News and Industry Happenings

Watch Dogs 2 Now Available

Today, Ubisoft announced that WATCH DOGS 2 is now available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game will launch on Windows PC on November 29.

In WATCH_DOGS 2, players explore the San Francisco Bay Area as Marcus Holloway, a brilliant young hacker from Oakland wrongly framed for a crime he did not commit by the predictive algorithms of ctOS 2.0.

This upgraded version of the city infrastructure operating system, which was introduced in the first WATCH_DOGS video game, is being used to track, control and manipulate citizens on a massive scale. As Marcus joins the hacktivist group DedSec, they decide take town ctOS and BLUME, the multinational company behind this oppressive system.

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Watch_Dogs 2 features a vast and dynamic open world offering a variety of environments and gameplay possibilities with extended hacking options and a greater variety of gadgets and weapons. Players can not only hack into the city’s infrastructure but also every person and any connected device to trigger unpredictable chains of events. This unique level of freedom unlocks many opportunities in terms of playstyles and players can choose to use stealth hacking to complete missions without killing a single enemy or go guns blazing for a more ferocious approach.

The topics of data security, privacy and hacking are more prevalent than ever in today’s society and the Watch_Dogs brand has been exploring these themes ever since the release of the first opus in 2014. In this context, WATCH_DOGS 2 offers a fictional environment linked to challenges players can relate to. Through their adventure, Marcus and the members of DedSec represent the values of the hacktivist movement that aims at fighting against oppressive practices. This framework is a way to raise the awareness of players beyond their gaming experience and perhaps even to present them with a new reflection on these major issues.

In fact, players are invited to try out and share their experience with the Watch_Dogs 2 Selfie Reveal Web site which exposes the potential information being assembled from their selfie and suggests how the collected data may be making them an unknowing target for high-powered industries. Marcus was framed, could your selfie be just as falsely incriminating, find out by visiting Selfie Reveal here: watchdogs.com/SelfieReveal.

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John Breeden II

As a journalist John has covered everything from rural town meetings to the U.S. Congress and even done time as a crime reporter and photographer.|His first venture into writing about the game industry came in the form of a computer column called "On the Chip Side," which grew to have over 1 million circulation and was published in newspapers in several states. From there he did several "ask the computer guy" columns in magazines such as Up Front! in New Mexico and Who Cares? in Washington D.C. When the Internet started to become popular, he began writing guided Web tours for the newly launched Washington Post online section as well as reviews for the weekend section of the paper, something he still does from time to time. His experience in trade publications came as a writer and reviewer for Government Computer News. As the editor of GiN, he demands strict editorial standards from all the writers and reviewers. Breeden feels the industry needs a weekly, reliable trade publication covering the games industry and works tirelessly to accomplish that goal.