Watch Dogs gameplay trailer calls Chicago a "hyper-connected playground"

Hey, who watches the watch dogs anyway? Ubisoft is hoping the answer is you, and is offering a new trailer as temptation. Having re-emerged from extended development, Watch Dogs ' biggest hook remains its fully explorable modern city – Chicago – which comes complete with the horseless carriages not found in its stablemate Assassin's Creed series, and a vast electronic surveillance system just begging for a morally ambiguous vigilante to muck about with.

Skilled cyber-wizard Aiden Pearce has unfettered access to Chicago's Central Operating System (CtOS), and that means immediate information on everything and everyone should you choose to grab it. As we've seen before , you can steal people's digital dollars through hacked ATMs or invade the privacy of complete strangers by spying on them through webcams, but you can also go loud and cause massive blackouts, multi-car pileups in broken intersections, or just simply skip down the sidewalk blowing manhole covers as you go. And sometimes those strangers you're pilfering data from are other players infiltrating your world to return the thefts in kind with sabotage and shootouts in a pretty slick interconnected multiplayer setup.

What's more noticeable is a pretty significant disparity in graphical punch between the current Dogs and its eyeball-clicking E3 demos from the past two years—a possible slimming result from getting a huge delay .

In other Watch Dogs news, a UK Game listing for the collector Dedsec Edition lists a Steam requirement in its Terms and Conditions, which suggests a Steam release on its May 27 launch date. Seeing as previous Ubisoft games have tied into Steam's platform in addition to launching through Uplay, it's pretty likely Watch Dogs will follow suit. Ubisoft hasn't said anything official so far.

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Omri Petitte is a former PC Gamer associate editor and long-time freelance writer covering news and reviews. If you spot his name, it probably means you're reading about some kind of first-person shooter. Why yes, he would like to talk to you about Battlefield. Do you have a few days?