Watch Dogs

Yapping is our weapon.

“Such wow. Much yap. So next-gen. I amaze.”

~ Doge on Watch Dogs

Watch Dogs is an open-world adventure video game developed and published by Ubisoft Montreal. The game has been called the ultimate next-gen experience, with a new game-play mechanism called "Yapping," which lets the player be the ultimate force in the city of Caninego and influence the surrounding world. Ubisoft sought help from the anti-yapping specialist Catspersky, which helped make the in-game experience feel more realistic.

The player plays as vigilante Aiden Poodle, who uses Yapping to avenge the death of his niece Lena and find the true dogs out to euthanize him and his mixed-breed family.

Development

The PS3 box cover.

After excessive amounts of games centred around rabbits and historical assassins, Ubisoft foresaw the coming of the next-gen consoles and decided create a completely different game. Ubisoft decided to make a game about Watch Dogs. Ubisoft was good at keeping up with the times and the players' demands. Ubisoft heard about a new fad among youth called "Hacking". However, actual hacking was far too sophisticated for next gen consoles and even more sophisticated for dogs. So they settled with highly next gen gameplay system that only a new gaming engine could handle. Yapping, a highly convoluted system that involved forcing a dog bark to cause a series of events and get an advantage over his enemies. To get help, the dog needed an ally that understood it the most. They eventually found one. The idiot twin of Kaspersky, Catspersky. The largest anti-yapping company helped make the Yapping system feel far more realistic and worthy of being on Xbox One and PS4.

The Reviews

The sequel's box art.

The game received overwhelmingly negative reviews from the gaming press and Ubisoft's fans alike. They were unimpressed by the fact that the Yapping system wasn't convoluted and hard enough. Players would have liked to control the vocal chords of Aiden Poodle rather than pressing X to Yap. There was also the problem that Yapping did absolutely nothing. For example, the traffic lights could not be changed by yapping, creating problems when you are being chased by German Shephard Police dogs. It was largely pointless in stealth as you often simply only called attention to yourself and it was better to just maul your opponents to death with your claws. Oh yeah, and you couldn't maul civilian dogs and cats to death either, only hurl feces at them, instantly killing them on a headshit.

The Doge skin for Aiden Poodle in the game sold more copies than the game itself.

The game was accused of being racist because all the antagonists are Cats. This caused problems with PETA and the Cats Outraged by Unnecessary Gaming Abuse and Racism (COUGAR) party. In response, both parties decided to call a boycott against the game. It was surprisingly successful and the game only sold 400,000 copies in its 1st week. This caused massive problems for Ubisoft who had been expecting a massive sales success. Left with no choice, they released DLC containing new skins for Aiden Pearce such as the Doge skin and the new DLC story starring one of Aiden Poodle's Wolf Pack members, T-Bone (his name referencing his eventual fate in the inevitable sequel).