How vulnerable are we?
For a lot of people, Watch Dogs was the true herald of next-gen gaming. At E3 2012 there was a feeling that the console generation had run its course, but when Ubisoft teased its open-world hack-able world,many of you sat up and got excited. And for good reason - this actually felt like something new.
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But it wasn't just about the graphics or how big Ubisoft's version of a hyper-connected Chicago was. There was something fascinating about a game where your most powerful weapon was your smartphone, where you wouldn't just roam the city but control it. What's more, there was something awfully real about it all.
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But how real?
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"Everything we've done was based on reality," says Thomas Geffroyd, the game's content director. "Everything you do in the game is feasible in one way or another."
You only need to spend a small amount of time with Watch Dogs to see how unnerving those words are. Sure, having everything accessible in one place - in this case the Central Operating System (CTOS) - is perhaps less feasible in reality, but Geffroyd reckons that even that idea isn't too far away. "I'm sure that in the next five to ten years we'll have a centralised system in most smart cities. It's the most efficient thing to do."
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About the game
Taking the role of greyhat hacker Aiden Pearce, you as the player progress through the game to earn more hacking abilities, gradually transforming Chicago city into your own manipulable playground.
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You'll start with basic hacks like traffic lights (good for causing obstructions during those hot pursuits) and move your way up to more complex maneuvers such as raising drawbridges and causing street pipes to explode.
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While hacking is fluid and accessible enough for any player to pick up and immediately have fun with, Ubisoft tells us that it carried out three years of research into the game's hacking systems to imbue a real sense of realism - even if it's only appreciated by the real Aiden Pearce's of the world.
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"We spent the first three years working on research because the hacking and security community are very adamant about sharing everything on the internet, so there was already a wealth of information," says Geffroyd.
"We went to Defcon, we went to Blackhat, the big conferences, not only for the technical knowledge but also for the culture and the identity of hacking."
