![]() It’s the complete opposite of Watch Dogs 2, and players could’ve spent dozens of hours leveling up Aerith, and falling in love with her before she met her unfortunate demise. The game took a huge risk by killing off a key character, one that was the focus of the story up until that point. In fact, a death is a huge reason as to why Final Fantasy VII is just as beloved in 2016 as it was in 1997. It’s one of the few things that can resonate at a universal scale, and if pulled off correctly it can be incredible. Loss is something that every human, no matter their upbringing or culture, has experienced and can sympathize with. It’s disappointing to see games fail at telling such a simple story. ![]() It shows that even in a game that is filled with permanent death, developers can find it hard to commit. Even worse, the game makes the seem even more meaningless by bringing her back to life in an optional side-mission. The problem is once again that she was given roughly five minutes of screen time, and that there was no connection. Early on in the game, the kingdom’s Queen ends up falling to her death. One recent game to try to get an emotional moment with a death was Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Awakening. It’s rare for a video game death to seem meaningful, and in the rare case that it’s pulled off correctly, it’s typically done at the very end. This issue isn’t unique to Watch Dogs 2, and it’s actually quite common in games. Unless you’re willing to write and produce alternate scenes for these side-missions, you can’t have the quest giver die and then make parts of the game unavailable. Well, they could just lock players out of content, but it would be an incredibly gutsy move that would end up upsetting players. Watch Dogs 2 is filled with side-missions, and that’s where a lot of the character moments are hidden. While I think the death is incredibly lame, I do understand why Ubisoft took the cheap route. It’s a disappointing low point in a game that alternates between good and poor writing. The whole idea failed in execution, and it seems like Horatio is only in the game in order to die. That’s great in theory, and if they had killed off any of the game’s other characters, it could’ve actually had been memorable. ![]() With the way it’s setup, Ubisoft gets to pat themselves on the back for a great narrative twist where a main character is killed. My immediate reaction wasn’t shock when I discovered Horatio’s dead body, it was just “Oh, so that’s why Ubisoft had the previous mission focus on him.” It’s Not Uncommon It’s too little too late, though, and it makes the death feel predictable in retrospect. It’s there that the game reveals that he also works at Nudle (the game’s Google equivalent) and it attempts to give him some depth. Horatio is cast aside almost immediately, and isn’t really brought back into the spotlight until the mission before his death. The player isn’t a monster for not caring, it just demonstrates how terrible the storytelling here is. While Marcus is struck emotionally, the player has no attachment to Horatio, and is just left to wonder if they are a monster for not caring about his death. It’s the one moment where Watch Dogs 2 justifies violence from Marcus, and it should be a huge moment. The usual wisecracking protagonist gets emotional over losing his brother-in-arms, and vows to seek revenge. It turns out that Horatio was murdered by an Oakland gang called the Tezcas.įor Marcus it’s an extremely emotional moment. What he finds isn’t pretty, as he discovers a grisly scene. One of the game’s later missions has the character going missing and Marcus has to then track him down. Horatio feels like a throwaway character, so it feels rather strange that he’d be involved in what should be a pivotal plot point in Watch Dogs 2. Who Was That? Minor, sadly, spoilers incoming. He’s given no personality or any sort of character in a game that is filled with larger-than-life ones. The reason I don’t is because he’s immediately thrown into the background for the majority of the game, and he just sits at a desk for all of eternity. The fifth member is Horatio, the group’s only black member at the beginning of the game, and I really wish I had a better description than that for him.
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