Watch Dogs 2 and Its Impact On Me as a Nerd and Engineer

This game is old, not old “Virtual Cop 2” old but still it's like 4 years old so some people call it old. I don't even buy it, I got it from Ubisoft Forward Event when Ubisoft announced WD Legion which to be honest has its own charm by having a “community-driven” vibe in it with generated chara, but I digress.

This game is not new to me either, being a broke boy I watch the walkthrough to see the story but playing myself opened my eyes a little more haha.

Spoiler Warning btw….but meh, it’s kinda generic anyway

In the game, we’re playing a Marcus Holloway or Retr0, a low-time Hacker who’s wrongly flagged by CtOS 2.0 in San Francisco, and with the help of Wrench, Sitara, Josh, Horatio, and T-Bone he helped to liberate SF from the grip of Blume and other corporation’s corruption towards people.

The story is to be very honest of you, very generic..a hacker group liberating people from greedy companies. The gameplay though, is something else, the sense of freedom to achieve the goal is unreal, and the hacking theme by itself but I’ll talk about this more

The Sense of Freedom in Gameplay……MY GOD!!!

The game itself let us do whatever we want to achieve the goal of the mission, they divide the playstyle into 3 types, silence and stealthy ‘Ghost’, loud and proud gun-blazing ‘Aggressor’, and last my favorite is the chaos-inducing ‘Trickster’.

well in reality, you might blend 2 or all styles but it’s amazing how they bring so much possibility, I remember one of the missions on the New Dawn Church where I didn't even step inside the building and instead just finish it with my RC jumper or when on one of the Tezcas mission instead of me killing the enemy, and since I didn't buy any lethal weapons I just do fake hit to make another gang kill the target, it creates a lot of chaos but lots of fun.

What’s The Impact on Me Anyway?

I have always been into technology, robotics, programs, and things like that, and it seems my mom knew it since little, she gave me MIT’s ‘Scratch’ book when I'm in 6th grade, I'm so happy that I can make interesting stuff….at least in the eyes of 6th grade

also, take a look at this vid…

Like oh my god, everything in this video represents almost everything I do on my table, well I'm not making guns or doing corporate espionage but the general vibe and how mess the table is, it just hit home.

the 3d printer making something, salvaged electronics, tools everywhere, and the soldering, it's just wow I've never been immersed so much in video games.

their dialogue is also very familiar in my brain, from talking nonsense about pop culture like anime or something, saying something with reference to..idk, sounds funny??

So this game is realistic? eh not really, kinda

they’re many reactions from real hackers about this game, mainly from Samy Kamkar (the one who created the “but most of all, Samy is my hero” worm), I'm not a hacker by any means, heck I don't know how to do social engineering, but compare to other popular media like Mr. Robot, this game is “super-powered speed up hacker”.

the nerd 🤓 explanation is Marcus(the main guy) install a backdoor in the first mission to enable access on CtOS 2.0, so he can control anything that is connected to it, but if you watch the cutscene at the end of the first mission he types something, probably to run a script but in the game, we just click one button cause..duh you don't want to code in Watch Dogs game.

makes me interested more in Cybersecurity

while I don't really start to learn cybersecurity(yet), this game ignites my interest in being an engineer/maker as a whole, I'm a jack of all trades but a master of none, I like robotics, 3d printing, electronics, bla bla bla thx to this game, hell my thesis is about AI and Microcontroller.

but I am keen to learn about cybersecurity, at least want to try to understand why I can break this, and how to mitigate stuff.

thx ubisoft, maybe you actually help to make me become what I am