A New Patch Tweaked Watch Dogs 2’s Ending, And Fans Are Wondering Why

A new 10GB patch for Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2 fixes bugs, adds new clothing, tweaks some systems and primes the game for some downloadable expansions, but it also adds a mysterious conversation to the game’s final cutscene. That’s got people guessing, since game endings don’t usually get patched.

Spoilers follow, of course.

Watch Dogs 2‘s ending still largely remains the same. Protagonist Marcus Holloway and his Dedsec hacking crew still beat their nemeses, still broadcast their righteous message of information freedom to the world, still try to wake people up to what’s really going on in the world. But, before the game returns control to the player to mop of any remaining sidequests in Watch Dogs 2‘s massive open world, an audio conversation plays between two mysterious figures (You can see the appended cutscene at this link, as captured by YouTuber Frenzy. The new stuff starts at the 2:15 mark):

Man 1: How much of this is hyperbole? Has it really gone global?

Man 2: There are new Dedsec cells popping up everywhere. The Middle East, South America, Europe. And not just them. We can’t even keep up with all the new hacktivist groups.

Man 1: Alright. Make the call.

Man 2: You Sure?

Man 1: Do it.

Atop their conversation are coordinates that, when punched into Google Maps, lead to the Brixton area of London.

Is the new dialogue hinting at a location for Watch Dogs 3? Or is it indeed about the DLC?

The planned DLC expansions for WD2 seem to take place in San Francisco, so these references to non-U.S. locations have fans on the game’s subreddit and message boards buzzing. (I’ve played the game to the end and am wondering about this, too.)

When asked, a Ubisoft rep said: “The production team wanted to include a little something extra at the end of the campaign to expand the Watch Dogs lore and hint at the potential future of DedSec.”

The meta context for this is that Watch Dogs 2 has not been the huge hit Ubisoft expected it to be and has fallen short of the explosive sales of the first game. While it is generally considered to be a superior sequel, fans burned by the first may be taking that out on the second, leading to reasonable questions about whether the franchise would even continue. In a press release last week about recent game sales, Ubisoft noted of Watch Dogs 2: “Launch not as dynamic as expected, but momentum now positive.”

Games have had game balance tweaks for ages, but patches that change or add to a game’s narrative are rare, if increasingly common, sometimes for the sake of improving a game and other times to hype a new project.

Most famously, in 2012, BioWare patched and expanded the ending of Mass Effect 3 to assuage some fan’s displeasure with the ending. In 2010, Valve had re-worked the ending of the first Portal when beginning to tease the development of Portal 2.

Last year, Activision added the arrival of a spaceship to one of its Call of Duty Black Ops III maps to tease the announcement of the space-based Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. And Square Enix is promising a patch to expand and improve the story of the recently released Final Fantasy XV.