Quests

Aiden Pearce does not level up by finishing the story. Almost every weapon, vehicle and trophy outside the campaign is sold to you at a published rate, and the rate is measured in repetitions. Six of one thing, nine of another, thirty of a third. Sort the eight activity sets in this section by that number and you get a shopping list rather than a pile of map icons, which is what the icons look like on a fresh save.

Watch Dogs side activities ranked by what they cost you

The thirteen towers come off the list first

Thirteen is not the cheapest number in that table, but it is the one to pay first. Every other set in this section says the same thing about itself: unlock the ctOS Tower covering an area and the game stops hiding that area's icons. Bodies, bidders, crates and eyes all print on the mini-map once the mast in that district is yours, and the towers hand you fast travel points while they are at it. Clearing them cold, before the map shows anything, means climbing thirteen roofs with nothing but the data flow lines to follow, and the tower page walks each of them from the alley up.

The three cheap sets are the three with a scene at the end

Missing Persons, Weapons Trade and Human Trafficking sit at the top of the ladder because they are short, and all three cash out in a set piece rather than in a counter ticking over. Six corpses in plastic, each with an audio log beside it, end with a stakeout on Edgar Noon in a public square where being spotted fails you outright. Nine crates locked in garages end with Tobias calling you to restock before the Tidis Warehouse, where three waves of Veterans, Marksmen and Enforcers are waiting. Ten hacked phones and ten briefcases end with Joseph DeMarco packing to leave Chicago and a convoy you have to tail without touching.

The long tail is where the hours go

Below the halfway line the sets stop telling stories and start asking for volume. The sixteen breaches are timed sprints between four or five hack boxes, with clocks running from two and a half minutes at St. Joseph Cemetery out to five minutes ten at the Umeni shipyard, and the ones whose boxes sit a long way apart say outright that you should bring a fast car. Crime Detection cannot be planned at all, since it fires as a notification with a short window to accept, and the first one you answer already buys the Quick Switch skill. Thirty Privacy Invasions are the single largest count in the game outside the contracts, and a good number of them need a camera hacked at range rather than a walk to the router.

Fixer Contracts are the outlier and the reason the ladder ends where it does. They split into four job types, and our walkthrough covers eleven Decoy runs, ten Getaway escapes and thirteen Interception chases, then counts ten Transporter deliveries on top without listing them. Decoy pays on a checkpoint timer, so the money changes with how much clock you have left. Getaway wants the cops or The Club shaken inside three minutes and a quiet arrival at the drop. Interception is the one worth learning properly, because taking the target out before you pull his data pays more than doing it the other way round.

Two of the eight sets are not really in this section at all once you look at how you collect them. The trails Maurice Vega and Giggles left behind live with the rest of the pickups and hackable objects, and the minigames and player invasions that feed Aiden's skill tree are covered in our guide to the game's side systems. Everything above, and the order to work through it in, sits on the Watch Dogs hub.