The original Watch Dogs arrived on the PC with a stunning amount of technical problems, but once the patches arrived, many players enjoyed what was often a pretty decent game, albeit one with a personality vacuum for a protagonist. If you missed out the first time around, you can now grab a copy without handing over any cash.
The PC version of the third-person, open-world title is free from November 7 through to November 13 to those registered for Ubisoft's Uplay digital distribution service. You can get it from 11 AM ET today, but the game can be preloaded right now.
Watch Dogs is currently available on Steam for $29.99, so whatever your thoughts on protagonist Aiden Pearce, the Grand Theft Auto-meets-hacking gameplay, and Uplay in general, this seems like a pretty good deal.
Watch Dogs famously garnered a lot of hype following its E3 trailer back in 2012, which brought controversy over how much better it looked than the finished game. When it arrived on PC, optimization problems meant it was almost unplayable on all but the most powerful rigs, and even those struggled with the highest settings. Some buyers, myself included, found the game suddenly stopped working altogether and had to wait a month before a patch addressed the issue. Eventually, more patches fixed the game's problems, but they came too late to repair its tarnished reputation on the platform.
The sequel, Watch Dogs 2, was released in November last year. It moved the setting from Chicago to San Francisco, replaced Aiden (though he does make a cameo appearance), and was an improvement over its predecessor. Despite all this, launch sales didn't come close to matching the first game, which, as one of the first big PS4/Xbox One titles, sold extremely well.