It was perhaps inevitable that Watch Dogs, Ubisoft Montreal's long-awaited open-world hacking game, would itself become a target for hackers. In what could be cleverly-designed meta-commentary, the developer has had a lot of difficulty preventing information and footage leaks from Watch Dogs and other games, like Assassin's Creed: Unity, and recently had to release a warning on Twitter that "Hackers have attempted to infiltrate our system and post false reviews of Watch Dogs." Keep that in mind if you come across any "early reviews" of the game.
After 5.5 years in development, Watch Dogs finally went gold last week and became the most pre-ordered new IP in Ubisoft's history. The game is releasing on both current and next-gen consoles as well as PC (the Wii U release is now set for fall 2014), and earlier this week some leaked PS4 gameplay footage made its way online.
The video has since been taken down, but not before VG24/7 secured a couple of screen grabs. One shows Aiden Pearce's skill tree and the other shows a map of CtOS-controlled Chicago, with Aiden's available hacking contract highlighted. Check out both screenshots below.
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The image resolution is a little low and the skill points are represented using symbols, but it looks like there are at least two separate skill trees: one for combat skills and another for notoriety skills. In Watch Dogs, notoriety points work in the same way as XP (see the "pontos de notoriedade" in the bottom-left corner of the first image), allowing the player to upgrade their skills. There are several online game modes that allow players to compete against one another in order to win more notoriety points.
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A movie based on Watch Dogs is already in development, but while we wait for more details on that it's definitely worth checking out this short live-action Watch Dogs film directed by Devin Graham and produced in collaboration with Ubisoft.
The premise is simple - Aiden Pearce comes across a police confrontation with a criminal and takes the guy down using a mixture of hacking, parkour and good old-fashioned gunplay - but it's an exciting and well-shot look at Watch Dogs' vision of vigilante justice. The video is also available in 4K, but unless you have a powerful graphics card and a huge 4K monitor then you may as well just stick to 1080p.
It's been a long wait for Watch Dogs. With the release now less than a week away, are you already eager to play Ubisoft's newest IP, or are you waiting to see what the reviews say?
Watch Dogs is set to launch on May 27, 2014 for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. The Wii U version is aiming for a release in fall 2014.
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Source: VG24/7