Watch Dogs has been out for a little while now. Some people have beaten up on it for various things, while others think it’s a perfectly fine time. But there is one thing most of us seem to agree on: That drinking minigame is the worst.
It’s bad enough with a controller, but it’s far worse with a mouse and keyboard. You have to move the mouse around but the game fights you, and then you have to hit the number keys when they pass over the corresponding numbers and…argh…it’s so bad…
I’m not the only one who thinks so — there are numerous threads on most Watch Dogs message boards dedicated to venting about the drinking minigame and asking others for help.
Reddit user platocplx even has a pretty detailed plan to take violent revenge on the in-game perpetrators:
Im currently plotting to put IEDs around the tables. shoot them in their legs and then blow up each bar in a rampage. When I beat them. I cant be the only one plotting to murder these guys. :-
Says one user in response: “Well I hadn’t planned on it and I’ve beat them all now. But now that you mention it, I know what I’m doing next time I boot up the game.”
The minigame is of particular concern to those who collect achievements or trophies, since while it’s a side activity that only turns up once in the core story, there’s an achievement tied to completion of all the drinking challenges.
A little while back, a concerned group of gamers even took it upon themselves to create a petition to ask developer Ubisoft to patch the minigame’s difficulty. It reads:
To: Ubisoft
Dear Ubisoft,
You are a great company, sometimes you are a bit inconsistent with your mini game difficulty. Gamers would appreciate it if you fix this in your game Watch_Dogs. The “Social Lubricant” trophy/achievement is just too difficult compared to the other mini games!
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
About a month in, the petition has 1,000 signatures and counting.
Are petitions and in-game terrorism over-the-top reactions to what amounts to poor game design? Perhaps. But I dunno…play that minigame a few times and you might feel differently.
Comments
14 responses to “Watch Dogs Players United In Their Loathing Of One Minigame”
The weird part is they were nice about the mini-game achievements everywhere else. You don’t need 100% on poker and you don’t need to do every single coin run. For some reason (it sounded good on paper?) they just decided to make the drinking one require you to go beyond the unlocks.
That said poker is by far my most hated mini-game in Watch Dogs, or any game for that matter. It’s a terrible game made fun either playing with friends or gambling money on the outcome. Playing against a computer is just boring. I don’t think I’ve ever played a single open world game where I thought the poker mini-game wasn’t a total waste of my time.
Interesting, I found the poker mini game the most enjoyable .. although I agree its obviously a game more suited to playing with mates and/or for real money.
Wahh Wahh. It’s called an “achievement” for a reason. Why can’t some achievements be difficult and hard to obtain?
If it was a challenge because of difficulty it’d be fine, it’s the fact it’s so mind meltingly tedious that’s the real problem. I’m the last person to care about achievements in a game but when it’s the last one to 100% a game, I can see why it’d really annoy people
Some achievements can be harder than others but this is more like a broken achievement than a challenging one. Every other achievement in the list is at hardest moderately difficult, maybe a little grindy but generally not too time consuming (with the exception of the ‘get tailed online 5 times’ one which is just dumb). Then this one just jumps out of nowhere and says ‘now go get absurdly good at a half-luck based, extremely simple, boring mini-game and then sink a hours into it’.
Overall it’s just a textbook bad achievement in a game that mostly got achievements right. The online achievements are typically participation based or low win bars. They don’t require you to be super good, use weapons/strategies that hinder your performance/team or spend an unreasonable amount of time playing. The bulk of the achievements have in-game rewards tied to them so people who aren’t just looking to increase their gamerscore get something from it all. With the exception of the drinking games they never ask that you go too deep into the fluff content.
It’s not a terribly challenging list but it’s a fun one to complete that really drives a player to explore everything the game has to offer without overloading them with busy work collectables (500 Agility Orb style) or forcing them to play hardcore.
Bro! Its a bronze trophy & it fucking harder than a Platinum. :3
Wait this is a thing? How was this achievement hard?
I don’t care about trophies, but it’s the last one I have left, and I’ve never platinumed a game before, so I really want to get it, but, ugh. I’ve only got a few rounds left to go, but my motivation to just push through it is gone. But I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who’s already planned the gruesome murder of the drinking challengers.
Not sure about PC, but after the update 3 or 4 weeks ago, this achievement got a fair bit easier on console. They basically extended the time before you pass out if you fail a level a few consecutive times….. They might have edited the actual game to be easier as well, not sure.
IMO it was too hard for the average person to do, but the patch brought it more in line of where it should be difficulty-wise.
I understand where people are coming from but for me it was just a matter of practice, the pattern is the same every time so you learn it eventually and then its all about getting that one good run. The part I hated most about it wasn’t the difficulty, it was the fact that every time you failed it would dump you in a random location and you had to run back to the guy to try again.
Agreed. Granted it wasn’t loads of fun, but all this trophy took was practice. It takes a while, but with practice it’s doable.
I love that the sole purpose for it even being in the game is to appeal to frat boy dude bro gamers. That said, it would make for a novel drinking game to just get loaded in real life and attempt it.
I don’t think I’m a ‘dude bro’ gamer, and I liked this at first (then it just got annoying).
There was such rage over this when I did it…
I had gotten so close that I thought, ah there’s only like 4 bronze trophies left and I get the platinum, boy was I wrong. about 3 days of grinding and retrying to get this damn drinking BRONZE trophy.
I got it in the end but it’s not fun, it’s not easy and man is it repetitive.
This single bronze trophy was harder than all of the storyline combined. madness.
I actually didn’t mind the version of this in the campaign (hadn’t tried it previously) and enjoyed it enough to try get the achievement I heard so much about. But man did it stop being fun pretty dern quickly. I’ve set myself a little goal to not do shit like this if it’s not fun just to get the trophy.