Watch Dogs is Ubisoft’s latest hacking game. In Watch Dogs, players travel around Chicago and complete missions by hacking into smartphones, electrical grids, and other important things.
Players simply need to press a button to immediately hack into most electronic devices in the game. That makes many people think that Watch Dogs is totally unrealistic.
Unfortunately for those people, Watch Dogs isn’t as fake as people think. In fact, parts of the game are disturbingly realistic.
In the words of the game’s content director, Thomas Geffroyd, “Everything you do in the game is feasible in one way or another.”

How is Watch Dogs realistic in any way? Well, it’s not totally realistic, but it has elements of reality. Here are some of the realistic components of Watch Dogs:
-In Watch Dogs, players interact with the city through a Centralized Operating System, ctOS, which controls virtually everything within a city. Although no such systems exist in any city in the world, Geffroyd estimates that we’ll see centralized city-based operating systems within the next 5 to 10 years because “it’s the most efficient thing to do.”
-Ubisoft spent three years researching hacking, which was relatively easy to do online because “…the hacking and security community are very adamant about sharing everything on the internet.”
-Ubisoft went to Defcon, Blackhat, and other major hacking conferences to gain technical knowledge and understand hacking culture.
-Ubisoft hired security specialists from Kaspersky to read through the game’s script and tweak Watch Dogs to make it more realistic.
-A smartphone was used as the main hacking tool because Ubisoft wanted to make average people aware how much information they share over their smartphones.
-Today’s smartphone users simply tap “accept, accept, accept” when greeted with privacy requests from apps. Ubisoft wanted to illustrate the consequences of that on society.
-Ubisoft claims that it predicted every news piece from the last two years during the game’s development: “That wasn’t expected, it just turned out that way. It was part of the goal to make a game that would be relevant to today’s world. We just didn’t expect it would be so relevant.”

Ultimately, Ubisoft claims it spent three years researching hacking to make sure its game was realistic and accurate. As with all video games, a fair bit of artistic license was used to recreate the experience, but there’s still a surprising amount of truth to the game.
In any case, Watch Dogs is currently available on all major platforms, including current-gen and next-gen consoles.