Name a franchise that went steeper off a cliff in three iterations, I dare you.
Ubisoft absolutely trainwrecked an IP with incredible potential and I am baffled how this happened. Sure the first one was not perfect by any stretch and hindered by Ubi insisting it be a multigenerational title resulting in a final game that in no way lives up to the insanely hyped E3 gameplay demo. Ubi fucked up and fucked up hard with that. But it brought innovative gameplay and novel concepts in a gritty and atmospheric game.
The second is a complete 180 and by my guess caused by the backlash over the first one being too dark, sombre and "edgy". It maintained a lot of core elements but spruced it up with bright colors and cheerful banter while at the same time keeping the dystopian 1984 theme, albeit more in the background.
The third one is just... I don't even know why this is a Watchdogs game, honestly. Wouldn't surprise me if we discover 10 years from now that this was a completely different game that ran into some development barriers so they slapped the watchdogs name on it and copied some mechanics from it.
It is so utterly bad, soulless, unrewarding, poorly structured, barebones mishmash of random ideas that makes me wonder just what the hell happened. Was the team just too big to keep oversight? Surely at some point during testing they must've seen how poor all the mechanics mesh together?
It also doesn't help that London is a miserable place to drive through, a blur of brown and grey.
With Watchdogs down the drain, Ghost Recon still recovering from the absolute piledriver that is Breakpoint, Splinter Cell is MIA for ages, I'm not having a lot of faith in Ubi.