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Hey everyone. This is another hold-over video as I work on Arkham Knight. Things are coming along very nicely on that front, can't wait to share it with you all. Oh yeah and Death Stranding 2 dropped so that's the next year of work sorted.

whitelight is probably the last ubisoft fan

Aiden has the greatest RP walk in gaming, everything about it is PERFECT.

"What do we say to Arkham Knight?"

"...Watchdogs mod."

A comment from the admin of the modding server: "There's a logical next step for Watch Dogs, and it's reverse engineering. By analyzing the inner workings of the game, we can go beyond the game's scripting framework (which Living City makes extensive use of) and actually begin thinking about addressing the game's weaknesses, expanding on existing features and creating entirely new gameplay possibilities.

But there's a catch: this kind of thing requires an extreme amount of time and effort to make it a) work and b) more than just an experiment or a tech demo. Throughout the years, there have been a handful of attempts that sadly never amounted to anything usable. What's needed is an organized effort powered by knowledgeable and determined contributors.


Check out the Watch Dogs modding discord server if you're interested in starting something with us - we're not starting at zero!"

even in vanilla aiden walking with hands in his coat goes unnecessarily hard, straight aura farming

Alright I'm downloading the game again

Never thought I’d see you do a video on our autistic little niche of the community but here we are. A lot of us have been involved since day 1, before discord, on the guru3d forums. If you told 14 year old me what we would have accomplished 11 years later, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. This game will always hold a special place in my heart, thank you for covering something which many of us have devoted so much time in our lives to.

3 minutes in and I can say with 98% certainty, you sir.. have caught the "Ubisoft Bug"

That nagging feeling that you have stumbled upon something incredibly cool that only meets you halfway with it's ambitions. So many of their titles suffer from it.

I love what Ubisoft is thinking, just not exactly what Ubisoft is doing. Watch Dogs should live on.. despite each entry disappointing me in a variety of ways, every single one of them hooked me deep and left me wanting something deeper.

I don't think any other developer is capable of the sheer amount of edging they do with their game design.

Watch Dogs with Living City mod feels like the Person of Interest videogame that was never made.

whitelight relentlessly shitting on every remaster for slightly fucking up the original color correction over crowbcat footage is something i needed in my life today

When i grew up with this game the way it made me actually shake in fear and make me struggle to keep my controller in my hands just from online invasions, the thought of another person invading my SINGLE PLAYER GAME and potentially killing me was actually so scary.
In fact, so scary, that as time went on i developed strategies to counter those events.
I literally learned to listen for specific sounds, since i played the game so much the sound of the game, the streets, the npcs, everything was burned into the back of my mind, so when something felt off, when something was too loud, when a random fire hydrant had gone off, i knew my session was no longer single player.
And to test my suspicion i always followed up with a test by using the focus, wich if i was still in single player would still work and turn everything slow-mo, and if i was in an online session would only slap a blue filter on my screen, that way i knew whether i was being followed or not.
I would then continue to drive as fast as i could on the most longest straight street i could find, and then i would just look out behind me every 2 seconds. Either i'd loose them, or i would see an npc driving suspiciously just as fast as me and dodging cars just as well, and then i had my target and oh my god i felt so cool back then.

Anyway since we were talking about watch dogs i just had to share this, i still find it amazing that my 8 year old dumbass brain managed to play the game like this.

33:03 "scheduling an appointment with a mugging" is the best description of these kinds of missions I've ever heard

Frankly, the first Watchdogs was probably the only game I have zero issues with. I played it on PS3, then got it for PS4.
Go watch Person of Interest then come back to this game. It’s a great game.

Watchdogs still had one of the best mechanics and that's being able to listen to music while on foot.

Watchdogs is “a modern/grownup Batman” OMG HOW COULD I MISS THIS thats what it was so appealing

Your take on open world games rings so true. It really feels like so many open worlds, ESPECIALLY ones set in urban environments, feel like they're sitting there waiting for you instead of being, you know, a world.

I remember an Oddly Satirical Production's video where Red mentioned how playwrights, authors, producers, and other storytellers in media will use literary devices to illustrate how the world the characters live and engage still is moving and existing despite the fact that when you turn off the TV or close to book, it's gone. The usage of suggestion and worldbuilding to make it feel as if the world outside the microcosm that is the character's life and experiences is going on it's business even when the viewpoint of which we, the audience, see this world doesn't get to witness those parts.

The Living City mod is basically that solution for video games, alongside what you proposed. The world too often feels like a mere set, a pretty backdrop, the stage for which the story happens, but that becomes an issue since unlike a book or movie, the viewpoint of how the audience perceives the world is not limited by the hand of the author. You can't hide the fact outside this world is functionally an empty void because the camera is not controlled by the author, who guides the story, but is controlled by the audience, and gamers are known to look in nooks and crannies that sometimes not even the most detail-oriented of world/environmental development artist could ever FATHOM checking out.

Hence we fall into the problem of the developer putting all the important stuff in the few select areas they deemed worthy, and creating a pretty world to fill the gaps between them. If you could turn the game from a full open world like Skyrim or Watchdogs, to a mostly closed one like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Final Fantasy XVI, where you can mission select on the fancy world map, but the actual place you do anything is limited to a specific area, that's when you know your open world is shallow. It can be as full as Spiderman's but that fullness of stuff is skin deep. You're Spiderman until the cutscene ends, you're the bada*s V until you beat the mini-boss, you're an assassin until it's time to travel to the next set piece. The open world genre focuses so much on being open that it fails to be a world, and the character you play as is a part of that world as long as the scriptwriters tell you they are, but outside of the specially chosen moments, your character is becomes removed from the world, they don't live IN it, they move across it with grace. You're not a superhero until the 5 o'clock butt-whupping the Joker scheduled. GTA 5 shows how this can be fine... so long as you're not trying to sell it as something it isn't, which many AAA open world titles do.

The Living City is so interesting because random events are not new, at ALL. You find them across all genres of game, but open worlds, who truly would benefit from some unpredictability and spontaneity, often lack it. Spiderman, who's entire shtick is that he's the "friendly neighborhood superhero" does NOTHING to prove it in the games, aside from doing a speech at F.E.A.S.T. in the first game and a few other things, but that was scripted. The only way you get taken by surprise is due to inattention to something, like forgetting an enemy and getting shot in the back.

Open worlds should feel like they exist, live, and operate even when the camera, even when you can't see it. Worlds that often fail at this are worlds in games where each side content feels like a smaller, lower quality version of the big scripted scenes with cutscenes, rather than the character in their element or a happening as result of the fact people exist, and do things. The world can be gorgeous, and big, and full of detail and NPCs and all that, but it is still shallow because it's not trying to be a world in which you the player interact with, but another stage for the Shakespearean in-the-round play that is the campaign/plot to muck about in. It's not to be lived in, it's just to fill in the gaps between the parts the environmental design team cared about. It's not a slice of existence in which other people besides you (they player) have agency, it's a pretty picture you can walk around in. This is what causes the extreme cases of immersive disconnect.

Games that negate the full, unbridled open world experience this less since they function like movies and books, in which the director, not the audience, controls what is in focus, and what is left to imagination and assumption. That vignette feels more significant and less empty because you don't know what's outside the camera's frame, but you can have some decent guesses if the dev doesn't tell you themself. Open worlds allow the audience to point the camera wherever, but more often than not, that camera is not pointed towards the main theatre of which the developer has made the focus, they look to the things that lie outside those areas of spectacle, which in a closed world game might not be much, but in an open world game is... well, THE WORLD. If a dev leaves little depth outside the scripted sections, the world will feel hollow. It will feel not immersive since we compare these worlds to our real life world, where even within the city you live in, every square meter of it has something happening, whether you know what that is, or not, and whether you're involved in it or not. For example, Spiderman's New York City is a very pretty picture of NYC, but visit NYC in real life and you're bound to be 1000x more invested and swept up in it not just because you're there in person versus watching it on a screen, but because you sense the scale, and how the city is teeming with life, with action, even when it's out of your sight, not of your knowledge, and none of your business. Spiderman's NYC at times feels it doesn't exist outside the area surrounding where you're standing, as if time stops outside the range of Peter and Miles' hearing.

TLDR Whitelight clocked it again yall, and I've left another essay below one of his videos LOLL. Also BTW when I say "Spiderman's" I do in fact mean all 3 games.

Came for the video title, but thoroughly enjoyed the catharsis of the "remake/remaster" rant.

5:17 wasnt ready for such offensive language

This is genuinely the absolute best analysis of the current state of open world games and gaming as a whole (towards the end). Incredibly articutale and well put. Best 50 minutes I've spent on YouTube in a while.