Watch Dogs: Exclusive PAX Content

Watch Dogs is one of the games I am most excited about in the next-gen console lineup (although it will be available on current gen consoles , Wiiu and PC as well).

The game is set in the near future in Chicago, where everything and everybody is interconnected through technology. As a brilliant hacker and thug, you hold the digital keys to the city, giving you the ability to control everything from traffic lights, to power grids, underground gas lines (with explosive results), security cameras, and even the cell phones of complete strangers. Given the recent NSA scandals, this scenario (which 6 months ago might have seemed impossible) now seems inevitable.

Photo courtesy of Game Informer

Well we lucky PAX attendees got to watch a video from the creative director, followed by some live gameplay.  We watched one of the devs play through a mission, sadly we didn’t get to play ourselves. The awesome, super secret reveal from PAX this year is the level of mobile/cross-platform integration built into the game – we’ve seen a few games with this cross functionality built in, and this one pretty much blew my mind. While the dev was showing us the game (playing on a PC gaming rig with a ps4 control pad), another member of the team brought up an android tablet, launched and app, and sent him a mission request. Immediately, the PC version of the game showed an incoming mission, the objective which was to get to a determined location by a certain time.

Now things got really interesting, as the tablet player took the role of a police helicopter – which immediately SHOWED UP in the PC version of the game, including the bright searchlights and distinct flap of rotor blades. The tablet player could follow around the PC player with the chopper, controlling It via her app. But that’s not all, as we became aware the two players were not cooperating bud adversaries. The PC gamer (playing the game’s protagonist, Aiden Pierce), was trying to escape from the all-seeing eye of the tablet player (the Chicago PD). We watched a GTA-style chase sequence through a beautifully rendered cityscape, stealing cars and plowing over pedestrians as Aiden tried to escape the police.

Not only could the tablet player chase Aiden through the city, she created obstacles and roadblocks from her tablet such as hacking traffic lights (to stop/slow Aiden’s escape), to underground gas mains (causing explosions), to cameras mounted on buildings. All of this happened real-time, before our very eyes.

This is the single best use of cross-platform gaming I have ever seen, and I am so excited to get to try it out. Watch  Dogs will release on November 19, 2013 on current-gen and next gen platforms, as well as WII U and PC.

You can read more about the cross-platform gameplay here