Watch Dogs 2 game director Danny Belanger.
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Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2 game director tells us how to take on the surveillance state

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 8 min

Watch Dogs 2 is an open world game about hacktivists taking on the smart city of San Francisco. Its anti-hero is Marcus Holloway, a hacker who is wrongly accused of a crime as a result of manipulation of data from San Francisco’s smart operating system, ctOS 2.0.

Holloway joins the hacktivist group DedSec, which is modeled after real-world hackers, and his goal is to bring down the smart city and its maker, the Blume corporation. Ubisoft’s Danny Bélanger, director of the game, told me in an interview that you have to walk the line between stealthy hacking and brute-force action if you want to complete the missions and unravel the mystery of the story.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.