Watch Dogs: the Digital Foundry verdict
Watch Dogs meets most of our expectations of a next-gen title, but falls a little short on others. It's clear that the six-month delay has resulted in a significantly more polished title, but some parts of the visual presentation are still stronger than others. Night-time lighting counts as a huge high point, for example, delivering on the early promises made in its rain-soaked E3 2012 showcase. In concert with the Havok physics used for cloth simulation, ragdoll impacts and water, the world not only looks, but reacts in a way we hope future titles will expand upon.
But it's often the case that the game carries the distinct air of the 2013 launch window title it was originally meant to be. Technical aspects such as the weak texture filtering, pop-in and dithered shadows stand out in the face of an impressively constructed Chicago cityscape. Seamless online play adds an exciting dimension to the sandbox formula too, though not necessarily a brand new idea to the console scene itself; players are able to invade one another, complete missions in co-op, or compete in races. That said, the improved hardware makes delivery of this idea more tenable, where getting any frame-rate drop below the 30fps line in solo play requires some heavy stress-testing. The overall impression is that gameplay and frame-rate consistency are strong, on the tested PS4 version at least.
Does Watch Dogs truly deliver on the promise of its initial E3 2012 reveal? The short answer is yes. Cutting away the obviously pre-rendered CG inserts at E3 2012 leaves a slice of gameplay that is indeed a close match for the final game. In fact, the finished game comes out of the comparison very favourably, because that original demo only represented a tiny fraction of the overall offering; Watch Dogs as it ships is an ambitious project with a massive cityscape to explore and a vast array of tasks to carry out. The only downside is that, on a conceptual level, this still feels like a game that takes the template established by the last-gen Grand Theft Auto titles and merely embellishes it - often dramatically - as opposed to completely reinventing the genre in the way that many might have hoped. Whether it's the true next-gen experience you wanted is down your expectations, then, but on a technical level we do not feel duped by the original reveal.
