Fandom Promotion

[longficmod]

Many of us are already planning which fandoms to offer and request! Nominations open in about a week, which may give some of us enough time to pick up a new canon before signups begin.

Use this post to promote your canon or to coordinate nominations with other fans.

Comments

Watch Dogs

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have a lot of feelings about the stupid cyberpunk dystopia we're actively in? Do you like a massive tonal shift between games that means there's a version for everyone, even if every version doesn't work for the same people? Have a five-minutes-into-the-future urban crime sim that looked at the rise of smart city technology and went 'I bet I can write some really interesting stories using that.'

Watch Dogs is the first entry into the series, a crime noir story following an enraged former criminal that's turned his attention (and his violence) towards the circles he used to occupy. It has:
- a seedy underbelly of crime
- a completely amoral villain protagonist
- actual consequences for that villain protagonist's actions
- frankly the funniest amoral villain sidekick alive
- no really, Jordi Chin makes everything worth it
- surprisingly robust third person shooting and stealth mechanics, even if the hacking mechanics are all contextual and a little weak

But maybe edgy manpain isn't your thing. Maybe you're looking at that and going 'jesus, not another one'. Maybe you want your hacking game to, like, actually revolve around hacker culture.

Watch Dogs 2 is the lighter, funnier, more poignant little brother to the first game. When hackers went 'hey, that's stupid' about some of the key plot points in the first game, the devs listened and actually did their homework for the second. If WD1 is a cold and rainy Chicago night, then WD2 is a sunny breath of fresh West Coast air. It has:
- a black male main character and
- racism, both overt and more insidious in the tech industry, acknowledged and combatted
- a canonically autistic side character who's treated with respect
- literally an entire mission revolving around kink and porn shoots
- found family/nakama
- genuinely some of the best third person freeroam shooting and parkour in an urban crime sim
- much more nuanced and useful hacking mechanics
- the ability to do a full stealth/no death run that's supported by the level design
- a long, hard look at what it means to be a product in the social media tech giant future we live in now

Both games have a full playtime of roughly 18 hours including side missions (but not all side content, since WD1 is chock full of things to bullshit around with for hours without achieving much plotwise.) If picking up a new game isn't something you're up to, WD1's cutscenes movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWlKjw3LBDk) runs about five hours including the dialogue between missions, while WD2's cutscenes move (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNyn4Hg8Yyo) runs about the same, with between missions dialogue and not including DLC content.

Aiden is a depressed mess that fucks up his own life and never quite digs himself out of that hole he deservedly put himself in.

Marcus is an empathetic darling who always gets back up after getting knocked down and is going to make the world a better place, no matter who tries to stop him.

Both of them are really really good games in their own way, with a taste of variety to boot!

Content Warnings: Both games feature privacy invasions where the player is functionally a voyeur and those include references to suicide, eating disorders, abuse, and drug use, and both games have human trafficking subplots. WD1 has onscreen torture and objectification/dehumanization of women. Both games feature a sudden and abrupt main cast member death. Also, y'know, guns.

Re: Watch Dogs

[(Anonymous)]

I'm very slow and am intending on making my way through both cutscene movies but I just wanna say for now from the first 30 mins of WD1, I 1000% adore Jordi Chin. You were not wrong, anon. He does make everything worth it!

Re: Watch Dogs

[(Anonymous)]

Potentially an odd question but what's the difficulty like on these? I'm a crappy casual gamer and don't want to try them out only to find I'm stuck in minutes!

Re: Watch Dogs

[(Anonymous)]

I know this is a couple days late but both games are pretty casual friendly, with the exception of a few missions. WD1 has a stealth driving section early on which is just an exercise in frustration and WD2 has a side mission in Alcatraz near the midpoint of the game that's an absolute pain without a coherent plan, but the skills you can pick up and the decision to let stealth gameplay be there makes it easier to progress through most stuff. Fullscale combat isn't as much a focus as exploration and multiple avenues of approach in a mission area. (WD1 does have a bossfight that is totally combat based and, like the stealth driving section, it's an exercise in frustration, but stocking up on explosives makes it easier and the easy mode of the game is very forgiving.)

There's no melee combat (only takedowns which are an instant KO if you get close enough to use them) and in WD1 you start with a stealth pistol that can headshot and one-hit kill most enemies, so it's more forgiving towards shooting gameplay. WD2 can be beat without shooting anyone at all, and Marcus's stungun is a 1KO like the rest of the melee takedowns.

Re: Watch Dogs

[(Anonymous)]

...and as luck would have it, Epic Games is offering the Standard Edition for free on PC until March 26th!: https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/watch-dogs/home