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It feels racist.

In their review, our colleagues at Kotaku highlighted the fact that the majority of black characters you see in Watch Dogs are bad guys to be mowed down, and speak in clichés. Kirk Hamilton called Ubisoft out for its depiction of black people as “street hustlers, gangsters, drug addicts and thugs”.

We’re not talking about a small number of characters in a cast of dozens, as in Deus Ex: Human revolution, which was similarly criticised. Two or even three walking stereotype characters could be explained away, although not to a degree that I personally would feel comfortable with. But dozens and dozens? Even nameless cannon fodder deserves better treatment – and people of colour deserve better representation than to be presented as nameless cannon fodder.

Aiden is about as interesting as a bread sandwich.

Now guys, I love bread. Bread is delicious. I certainly don’t want to see a world with no bread! And happily, there’s no chance of that world ever coming about. Bread is everywhere. You can buy bread at any store. Watch any movie or TV show where people eat – there’ll be some bread or a bread product. Everyone knows about bread; everyone can talk about bread. Some people don’t eat bread, and some people even hate bread, but the bread industry is certainly not under any threat. Bread is not going anywhere. Bread is here forever, whether we like it or not.

The thing is though, bread’s not the only food there is. There are loads of other foods. How weird would it be if, whenever you turned on the TV or fired up a video game, the only food anybody every showed or talked about in any detail was bread? If 90% of the groceries at the store were bread? If every restaurant menu was almost entirely bread? Wouldn’t that make you feel a bit weird?

This is a long drawn out metaphor for why I’m sick of angry white male video game protagonists, and also why I’m having bacon for breakfast tomorrow. Hell, even Yves Guillemot has admitted Aiden is dull as dentistry.

The story doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense.

This is a criticism that could be lowered at the Assassin’s Creed franchise equally. The story boils down to this: some bad guys do a thing, and our hero is upset and wants to stop them from doing more bad things, or take revenge on them. That would take about 90 minutes to resolve in any action movie. But this is a video game, so instead it has to take at least 12 hours, and sometimes – gods – hundreds more. As such, there can be no straight A to B.

Let me fill you in on a little secret about video games: most of them don’t have a plot till quite close to the finish line. They have some vague details – good guy, bad guys, certain explosive high points – but mainly, the mission to mission sequence is being laid out by designers trying to make fun gameplay (or, perhaps in the case of million hour epics, just gameplay. Any gameplay. Oh my god how are we going to meet quota? Put in another eavesdropping mission). Later, someone strings all this content together in a way that’s supposed to make sense.

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I’m not saying that’s necessarily how Ubisoft does it, but it’s a well-documented practice elsewhere, and that’s why writers have made a career out of coming in, leading the producer gently away from the script to somewhere they can do less harm, and performing emergency surgery to cobble together some sort of Frankenstein over-plot. It’s why writers like Rhianna Pratchett, who fight for narrative to be a consideration at the start of a project rather than the end, are so important.

Maybe you don’t give a shit about story, in which case more power to you, but if I have to sit through unskippable cutscenes (in 2014!) then god dammit I want sufficient narrative justification for the ludicrous events my hero seems to be helplessly tumbling between, obeying the weird whims of every unique NPC he meets.

The dialogue is abysmal.

It just is.

So that’s why we’re not playing Watch Dogs. That said, we know many of you are, and that there really are a lot of things to love about it. So we’d like to know: what do you like about it? What are your favourite experiences so far?

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