After a couple of days filled with wild rumors Ubisoft has finally confirmed the existence of Watch Dogs 2. It is set to arrive on November 15 and bring with it a brand new protagonist, a brilliant young hacker by the name of Marcus Holloway. Unlike Aiden, the protagonist from Watch Dogs 1, the plan with Marcus is to make him an expressive and relatable character, someone the players can actually get along with.
This whole announcement comes in the form of a rather long and detailed "premier video", so if you're interested in some Watch Dogs 2 footage and developer commentary I would recommend you check it out:
“Our creative team is working hard to deliver an outstanding WATCH_DOGS experience,” said Dominic Guay, senior producer, Ubisoft Montreal. “In WATCH_DOGS 2, we’re excited to give players a captivating storyline with engaging characters that offers deeper, more meaningful hacking options, a greater variety of gadgets and weapons, and a brand new seamless multiplayer experience that will appeal to fans of the original WATCH_DOGS as well as players new to the brand.”
The action will take place in the "massive and dynamic open world environment" set in the San Francisco Bay Area, the latest city to adopt the rather intrusive ctOS 2.0 surveillance network. When the massive and convoluted system inevitably fails it will pin our protagonist with a crime he did not commit, and thus set him on a path to prevent such atrocities from happening to anyone else.
In your quest to shut down the massive surveillance network you will only have two things to rely on, your wits, as well as your significant hacking abilities. As before, you will be able to hack into the city's infrastructure in order to mess with traffic lights, steam pipes (how does this work again?), cranes, and so on, but you will also be able to manipulate every single person that's using any connected device! While the details are currently a bit sketchy, the developers are promising a whole chain of random and interesting events as a result of hacking even the smallest of devices.
Perhaps a ringing phone will trigger a dog into chasing the person across the street, which would then cause a traffic jam, which would then result in a massive pile-up, and so forth. While this is certainly a unique feature, and one that I welcome with open arms, I would advise against getting excited just yet since this is the sort of thing that's way easier to mess up than to actually implement successfully.
Watch Dogs 2 will be available in three editions: Deluxe, Gold, and Collector's, the details on which you can read on the Ubisoft Store page. Finally, here's the cinematic trailer to give you an idea of what sort of tone the story is going with: