Watch_Dogs 2 and Non Lethal Gameplay

Watch_Dogs 2 was announced before this year’s E3 conference, and early impressions suggest that Ubisoft has learnt a lot from the criticism of the first game. Hacking has been expanded beyond being a single point-and-click feature, and the new protagonist Marcus Holloway appears to have an actual personality, unlike Aiden ‘Gruff McGrumpants’ Pearce from the first game. The most interesting addition though is the developer’s claim that the game can be played completely non-lethally. Marcus can use stealth to get past enemies, and has a selection of weaponry ‘set to stun’ if, like me, your sneaking skills aren’t up to scratch. All this makes me question - why do we need the option to kill at all?

Ubisoft seem to have a pretty solid idea of who Marcus Holloway is as a character. He’s young, brilliant, witty and charming. He’s idealistic and angry, but not cruel. The demo they showed off at their E3 conference focused on a mission completed with no casualties. Imagining that same mission, played through using an assault rifle instead, paints a different picture of a different man. It doesn’t quite seem to fit. But the inclusion of deadly force almost feels obligatory in AAA games - of course the player character can kill people, but you’ve also got the option not to. Why not instead take away the option to kill altogether?

The argument against this is player choice, and that’s something Ubisoft have been promoting. More and more games these days are offering players multiple ways to approach any situation or mission. This ‘emergent gameplay’, combined with the open world of a game like Watch_Dogs - where you can very literally approach a situation from any angle - is something most developers are striving for. It leads to players talking about your game, sharing their experiences on social media and helps creature exposure for your brand. Give the player lethal and non-lethal weapons and let them choose how to approach it.

This brings us back to Marcus Holloway and the ludonarrative dissonance created if you choose to run around killing all and sundry. Marcus is not an avatar to imprint yourself on like in so many other games, he’s designed as a real man existing in a real world. The implication in this game is that you’re the hero, fighting against the ever-watching establishment, ‘the man’. Can this really be justified if the body count continues to rise without consequence? At what point do you cross over from vigilante to dangerous criminal? It’s an issue that the first Watch_Dogs game encountered as well, and it seems to only be magnified in Watch_Dogs 2.

Open worlds themselves offer other issues to the non-lethal approach as well. If you give a player a large city and the ability to drive, any vehicle can become your most dangerous weapon. Accidental civilian deaths become very hard to avoid during a high speed chase, and even when being careful accidents can happen. As a developer, if you choose not to allow the player to use lethal weaponry, you have to question if you can give them the ability to drive. It’s hard to know where to draw the line.

The ability to kill in Watch_Dogs 2 feels to me like a idea that the games industry is yet to shed, included because it always has been. For so many years, combat in games has been about eliminating the enemy, whether it’s slaying a monster or gunning down a soldier. Over time more games have given us a choice, allowed us to take a non-lethal approach. Maybe now it’s time for some games to take the choice away from us.