Watch Dogs 2

Similar to its predecessor, Watch Dogs 2 is an action-adventure game with stealth elements and played from a third-person perspective as Marcus Holloway, a young hacker. The game features an open world set in the San Francisco Bay Area, an area more than twice as large as the Chicagoland setting from Watch Dogs. It consists of four different areas: San Francisco, Oakland, Marin County (including the city of Sausalito), and Silicon Valley. Players can navigate the game's world on-foot or by the various vehicles featured in the game, such as cars, trucks, buses, cable cars, motorcycles, quad bikes, and boats.

The driving mechanic was overhauled and designed to be more accessible. The player can shoot their weapons while driving. Marcus also has improved acrobatic skills, and the ability to parkour around the city. The player can use different methods to approach the game's missions, choosing between the aggressive approach, in which they defeat enemies with guns which are made with a 3D printer; explosives, like mines; or Marcus's own melee weapon, a billiard ball attached to a bungee cord.

In 2016, three years after the events of Chicago, San Francisco becomes the first city to install the next generation of ctOS (central Operating System) – a computing network connecting every device together into a single system, developed by technology company Blume. Hacker Marcus Holloway, punished for a crime he did not commit through ctOS 2.0, decides to join the hacking group DedSec (composed of hackers Sitara Dhawan, Josh Sauchak, Horatio Carlin, and Reginald "Wrench" Blechman), and conducts an initiation test by hacking a Blume server farm to wipe his profile from the system. DedSec determines that the new ctOS can covertly harm innocent citizens across the city, and thus decides to bring about awareness of their goals through conducting a social media campaign to recruit, by exposing corruption and crimes being conducted through the system, before bringing down Blume.

After several successful exposures, Josh discovers a number of irregularities in their follower numbers. 0 to those frightened at being hacked. Forced to leave the city for a while, DedSec partake in a hacking event in the desert, and encounter legendary hacker Raymond "T-Bone" Kenney. Interested in assisting them, Kenney joins DedSec as they work to continue their fight against Blume.

At E3 2014, Ubisoft executive Tony Key claimed they were satisfied with the sales of the first game, and that the brand would be turned into a long-running franchise. According to creative director Jonathan Morin, the first game's main goal was to establish the Watch Dogs brand. It was intended that they take risks with the sequel, instead of creating a more polished version of the previous game. To improve the game, Morin and his team read the reviews of the first game, and visited NeoGAF and various forums to study player feedback.

Their priorities included creating a "believable" environment, giving players more freedom, and introducing a new leading character, whose personality would be completely different from that of the protagonist of the first game, Aiden Pearce. The primary developer Ubisoft Montreal worked with other subsidiaries Ubisoft Toronto, Ubisoft Paris, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Kyiv, and Ubisoft Reflections to aid in the production. The driving mechanic was completely overhauled to make it more accessible to players, and was developed by Ubisoft Reflections, the developer of Ubisoft's own Driver series. In light of complaints about a graphical downgrade in Watch Dogs from what was seen at E3 2012, Ubisoft assured that Watch Dogs 2 would not suffer the same outcome because, unlike the first installment, it was developed for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One from the start.

Watch Dogs 2 received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator Metacritic. 04 patch. In his review, Destructoid's Zack Furniss praised the sequel's tonal shift to a lack of seriousness and stated that its protagonist Marcus Holloway boasted a similar charm and wit. He thought well of the hacking component as it was suggestible to multiple fields of use, and enjoyed its nature of compatibility with a non-lethal approach; in fact, Furniss felt that for this reason firearms could have been excluded entirely.

The driving was lauded as an improvement from the first game, yet technical issues like glitches and low frame rates were cited as shortcomings. To Matt Buchholtz, writing for EGM, the game signified "less a hacktivist tale and more a beautiful immersion into the San Francisco Bay". The setting, characters and story were cited as considerable refinements from its predecessor. Buchholtz discerned that the tasks demanded to gain followers were successful in encouraging world exploration.