To no one's surprise, Watch Dogs will require us to use Uplay even if we buy it through Steam. It's one of Ubisoft's biggest games of the year, and the company isn't about to set aside its Steam competitor, despite releasing it on Steam. If you want to play Watch Dogs on PC, there's no way around it.
"Like some of our other AAA releases, including Far Cry 3 , Splinter Cell Blacklist , and Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag , Watch Dogs will be available on Steam and will leverage Uplay to support the games services,” Ubisoft confirms to IGN .
One of the most annoying things I've noticed about Uplay is that if you don't close it after you quit a game, Steam continues to count the hours as time played. It's why I have 60 hours logged into Trials Evolution even though I probably didn't play it for more than six.
That's a minor inconvenience, but it's still frustrating to have another thing to download and launch every time I want to play Watch Dogs, especially when it doesn't do Steam's features better. But is Uplay going to stop me from playing Watch Dogs? Not even close. If it turns out as good as promised, I might even upgrade my PC for it, given the recently released and slightly daunting recommended system requirements. In case you missed those, here they are:
Minimum:
- OS: Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7 (SP1) or Windows 8 (Please note that we only support 64 bit OSs.)
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 @ 2.66Ghz or AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3.0Ghz
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: DirectX 11 graphics card with 1 GB Video RAM - Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD 5770
- DirectX: Version 11
- Hard Drive: 25 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Sound Card with Latest Drivers
Recommended:
- OS: Windows Vista (SP2), Windows 7 (SP1) or Windows 8 (Please note that we only support 64 bit OSs.)
- Processor: Eight core - Intel Core i7-3770 @3.5 GHz or AMD FX-8350 X8 @ 4 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: DirectX 11 graphics card with 2 GB Video RAM - Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 ti or AMD Radeon HD 7850
- DirectX: Version 11
- Hard Drive: 25 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Sound Card with Latest Drivers
