After 12 Years, Ubisoft’s Most Daring Franchise Is All but Gone

Ubisoft’s games often meet mixed reception thanks to their rather repetitious nature and the general sentiment around bloated open-world games. The more Ubisoft attempts to innovate or transition its franchises into the modern era, the more it seems to encounter pushback from fans and non-fans alike. That’s not to say that Ubisoft games are all misunderstood masterpieces, but rather the divisive nature of their games comes with a considerable amount of caveats.

This pertains potentially the most to its Watch Dogs series, a collection of games that strived to both rival Rockstar’s unbeatable GTA and innovate the urban open-world adventure genre. In many respects, Ubisoft’s valiant attempts at offering something new succeeded, but it always felt as if the fledgling franchise was just getting started. Alas, it would seem its chances of living up to its full potential are over, as, if rumors are to be believed, Ubisoft has axed it for good.

Watch Dogs May Finally Be Dead

Watch Dogs has felt like a staple in Ubisoft’s lineup, akin to the likes of Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, since the sequel launched back in 2016. While the rollout of games was considerably slower than Ubisoft’s other flagship series, it nevertheless felt synonymous with the company’s whole brand, and its answer, as aforementioned, to its rivals in the urban open-world market. Yet, with Legion floundering critically and underperforming (for a Ubisoft title) commercially, it appears that Ubisoft may have canceled Watch Dogs altogether.

This is according to Tom Henderson, who is typically reliable (although not infallible) when it comes to Ubisoft news. In a podcast uploaded to the Insider Gaming YouTube channel, Henderson claimed that Watch Dogs is “completely dead“, with Ubisoft having quietly canceled it behind closed doors. This comes after a mass restructuring of the company, as well as the cancelation of numerous Ubisoft titles, both in development and seemingly nearly completed, as was the case with the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake.

Of course, all of this must be taken with a grain of salt. Rumors and speculation are frequently wrong, especially within the ever changing gaming industry, and Ubisoft may decide to resurrect the series at a future date. Crucially, the Watch Dogs film is still in development, something that, in theory, could help bolster the game’s popularity once more. However, the believability of this speculation somewhat implies a lack of surprise, something that, I believe, stems from Watch Dog’s failure to ever live up to the potential its premise promised.

Watch Dogs Should Have Been So Much More

The toughest part about Watch Dogs’ alleged cancelation is that it could mean we never get to see what this series was truly capable of. The concept of an open-world vulnerable to fantastical hacks resulting in city-wide carnage and chaos is immensely appealing, as it promises a truly dynamic and reactive sandbox unlike anything we’d seen before. It also suggests an expansion of the combat sandbox we’ve all become accustomed to in third-person shooters, giving players the ability to tackle encounters in numerous, potentially even non-violent ways, should they choose to.

Furthermore, the idea of discovering criminal activity, spying on civilians, and engaging with NPCs on an unprecedented level is exciting too. Watch Dogs promised all of this and more, and, in many ways, delivered with its first entry. While it was lacking in areas, the experience of causing a city-wide blackout, or perfectly timing a hack to blast a police car into the air, simply never got old. Watch Dogs 2 proved to be one of gaming’s surprisingly good sequels, owing to its greater focus on the environmental and combat sandbox, as well as shifting away from the overly grungy aesthetic of the first entry.

The difficulty was that, while both certainly pushed the notion of an urban open-world sandbox to new heights, Watch Dogs and its sequel never quite went far enough. It always felt as if interactions with civilians were surface-level, Watch Dogs 2’s random encounters and events were too infrequent to even notice them, and the narratives contextualizing each game’s hacker’s paradise were severely underwhelming. Watch Dogs needed to push its sandbox further, go more in-depth with its hacking mechanics, and establish some form of consistent visual and tonal identity. Alas, Legion proved the series wasn’t interested in doing either, resulting in a decidedly disappointing flop.

GTA Still Needs An Urban Open-World Rival

Watch Dogs, for all its failings, still presented a compelling alternative to the incredibly popular yet slow-to-release Grand Theft Auto. There are simply not enough urban open-world experiences, even with the terrible likes of MindsEye and the Saints Row reboot floating around out there. Much like how ambitious, grand, story-driven open-world fantasy RPGs are in short supply, the gaming industry lacks a consistent flurry of open-world titles set within a modern, urban setting. Watch Dogs provided that, and without it, we’ll be worse off, even if GTA 6 proves to be the definitive experience.

More importantly, as Watch Dogs: Legion’s hyperfixation on the “play as anyone” mechanic failed spectacularly to both push the series forward and deliver a compelling and memorable narrative, we’ll never get to see what a true sequel to the series’ core concept would look like. Watch Dogs always felt like Ubisoft’s experimental sandbox, a place for it to try new ideas within an open-world setting while it relied on its consistent and unshifting Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises to bring in the big money.

However, now that AC and Far Cry’s newer entries are flailing compared to their predecessors, Ubisoft can perhaps no longer afford to experiment so wildly. Sadly, I feel that it shouldn’t have done so in the first place, as the potential the original Watch Dogs provided was a strong enough foundation from which they could have built something spectacular, rather than introducing mechanics that neither fit the series’ tone, theme, or concept. It remains to be seen what Ubisoft does with Watch Dogs, but should it release a new entry, I hope it focuses on its strengths, the hacking, the spying, the neo-noir fantasy of it all, if only to showcase what we’ve all known it was capable of this entire time.

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