A good gift is one that stays: between November 7 and 13, 2017, Ubisoft made Watch Dogs free for PC players. All you had to do was log in to your Uplay account, the company’s store and launcher at the time, and claim the game within the deadline for it to stay in your library for good.
Released on May 27, 2014 on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, with a Wii U version in November the same year, Watch Dogs was created by Ubisoft Montreal. The story takes place in a fictional Chicago, controlled by a central operating system, ctOS, which links traffic lights, trains, cameras and much of the city’s infrastructure. The protagonist is Aiden Pearce, a vigilante hacker seeking revenge after his niece’s death.
What stands out to this day is the central idea: Aiden’s phone becomes the main weapon. You can switch traffic signals in the middle of a chase, lock down trains, spy on cameras and phones. A nice detail: each scanned pedestrian shows their own profile, with a name and some personal information, which gives life to the streets.
And why is the game remembered as controversial? Watch Dogs was revealed at E3 2012 with impressive visuals, and the final version came out much simpler than those demos, which generated a lot of criticism about a graphical “downgrade.” Even so, it was a success: it sold more copies in 24 hours than any other Ubisoft game up to then and reached 10 million units shipped by December 2014.
The generosity was not new either. In 2016, to celebrate the company’s 30th anniversary, Ubisoft gave away on PC games such as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Splinter Cell, Rayman Origins, Beyond Good & Evil and Assassin’s Creed III.
What came next
The series continued with Watch Dogs 2, from November 2016, set in San Francisco, and Watch Dogs: Legion, from October 2020, set in London. Uplay itself changed its name in October 2020 and became Ubisoft Connect.
Where to buy
Source: Ubisoft.
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