Watch Dogs 2 Runs Just Fine On PC

The first Watch Dogs game was a mess on PC. The sequel, thankfully, is not.

I took the game for a spin last night on my almost-two-year-old PC and found that, after only one adjustment (turning v-sync on, as it was off by default and chopping up everything), the game’s default GeForce Experience optimized settings—normally not something I like to dabble with—did a real good job!

Here’s a video of me trying to put the game through its paces by driving like a maniac and panning the camera around a lot while I crash into traffic because I wasn’t looking where I was going.

For reference, my specs are a i5 4690 3.5ghz, GTX 980 and 16GB of RAM running Windows 10.

And here are the settings I’ve been playing on:

Now for the caveats: is this game going to run perfectly for everyone? No. It’s a PC game. Don’t be ridiculous. There will always be those who through bad luck or bad purchasing are stuck with a hardware combination that will cause them problems. For example, me and Kirk are playing without a hitch, while Nathan is having some problems. But forums and discussions aren’t anywhere near as flooded with despair as they were with the original.

Is it as optimised as, say, The Witcher 3? No, it’s not. Even when you think you’ve got your settings settled and running smoothly you’ll probably hit points where the action drops under 60fps.

But are your chances good that you will be able to boot this game up and play it without any dramatic or game-ending issues, all the while enjoying something that looks pretty damn nice? The answer is a lot more likely to be “yes” than it was with, say, Watch Dogs 1, or Assassin’s Creed Unity. This game is fine, as you’ll find from benchmark reviews on sites like Guru3D and Techpowerup

If you’ve got the game and want to play around with your settings, there’s a useful Nvidia guide here, while GAF’s performance thread is also probably worth a bookmark