By Paul Robert Scott
For a person like me game trailers are rarely things to take notice of. This is usually down to the fact that most are simply used as a form of graphical 'one-upmanship' on the part of developers who simply wish to brag about how shiny looking their latest release is, with perhaps a line or two thrown in to give some idea of plot.
For a person like me game trailers are rarely things to take notice of. This is usually down to the fact that most are simply used as a form of graphical 'one-upmanship' on the part of developers who simply wish to brag about how shiny looking their latest release is, with perhaps a line or two thrown in to give some idea of plot.
It is therefore refreshing when every so often a trailer comes along that bucks the trend of its competitors and instead gives us something a little different to enjoy. With the latest offering from Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs we are given a live action presentation that would be more at home in an episode of Punk’d than a game trailer. Despite this, it works to grab your attention straight away just by being the kind of advertisement that makes you wonder what point it’s trying to get across.
To start we are introduced to an enthusiastic shopkeeper who wants nothing more than to coax a series of people off the street to fix their mobile phones, while installing his own personal app: a big blue button that simply says ‘hack’.
To start we are introduced to an enthusiastic shopkeeper who wants nothing more than to coax a series of people off the street to fix their mobile phones, while installing his own personal app: a big blue button that simply says ‘hack’.
“A special gift from me to you,” he promises as he eagerly begins to demonstrate the phone’s new capabilities with his increasingly bewildered clientele. First he uses the hack app to flip the lights in his store on and off, then draws the customer outside and does the same with an entire row of street lamps. He then shows how the hack can unlock a nearby car, or any other vehicle the customer may wish to appropriate. Likewise, a quick press of the button in the direction of an ATM instantly causes cold, hard cash to fly out onto the sidewalk. Finally, our happy shop keeper hands the phone over to the customer and tells them to point it at a set of traffic lights. From this point on, it is best if you simply watch the trailer yourselves but suffice it to say, pandemonium ensues.
All in all it’s a fun little teaser which doesn’t give all that much away about the game. Watch Dogs has already had other trailers released that offer a much more in depth look into the storyline and universe that the player will inhabit, but this live-action short is not really about those things. It has nothing to do with the graphics or the characters or the more familiar shooting and car stealing dynamics we’re used to in open-world games. Instead this is trailer that announces clearly what the game-changer in this world is going to be. Hacking isn’t going to be a gimmick or some little side-ability, but it will be fundamentally tied to how you play the game and how you think when you’re moving around its high-tech version of Chicago. It’s a bold statement by the game’s marketing team, and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
The game will be released on 27th May, and I must say that I am very much looking forward to trying it out. In the same way Ubisoft won us over with their favourite free-running Assassins, I suspect that the big brother dynamic of Watch Dogs will keep us enthralled for quite some time to come.
All in all it’s a fun little teaser which doesn’t give all that much away about the game. Watch Dogs has already had other trailers released that offer a much more in depth look into the storyline and universe that the player will inhabit, but this live-action short is not really about those things. It has nothing to do with the graphics or the characters or the more familiar shooting and car stealing dynamics we’re used to in open-world games. Instead this is trailer that announces clearly what the game-changer in this world is going to be. Hacking isn’t going to be a gimmick or some little side-ability, but it will be fundamentally tied to how you play the game and how you think when you’re moving around its high-tech version of Chicago. It’s a bold statement by the game’s marketing team, and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
The game will be released on 27th May, and I must say that I am very much looking forward to trying it out. In the same way Ubisoft won us over with their favourite free-running Assassins, I suspect that the big brother dynamic of Watch Dogs will keep us enthralled for quite some time to come.
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