Watch Dogs preview

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: Open world action-adventure
Number of Players: Single-player, co-op multiplayer
ESRB: RP (Rating Pending)
Available on: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U, PC
Release date: Holiday 2013

A surprise from developer Ubisoft Montreal, Watch Dogs wowed gamers across the globe with its new IP at the Ubisoft press conference at E3 last year.

Watch Dogs is an open-world action-adventure game set in modern-day Chicago. You take on the role of Aiden Pearce, a man “shaped by violence, and obsessed with surveillance.” Throughout the course of the game, Pearce earns abilities that allow him to manipulate any and all electronic devices. His main weapon? The city itself.

So, what kind of guy is Aiden Pearce? “Aiden Pearce is a man who is not good or bad; he’s in the gray zone,” said Dominic Guay, producer of Watch Dogs. The player can go about objectives in many different ways, choosing, for example, to either attack or kill your enemy directly, or to go about your objective in a way that harms innocent civilians. The player will make a lot of choices that will ultimately determine what kind of person Aiden Pearce will be and how the media will perceive him.

Pearce can use his incredible hacking abilities to uncover the deepest, darkest secrets of the residents of Chicago. The demo shows Pearce walking by a crowd of people, and information about each person is displayed on the screen: his or her name, age, occupation, income, medical records, and more. Pearce proves that in today’s day and age, there is no such thing as privacy.

Watch Dogs caught everyone’s attention at E3 2012; not only because it’s a brand new game as opposed to a re-imagination of a series or a sequel, but also because it’s something we can all relate to. It’s real. Producer Dominic Guay said that a lot of the inspiration for the game came from real things that he heard on the news, such as controlling all of the traffic lights in a city with a computer program.

In our technology-reliant world, it’s easy for relatively anyone to learn almost anything about you, even without the tools that Aiden Pearce has at his disposal. Simply looking at someone’s Facebook page can tell you a lot about him or her; even his or her home address. It’s a scary thing to think about, and Watch Dogs forces you to think twice about what you put on the Internet. While you cannot hide everything from the public eye, it is possible to make your digital shadow significantly smaller.

Watch Dogs looks to be a very promising game that will bring to us a gaming experience like no other that we have seen.

The game will be released Holiday 2013 for PC, PS3 and PS4, Xbox 360, and Wii U. It is available for pre-order through Uplay for PC, and at amazon.com, Best Buy, GameStop, and Walmart.

For more information on Watch Dogs, go to http://watchdogs.ubi.com.