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What Does Watch Dogs Mean to Ubisoft?

Watch Dogs gameplay trailerWith a little over a month until Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs launches for everything under the sun except the Wii U, Ubisoft has been out pimping their game on anybody who plays games. Megan Farokhmanesh had a write-up today concerning the multiplayer features of the soon to be released game.

Farokhmanesh confirmed the 8 person multiplayer, which can be turned on or off, which will allow the player to infiltrate another players world and using “encryption based PVP.” The player will impact the notoriety or fame of other player through hacking; your notoriety will go up with successful hacks and go down if you are hacked. (Could this just be a glorified Rush mode?) The Polygon video above has renewed my interest in the game.

Great White Hope From the gameplay footage that I have seen and through the information in the Farokhmanesh article and the Brian Crecente article that appeared earlier this month, I think that Ubisofts ” The Great Watch Dog Hope” looks like a mix of Naughty Dog action (Uncharted and The Last of Us came to mind when I watched the action in the video.) and, hopefully, Syndicate style cyberpunk hacking. Although, Ubisoft doesn’t want their game to end up like EA’s Syndicate sales-wise.

I am much more excited to play Watch Dogs now after seeing the Polygon video and reading the two Polygon articles, so I guess that part of their marketing worked; for me, at least. The biggest question I have though is: What does this game mean to Ubisoft?

I know that Ubisoft is a big company and it is built to take a flop. But, can it take a flop like this? In this down economy no developer can risk losing money. Will this be Ubisoft’s uDraw

A girl playing uDraw
uDraw kicks ass! Thanks Mom!

If Ubisoft is going out to places like Polygon right now, before the game comes out, are they really trying to be honest with the media? You can excuse me if I am skeptical that a publisher isn’t shoveling shit into my mouth and calling it chocolate. With the financial commitment that Ubisoft has put into Watch Dogs they would not shelve it at this stage of the game, but they just might get out there and try to convince the media and the public that they spent their extra time making their game into the new “be-all-end-all” of gaming.

Denis Dyack memeI bought Too Human. I bought into all of that bullshit that Denis Dyack fed to me because I wanted to believe Too Human was good. That was my fault and I have learned from my bad decisions. But, you will excuse me if I am less than convinced that Watch Dogs is going to be anything more than a GTA style action game that had serious problems with development up until a few months ago.

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Nintendo is Tryin’ to Flip the Script

Aya Kyogoku from Nintendo
She’s probably thinking about how many Bells she owes Tom Nook’s stingy ass!

Nintendo has been in the news a lot lately. Much of the internet would have us believe that they have been in the news for their lemming like dash towards the cliff of obscurity. Of course these kinds of headlines catch our attention and provide very “clickable” for the sites that publish many of these stories, but when one reads through the digital piles of garbage and starts to look at the real stories that are being written about Nintendo we see that Nintendo is a company that is daring to change the way that we think about video games. Yes! While continuing to make the same games over-and-over.