SegmentNext
Lay our Watch Dogs 2 pages next to each other and they sort themselves by one question: what does Marcus have to be holding? Some jobs need nothing but the hacks he already carries. Some he never physically attends, because a Quadcopter or an RC Jumper goes in his place. A few need him behind a wheel or a tiller, and one of those he has to buy. That is how this guide is arranged. It is not a story walkthrough, and it does not try to be a completion checklist: we have four of the game's twenty two side operations written up in depth, both race series, the hacks themselves, the rare rides, our PC settings breakdown and our review.
| What is in your hands | What our pages put behind it | Where to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing but Marcus himself | The hacks themselves, three of the seven rare rides that are simply parked, a fourth that needs a hack but no hardware, and the one of our four side operations that locks both gadgets out | Hacking, unique vehicles |
| The Quadcopter | All ten drone race courses, two of our four side operations, and one rare ride you would not otherwise spot | Drone races, side operations |
| The RC Jumper | The gym router in Schadenfreude, and two rare rides shut away behind a garage door and a locked gate | Side operations, unique vehicles |
| Something you sit in | Six sailboat courses on the bay, and the Car on Demand list every rare ride joins | Sailboat races |
| Your PC | Fourteen graphics settings, eight of them with a frame cost in numbers | PC tweaks |
Deciding to play it, and getting it running
Our Watch Dogs 2 review is the place to start if the first game put you off. Its verdict is that the sequel is the Assassin's Creed 2 of this series: the same premise, rebuilt. Where Aiden Pearce was flat and grey, our reviewer found Marcus Holloway loud and likeable, the supporting cast written as caricatures of eccentrics rather than brooding operators, and the Bay Area a sunnier and far larger map than the Chicago of the original, stretching from San Francisco and Oakland out to Silicon Valley and Alcatraz. The criticism is aimed squarely at the story: mission arcs make it more cohesive than the first game's, but our reviewer thought it never manages to give you a personal stake in it. Worth knowing before you read further, the review was written while the seamless online component had been pulled offline, so its notes on Hacking Invasions and on the Bounty Hunter chases, where up to three players can gang up on somebody the police want, come with that caveat attached.
On PC the question is which of the pretty settings you can afford, and our PC tweaks guide goes through fourteen of them alphabetically and puts a number of frames on eight of them. Three of those can take up to thirty frames each, which is where your budget goes: TXAA multisampling, a pixel density slider pushed past your monitor's resolution, and the San Francisco fog, which is a PC exclusive and looks like the trailers did. The page's own recommendation is to leave Temporal Filtering on, because it improves the look and the frame rate together and does not interfere with anything else, and to take Post-process Anti-aliasing instead of TXAA on a weaker card. It also puts a GTX 1060 behind 1080p, notes that the highest texture setting stays under 8GB of VRAM, and warns that Temporal Filtering is no help at all on an SLI setup.
What Marcus can do without picking anything up
All four of the side operations we have written up run through the hacks themselves, and so do three of the seven rare rides, which is why our hacking guide is the first page here worth reading end to end. The habit it teaches is to sweep an area with NetHack before you do anything else, since the overlay sees enemies and hackable objects through walls and colours them, and everything after that is a choice from what the sweep found. Objects can be detonated, switched off, armed as a trap or used as bait; people can be arrested by proxy, distracted, handed over to a rival gang, or drained for cash and BotNet through Acquire; cars can be nudged, driven remotely or simply stopped, and a pursuing one can be wiped out with a billboard or a steam pipe as you drive past it. Behind the locked doors sit red BLUME boxes and the conduit puzzle that unlocks them. Our mechanics guide sets those hacks alongside the two race series and asks a different question of all three, which is how strictly each one is scored.
The gadget-free rule shows up in the collection too. Of the seven rare rides on our unique vehicles guide, three are simply parked and waiting: the Ice Cube at a campsite by the lighthouse near the Golden Gate Bridge, the Flip Wagon in an alley off the park by the Painted Ladies, and the Danger Mobile between two houses out on the island near Yerba Buena. A fourth, the scooter called the Rainbow Missile, needs a hack but no hardware, since you distract the woman and the robot in the yard at San Mateo and then open the gate from the BLUME box nearby. The same pattern closes our side operations set: Ubistolen ends with a rooftop and a PC under a TV, and the page is explicit that neither the RC Jumper nor the Quadcopter can make that entry for you.
The jobs you send a machine to do
Once Marcus owns the little drone, a whole category of work stops needing him present. Our drone races guide is the purest version of it: speak to Mark in the Hackerspace garden at Mission Dolores Park after the first Main Operation and ten courses open up across the map, which the page recommends as a source of cash and Followers, with a Golden Medal for a run that does not clip anything. Buy Speed Boost, then ration it; the page's whole argument is that the crash which costs you the medal comes from holding the boost down rather than from flying too slowly.
The side operations guide is where the two gadgets do investigative work instead. Schadenfreude is the RC Jumper's showpiece: clear Haum Intruder, reach 525,000 followers, then drive the Jumper into the gym beside the Haum Data Center, take the security router, and cycle cameras until your target is on a treadmill you can speed up. Shadows offers a choice, since the crime scene containers at the interchange by the Golden Gate Bridge can be investigated with the Quadcopter or on foot, and before that it wants a citizen hacked at one of three places and Victor Cheung found, guard dog and all, in the hideout two blocks east of Lombard Street. Stolen Signals is the drone's longest shift, hopping between stingray devices around Coit Tower, and it names a hard limit on the little aircraft: the triangulation device sits at the very top of the tower, higher than the Quadcopter can climb from street level, so you have to gain ground before you deploy it. Our reviewer called this way of playing the trickster style and credited both gadgets with making it viable at all, which is a fair description of how three of these four missions actually go.
Two of the rare rides belong to the Jumper as well. The Dangerzone is sealed in the underground garages across the street from Nudle in Silicon Valley, reached by driving the Jumper through a vent and breaking the plank that hides the BLUME box, and the Mountain King sits behind a locked gate in Oakland near your safehouse, on the same trick. Add the Rainbow Missile, whose gate opens once you have distracted the pair guarding it, and three of the seven rides on that page end at a red box, although only the Dangerzone and the Mountain King send a gadget in to reach it.
The things you have to climb into yourself
Only one activity on these pages makes you buy a vehicle before it will start. Our sailboat races guide sends you over to Marin, to the Sailboat Shop inside the Yacht Club of Legacy Bay, and once a hull is yours there are six courses out on San Francisco Bay. They are the odd ones out here because the page names no hack that helps. The wind is the engine out here, so its advice is about reading the weather off your mini-map and following the marked course rather than about anything Marcus happens to be carrying, and the only opponents that matter are the boats in the water beside you.
The cars are a collection rather than a contest. Every rare ride on our unique vehicles page wears a custom paint job, which our page notes will single you out in Online Mode, and each one found is added to Car on Demand so it can be called in later from anywhere. Riding just one of them is enough for the A Ride to Remember achievement, so the collection is optional after the first. If you want a second opinion on the driving itself, the review rates the handling as tightened and more arcade-like than the first game's, with shooting from the driver's seat added, six radio stations and songs across seven genres.
What these pages do not cover
Two gaps are worth naming so you do not go looking. The main story is not here: our reviewer counts fifteen main objective arcs and the co-operative DedSec events that merge two players' sessions, but we have no mission by mission walkthrough of any of it. Neither are the rest of the side operations, since the page above works through four of the twenty two it counts, and deliberately keeps even those four light on story to stay spoiler-free. What the set does cover well is the moment to moment business of hacking, racing and collecting, and the fastest way into that is the mechanics guide, which takes the three systems above and ranks them by how strictly the game marks what you do in each one.
