Ubisoft's games are often derided for their homogeneity, but every few years one will change up the formula a wee bit, shaking you out of your Ubi-slumber with just enough energy to try another one of their massive open world games. I'm speaking personally of course, and personally I'm very glad that Watch Dogs 2 won't feature now-traditional Ubi-towers that reveal missions and other opportunities on the map. That's confirmed in this Eurogamer article, which reveals that you'll now unlock things by getting more and more followers for your hacking group DedSec.
"It's not a game where you open your map and everything's there," Jonathan Morin, the game's creative director, told Eurogamer. "There are no towers. You just explore the world."
"Players start with a few followers in DedSec but pretty soon you realise you're going to need more if you want to pull off big operations" he continued. "So you start free-roaming. Every time you get followers, it's like you're unlocking the DedSec hivemind. You're also unlocking new knowledge, new operations, new co-op missions. And then organically you hit those end-game milestones."
Interestingly, Morin says that you can "barely touch the story" and still finish the game—there are three "milestones" you need to hit along the way, but you can unlock everything else by free-roaming or playing in co-op.
Have a read of the full interview over at Eurogamer.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.