as interested in that we have plenty of other wonderful experiences with watch dogs that I've gone through in the last week and a lot of it calls back to my experience working as a test engineer at at Dell and at other companies doing QA so the reason I mentioned this is because uh I've done Ubisoft a huge favor and have classified several issues as severity 1 or severity 2 in my full article that's Linked In the description below and just kind of skimming over some of these issues that ruin the game experience entirely as a gamer we had uh I experienced three different scenarios when ctds crash to desktop would happen regularly one was with up playay online mode simply being enabled so if you wanted to use up playay which I I that makes you a rarity in and of itself if you actually wanted to use up playay and you had online mode enabled it would occasionally and sporadically crashed the desktop another issue stemmed from uh this actually was just completely random I think it was a memory link leak potentially where the game would just crash after some time of playing another issue was a sporadic audio Loop that caused a crash to desktop I was unsure of which audio file triggered this I also got blue screens of death which is 100% inexcusable in software it's not in the slightest bit allowed in terms of uh when when I play a game if I get a blue screen of death I am instantly condemning that game for all manner of reasons and that's because if a bsod occurs first all you're not just losing game data now you are threatening the user's environment in that if the OS is performing some kind of right depending on the OS you could potentially be uh you could be compromising the OS and its stability upon reboot you can also be compromising the Integrity of an SSD if it's performing some kind of uh garbage collection or write function because ssds don't like being shut down randomly when they're performing these functions and neither do hard drives and then we've got the issue of background applications if I have a Word document open or if I have a certain tab open and the the background and it's not saved and I get a blue screen of death from this game I've suddenly lost that data and so the list goes on and it's it's problematic and frankly I hope that other game companies can learn from this because in my eyes it is inexcusable for a game company to put this sort of software out on the market and this doesn't even get into Nat negotiation failures it doesn't get into you plays servers being unable to handle the load of their overhyped game it doesn't talk about servers failing to synchronize cloud data between multiple PCS or even on the same PC when forced to play using local settings uh due to the the server down time and it doesn't talk about uh some of the performance issues we've already discussed and uh and all these other things that are actually frankly so bad that it it's almost laughable and further on the performance side a lot of this is happening because Ubisoft is uh in terms of the the low frame rate is happening because Ubisoft is abusing or misusing the page file I didn't investigate this too heavily but if you disallow page file usage in Watchdogs using steam's properties and you're on a hard drive not an SSD I saw almost no difference on an SSD then uh disabling page file uses usage excuse me will finally utilize a bit more of the ram because for some reason the game does not natively go about above about 1.9 GB utilization which is kind of unbelievable given the era we live in that's actually less RAM usage than Titanfall which is arguably not as goodlooking uh and and does not require as much RAM as a game like Watchdogs would would so they're hitting the page file pretty heavily they're hitting storage pretty heavily and potentially without reason because we've got all this very high-speed Ram going untouched and that again tells me that we've got optimization issues when porting two PC from consoles even given modern console architecture largely mirroring PCS is being x86 and both incidents but now we can talk about fundamental design issues and move along from me doing a QA job for free talking about design I've I've complained about handholding in the past where a game tells you how to play it I find that insulting as a player and off-putting and just really quite unnecessary I mean we used to play Arcade games that had no hand holding at all and you figure it out after a couple quarters that's because people have some reasonable level of human intelligence that should be expected so I've complained about this regularly Watchdogs doesn't necessarily do a lot of handholding but it does have a lot of restrictions and we'll go into that in a second first I want to point out that Watch Dogs does a few things very well it's got a fairly compelling story not necessarily unique but unique within the world of gaming it's it's a story that we've explored in books in movies but haven't gotten into in an environment where we can play as the main character and that is fairly compelling it actually does have a bit of emotional pull as a player the game further has strong central characters with very visible flaws which is always a good thing the backdrop as a sort of cyberpunk dystopian Society or one that is on the precipice thereof is very interesting and fun to to think about the multiplayer drop in Dropout gameplay as a concept is very good when the you play servers are function but all of these things are obstructed by Watchdogs itself Watchdogs in effect is getting in its own way it is uh it is both interesting and awful at the same time and is uh is almost like shinger cat it is it is schinger Schrodinger's Watchdog it is both a good and bad game simultaneously and that's because we can't enjoy the good parts of it because of the bad parts of it so starting with my hatred of the save system as I wrote in the full review linked below the game uses only Auto saving 100% Auto saves you're not allowed to manually save because clearly as a player you are not qualified to make the decision of when you should be saving your content and so the the game only Autos saves when you're completing missions or when you reach a major milestone in some kind of main quest it doesn't really autosave almost ever during a side mission which is problematic and this is problematic for a few reasons first of all just looking at all the things I've already enumerated in terms of bugs if we crash during a mission especially one that I've taken 30 minutes to try and figure out or execute in a particular way that uh impacts my reputation within the game in a particular way and it crashes I've now lost 30 minutes and that's assuming it doesn't crash dur a right and corrupt my save file which has happened before by the way because of this Autos saving you're constantly losing data during crashes if I could manually save or quick save as I do in Skyrim every 30 seconds out of habit because of its crashing issues with all the mods I've installed that is my fault by the way then this would not be an issue but alas they don't let us do manual saving and so we sacrifice data constantly during crashes now maybe your game doesn't crash so much so what's the issue then outside of this well outside of this removing saving as as a function as a manual function from the player suddenly takes away a huge part of an open world game and Watchdogs is an open world game and the huge part it takes away is simply the fact that you should never tell a player how to play within your open world you've provided them you can be open world or you can be railroaded you can't be somewhere in the middle where you're telling them to go down the road but also giving them the tantalizing glimp glimpse of the entire World surrounding them without letting them have their way with it and this comes from me speaking as a veteran DM of tabletop RPGs so so that's kind of my viewpoint of it and the issue here is uh let's take morind back when morind was the game we played I'd often end a play session by going on some sort of uh silly Rampage or whatever out of boredom just to create a challenge for myself you can't do that here because if you do you're doing it on your only file for the character unless you copy p make backups now you're you're potentially changing how your character is perceived Within game so you can't have a splitting reality for your character one with being more anarchistic and one with being more of a citizen and that removes a bit of the fun it also makes it impossible to uh explore different story lines or different Pathways depending on how you execute things because once again you can't manually save once it auto saves it overwrites whatever you had before and it generally just makes things extremely annoying but all of that is a shadow in comparison to the input and controls on PC and this is where we start having issues of user abandonment of the game the game as I've explained in previous videos has Mouse acceleration and mouse smoothing and both uh or acceleration rather impacts both negatively and positively and what these things do and they they exist in Skyrim as well is they produce a very strange unintuitive movement of the cursor across the screen now smoothing attempts to smooth uh I I don't want to say smooth the pixels CU that's not really a correct term but it's if you think of it that way it comes from the days of mice that had the mouse ball when you would sometimes get sort of a a jump or a Jitter in your movement because it would perhaps not track as many pixels per inch so that's where Mouse smoothing comes from it's very useful with analog input devices like controllers but it's awful with high Precision mice and we end up with something that feels like it it feels like you've poured maple syrup on your mouse pad and you're attempting to move your mouse through it it's very sluggish and lags behind almost where your brain is telling you the Crosshair or the cursor or whatever should be on the screen Mouse acceleration is attempting to keep a more consistent speed of the mouse As you move it across theen screen so if you're moving too quickly in its mind uh we'll call it we'll give it a bit of anthropomorph eyes there but moving too quickly and mouse acceleration will try to slow it down a bit that's negative acceleration moving too slowly it might try to speed you up to reach the other side of the screen more quickly this is atrocious on so many levels when it comes to a game where you're trying to shoot things because now especially a game like Watch Dogs where shooting them in the knees has a huge difference from shooting them in the face in terms of gameplay outcome not just uh how efficiently you kill them cuz now we we have trouble aiming at those particular objects and this is furthered by the fact that there is a assy in Watchdogs on the PC which is not only insulting but detrimental to the way I want to play the game and that's just really the start of it so moving from there we've got issues with mouse sensitivity and speed as a whole in different parts of the game Watch Dogs is a game that has various menu and UI elements that change depending on what you're doing the main menu before you start the game has an insanely fast Mouse movement speed which can be cured easily by decreasing the mouse sensit the the DPI in your mouse or sensitivity in the options menu but then as soon as you get in game you realize that the mouse is incredibly slow because you've decreased its speed from the menu and the speed between the game the menu the cameras you hack and the infrastructure that you hack and the smartphone and driving all feels terribly different and although the speed doesn't actually change from being in the game to driving it doesn't execute the same way and this is in part because of acceleration and smoothing but that's sort of the it feels different and that's all that matters as a player it is actually different on an objective level between the menu the camera and in-game movement so if I hack a camera I've got to violently move the mouse to get the same amount of movement uh I would get with a half inch half inch pull of the mouse in the menu and if I'm trying to shoot someone in the game I've got to move the mouse a different amount than when I'm hacking the camera so that's sort of where where I'm coming from there and that's really obnoxious on many levels as a gamer uh to the point where it chases me away and makes me want to play something that makes more mechanical sense like Counter Strike where I know exactly and precisely how the the mouse is going to move every time I pull the mouse it's not ever changing and the sad thing with all this stuff is it doesn't even get into the times that input completely stops working like when enter no longer functions as a key within the game requiring you to restart the game completely or avoid using enter which is pretty hard to do in Watch Dogs since it has horrible design to begin with in terms of controls for PC and uh other than that I have issues minimizing I have to control alt delete to minimize and then when it comes back up it's in uh Window mode so you have to Alt Enter to resume in full screen and the best part I think is when alt gets stuck down for no apparent reason so you jump into a car and just hear the horn for 5 minutes because that's what triggers it so uh moving on from that we've still got gameplay to discuss and this is where I I take the quote from my article and say don't give me an open world and then then tell me how to play in that world that's just it's it's not even it's just teasing the player at that point and I say this because first of all gameplay is a bit repetitious um which is kind of normal for open worlds but it's basically go here hack this kill that or disable that and uh and that's okay but what's not okay is the upsetting rules they've placed within the missions that are in the game whether those are main missions or not so as an example we have something called Mission zones these are uh phys these are like actual circles on the mini map around your character where you must execute the mission and if you exit that zone it'll tell you hey you're exiting the zone you have 10 seconds to get back in there or you forfeit the mission so okay this this I want to stem two topics off of this the first is just that the mission zones are very restrictive feeling and the problem is they don't necessarily expand as you expand your conflict with the Enemy so if I'm out running an enemy because I need to reposition myself and I start exiting that zone and say the enemy is right behind me the Zone doesn't expand just because the enemy is right behind me I have to now turn around do a U-turn turn around go back in there and I can't reposition in the way I want to which is horrible for gameplay uh because I don't I don't need to tell you why if you're all Gamers you know why that sucks it's very annoying and it sort of kills the immersion outside of mission zones we've got issues of mission failure so when a mission is failed and you're still alive meaning you didn't die and trigger a failure maybe because you've exited the zone or or something when the mission has failed it'll actually reload you at the beginning of the mission reload the last auto save so you lose all your progress and that progress may contain things like a vehicle that you've jacked and you maybe decide you'd rather keep that and continue playing without completing the mission or maybe it contains something like a simple map positioning you've reached an area that you'd like to stay in and uh and so what should happen here is if you fail the mission this is similar maybe to just cause if you fail the mission it should simply fail the mission and let you keep playing in your open world and let the bad guys go do whatever they were going to do before inevitably despawning or being killed or whatever instead it just reloads you at the start of it which tampers with how the the player potentially wants to play your open world game you've created then we've got an option in the game to abort or abandon a mission and if choose that it does the same thing it'll reload you at some nearby spawn or autosave and you once again lose anything you've accumulated during that mission in in so far as map positioning and vehicles and things like that and that's just the the start of the gameplay issues I think no matter what whether you agree with me or not on the game play there's really very little room for argument on the objective Hardware performance data and the optimization which are outright terrible and I sincerely doubt will ever be resolved to any reasonable extent uh it's it's just too far along and they already delayed the game several months and couldn't do it then they're not going to do it now they're going to keep making DLC and pushing more content at you for you to purchase so what does this tell us it it tells us that these game development Studios and Publishers really need to learn from Watchdogs they really need to learn from Battlefield 4 they need to learn from Titanfall's abuse of its PC players and I've written articles about that if you're not sure what I'm talking about and overall we need to be more careful of hype this is something that's been touched on for uh as long as the game the game industry's been around um and just I wish Watch Dogs didn't have such lazy game design because I really want to enjoy the story but it is what it is I would strongly urge all PC Gamers to avoid this title save yourself the $60 I bought this game out of pocket normally we tried to get review samples uh but we could not get one in time for this one so I bought it myself did all the Ben benchmarking and I'm now doing this review I would say avoid it go buy something that's actually good something that respects your 50 or $100 Mouse that's got high Precision something that respects your ability to aim as a player and something that respects your ability to make decisions as a human and that's all I've got to say about watchdog's full article Linked In the description below please subscribe if you found this interesting and I will see you all next time peace Fu I'm home stand\n"