Summary

• Watch Dogs is reportedly "dead and buried", taking it with it the potential for a killer modern Assassin's Creed.
• The series is already full of references and easter eggs, but Ubisoft never committed.
• Instead, Watch Dogs buried the lede and kept muddying its premise, never landing on one identity.

One of the most interesting parts of the original 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Watch Dogs was uncovering all of the little easter eggs and references to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed. As we played, we pieced together a truth hiding in pla🌱in sight that we were exploring the modern world of templars and assassins. But Watch Dogs never embraced that side of itself, spending a trilogy trying to uncover an identity it was busy burying.

The first game featured Abstergo Entertainment CEO Oliver Garneau as a target for Aiden Pearce, only to discover that he was marke✱d by “the Brotherhood”. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black🍎 Flag returned the favour by referencing Watch Dogs’ own evil corporation, Blume. More recently, CCTV footage of Pearce killing Garneau could be found in AC: Origins, while Jacob Frye’s descendants even appeared directly in Watch Dogs: Legion.

It&rsqu🌠o;s clear where Watch Dogs lies in the grander scheme of things, but Ubisoft has been coy about these connections, leaving them as little more than vague breadcrumbs forming a trailಌ to nowhere. It’s unsurprising that it was never able to form a strong identity, because game after game it was still trying to work out what it was despite the answer being painfully obvious to everyone else.

As🥃sassin’s Creed used to know what to do with its modern day story. It gave us a reason to dive into the Animus and uncover our ancestors’ lives, using their history to continue the fight against the templars today. We&r🌼squo;ve somewhat returned to that idea with Layla and Loki after over a decade of meaningless filler, but so much of Assassin’s Creed is spent in the Animus that we never get to see the wider impacts of our actions or what the modern day is truly like.

A ♏big problem was that the modern day introduced higher tech and guns. The tricks of the trade adopted by a Renaissance assassin are hardly applicable when you’re faci﷽ng down M16s and state-of-the-art motion sensors. It’s no surprise that Ubisoft went all the way back to the Ptolemaic period instead of pushing forward into World War 1 and 2 after Unity and Syndicate.

That 🎐has always been the challenge of making a modern Assassin’s Creed game, so Ubisoft instead used those segments sparingly to connect different characters and give their stories a larger role to play. But Watch Dogs found an ꦑincredible solution to the modern day problem ten years ago.

Aiden Pe♐arce, armed with a mobile phone, could match Ezio, Connor, and Bayek in the modern day. Hacking as a major gameplay loop meant that cameras and sensors were trivial obstacles that could easily be swept꧂ aside, keeping the intuitive stealth of Assassin’s Creed in a more contemporary setting.

Even more meaningful was that it allowed for in-depth interaction with a world that would be much harder to parkour in. Another big problem with a modern Assassin’s Creed set in a bustling American city is that they tend to be made up of gia༒nt glass skyscrapers - hardly the best backdrop for the series’ signature ‘climb everything’ approach. Hacking makes those cities more than just set dressing, offering the interactivity AC is renowned for.

A band of resistance fighters targeting powerful corporations who rule the world from behind a digital curtain using hacking as their ꦛsignature weapon instead of hidden blades is modern Assassin’s Creed writing itself in front of our very eyes. The old techniques just wꦛouldn’t work today, but with the skillset of Watch Dogs, the creed could finally match the now near-untouchable Abstergo.

Instead, a lot of what we see with the modern Brotherhood is just the same as the past but w🌄ith slicker hoodies. Watch Dogs had🌄 the answer sitting right there, but in being ashamed to outright say the two are connected, Ubisoft was never able to take that idea to its limits.

Over time, Watch Dogs became increasingly generic, its gimmick no longer enough to hook audiences. If Ubisoft was willing to pull the trigger and admit that this is the same world as Assassin’s Creed and finally let us push forward the modern story in a meaningful way, rather than meandering in a fight with Abstergo that has been going on since 2008, it might’ve become as iconic as the series it spun off from. Instead, it’s 16💦8澳🐼洲幸运5开奖网:reportedly “dead and buried”, and with it, all of that potential lost.