Watch Dogs

Overview

Watch Dogs is a 2014 action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It is the first installment in the Watch Dogs series. The game is played from a third-person perspective, and its world is navigated on foot or by vehicle. Set within a fictionalized version of the Chicago metropolitan area in 2013, the single-player story follows grey hat hacker and vigilante Aiden Pearce's quest for revenge after the killing of his niece. An online multiplayer mode allows up to eight players to engage in cooperative and competitive gameplay. Development of the game began in 2009, and continued for over five years. Duties were shared by many of Ubisoft's studios worldwide, with more than a thousand people involved. The developers visited Chicago to conduct field research on the setting, and used regional language for authenticity. Hacking features were created in consultation with the cyber-security company Kaspersky Lab, and the in-game control system was based on SCADA. The score was composed by Brian Reitzell, who infused it with krautrock. Following its announcement in June 2012, Watch Dogs was widely anticipated. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Wii U in 2014. The game received generally favorable reviews; praise was directed at the gameplay, mission and open world design, combat system, hacking elements and mission variety, while criticism was expressed concerning technical issues, the discrepancy in graphical quality between marketing and the real game, plot, and protagonist. Watch Dogs was a commercial success, breaking the record for the biggest first-day sales of a Ubisoft game and becoming the biggest launch of a new intellectual property in the United Kingdom at the time. The game has shipped over 10 million copies. A sequel, Watch Dogs 2, was released in November 2016, and a third game, Watch Dogs: Legion, was released in October 2020.