Watch Dogs 101 gives us a crash course in awesome

Watch Dogs is literally right around the corner, so Ubisoft Montreal took a moment to give us a crash course in everything you can expect when the game launches in two weeks.   The video goes over some of the big features in the game, as well as a few of the characters you’ll encounter.  It’s not spoiler free, but the few that are there aren’t big.   What is big is the laundry list of awesome things to do in the game.  Here’s a bit from my hands-on preview:

In fact, there are nearly 90 side missions, 36 main missions (the first of which took over an hour), 22 distraction missions like drinking, chess, and poker, 40 online contracts, 23 songs to steal from people’s phones, 100 city hotspots to find, 30 privacy invasion opportunities, 16 major ctOS centers to breach, a bevy of missing people and traffickers to stop, 40 fixer contracts, and on and on. This game is so much larger than we could have anticipated, and it is alive with things to do, just like a real world. To help bring the world alive, the team spent a great deal of time on motion capture. Each NPC has over 5,000 animation states, with Aiden adding another 4,000 or so to that mix. In all there are over 13,000 unique captured animations in the game, ensuring that you won’t see the same animation over and over.

Look for our coverage on Watch Dogs before it’s release on May 27th on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, with Wii U following this fall.