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Watch Dogs at E3 2013

We Finally Get to See Open World Multiplayer Gameplay

June 14, 2013 by

The biggest and best surprise from last year’s E3 that came out of nowhere and blew our minds, is thankfully looking to still be on track for its release date later this year. With the game set for release this November on both current and next-gen consoles, it’s about time that we finally see more of the real gameplay you can expect to get when playing the game yourself and outside of Ubisoft’s scripted gameplay sequences.

After leaving everyone begging for more at last year’s show, this year we got all the Watch Dogs we could handle. Ubisoft had a stunning CGI trailer at their press conference, Sony showed off more of the game’s intense campaign at their press conference, and at the Ubisoft booth at E3 we got an up close and personal look at the devs just running around the open world city and having some multiplayer fun.

During the preview we saw behind closed doors, the team showed off just how fun it is to roam around the city, not completing any missions, and rather just people-watching in an effort to stop crimes or commit crimes yourself.

In the preview we finally got a better taste of the game’s open world environment. Like Batman, players can freely roam the city as Aiden Pearce, spying on people and using his “profiler” tech devices to get detailed information on them in order to be able to calculate their chances or committing a crime or being the victim of a crime themselves. It’s then up to the player as Aiden to decide whether or not he should interfere and help the victim.

With the city covered in these types of random occurrences, the game gets even crazier when the concept of drop-in/drop-out multiplayer is introduced with no indication that a real player has snuck into your game. While in the singleplayer as Pearce, other players may enter your game and try to grief you by hacking you.

Once a hack is set in progress it quickly becomes a game of a cat and mouse with the player as Aiden needing to find his hacker before the process is completed. In our demo, we got to see Aiden successfully defend himself from being hacked by going to the suggested location of his hacker and hacking into a security camera himself to profile a large crowd of people and reveal the hacker before time ran out. After successfully defending against the hacking, he was able to then turn the tables on the other Ubisoft player and try to hack them and get away.

Not only does Watch Dogs‘ story look amazingly unique, but even the multiplayer now looks brilliant. Watching developers play their own games at E3, you can tell which ones are really special because the developers thmeselves are not tired of what they’re showing and actually excited and having fun. That was the case with Watch Dogs, which is sure to be even more for for everyone who finally gets their hands on the next-gen version of the game on November 19, 2013.