Since no-one asked. What's wrong with Watch_Dogs. From an email to Steve.

To be fair to Watch_Dogs though, it's not as bad as my initial disdain implies. The problems with it are that it's a shitty GTA clone. It doesn't do well any of the things that make GTA IV and V good. While the gameplay is structurally similar to Far Cry 3 it has the clear disadvantage when compared to that game of not being an excellent example of its genre (and actually Chicago is a less enjoyable free-roam setting than a jungle island). Whatever else Far Cry 3 was it was a good FPS. The movement, area design, enemy types and AI and weapons were all good. Watch_Dogs has cut features of GTA games that no other clone even thinks to cut. You can shoot civilians but you can't punch them, nor can you fire a gun from a car. Compare with Saints Row the Third where a great deal of thought went into making more of punching civilians than ever before. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is AssCreedification though. Watch_Dogs has two use buttons, rather than one, so it's not as bad as all that, but I still feel that the lack of a punch button or a shoot button when driving were partially motivated by Ubisoft's increasing phobia of having a player need to move their thumbs in needlessly complicated ways.

Watch_Dogs is not a good GTA-type game in part because it's not a driving game. It's lumbered with shit car handling and terrible physics and it's making me prefer to take the train, which thankfully you can. It does have one racing game feature I wish GTA had: in cab view. You can sit behind the wheel and see Aiden's hand on it. They've carried over the option of first person driving from the Far Cry games, but unfortunately haven't done it well - you can only use the camera to glance slightly towards your peripheral vision, there is no way to look out of the side windows. Bizarre, bizarre decision and means that you have to use the rear view to have the slightest situational awareness.

It continues to feel like other companies fail to notice what makes Rockstar so good at the subgenre they invented: it's all detail. You can't populate a city with cars and cops and chattering civilians and call it a day, you need to sell the world a lot harder than that. At this stage you need cracks in a concrete pillar after a collision, and you need independent suspension on all the wheels and peerless interactivity between the characters and the furniture. You need to perfect the way people bounce off stuff after you give them a crack or drive through them. Important stuff that no-one ever does right. The character models don't move right in third person games, not in Saint's Row, not Sleeping Dogs and not this game either. Crappy ragdolls are everywhere. GTA IV and V are quite happy to let you climb up on every single box, planter, table, umbrella, car, boat, train and rock and then spasmodically hurl yourself off any of them like a sex-crazed salmon. These are the very least things that all third person open world games, arguably all games, should contain if they want to build immersion, and should be designed-in before the developers even begin to design any of the other systems in the game.Watch_Dogs doesn't allow anything like enough interaction between Aiden and the people and objects around him to make controlling him a consistently joyful experience. (Saint's Row does something similar to GTA but with a more specific focus - rather than every small piece of furniture being mantleable it makes it easy to throw yourself off or into everything that's guaranteed to fucking hurt you instead and they designed the animation and skills accordingly.) All that said I do need to make it clear that the Watch_Dogs vault key works better than you'd fear it would; it is quite possible to throw yourself off a fifth floor balcony for no reason, thank fuck.

So it's clear enough that the Ubisoft formula of having an open world theme park full of triggerable game modes (i.e. what open world games always do), unlockable skills (distinct from GTA), unlockable areas (the radio tower mechanic) and so on makes for a robust formula and that's why it's not as bad as my initial disdain implies. The problem arises, just as it did with Sleeping Dogs and Saint's Row 2 and Red Faction and Assassin's Creed IV (was right to ignore AssCreed for so long, they're just as rubbish in fact as they sounded on paper) that the games feel slipshod because the actual open world doesn't respond physically to your actions with anything like the verve of GTA, nor is your immersion in it as present as in GTA. I shot a balloon with a gun for fuck's sake and the hit didn't even register, much less trigger a popped balloon. I don't know if there's even a single fucking balloon in GTA V, but if there is I'm going to find the motherfucker and pop it because, provided it exists, I already know I will be able to. What makes a badly realized GTA-clone is when you push against the world to try and affect something in it and the world pushes back a lot harder. That's what Watch_Dogs does.

I'm going to sum up my disappointment with it like this: if you present me with a world that looks realistic then the bigger the gap between my intuitive understanding of what my interactions with the real world could be and the actual interactions possible in the game then the shitter I will find the game. Watch_Dogs has some massive, baffling gaps in it.

And most of all, in GTA V you get moments like this. That animation is procedural, the bloke bounces off the rock because the rock is there. Wig too.