How To Actually Get Your Free Copy Of ‘Watch Dogs 2’ From Ubisoft Forward

This story was updated on 7.12.20

Well, things didn’t work quite as Ubisoft had intended when it came to the free giveaway from the Ubisoft Forward event. High demand crashed the Uplay login servers, meaning that huge numbers of people weren’t able to actually claim their free copy of Watch Dogs 2, even though they had watched the event.

It took a few hours for the company to turn things around, but there’s a workaround in place that you can take advantage of even if you didn’t actually watch the event. You need to go to this webpage here, where you’ll be directed to either login or register a Uplay account.

It still doesn’t seem like the game will be rewarded right away, however. Originally copies were slated to be delivered to Uplay accounts on July 13, and we assume that’s still the case. So if you do this right away, don’t expect to get playing until the next day. You will also, of course, need the Uplay launcher to download and install the game.

Watch Dogs might have been a strange, confused game that didn’t wind up delivering much more than a Ubisoft version of GTA with some magic thrown in (or hacking, whatever), but Watch Dogs 2 was a much more interesting take on the hacking-based open world game, with a broad, effective look at power, race and technology in the bay area. I do still wish that the game had been able to fully commit to this open world hacking game and remove guns entirely, but I suppose, at the end of the day, you’ve still got to have some guns in there.

Ubisoft is clearly giving away Watch Dogs 2 to build hype for Watch Dogs: Legion, which we’re bound to see more of today. It takes place in a near-future fascistic London, and it doesn’t have a primary protagonist: instead, you assemble your band of revolutionaries from skilled members of the general populace. Both the setting and the multiple character idea make it easier to reconcile the whole guns thing, but the developer has also said that it’s trying to build out significant nonlethal options as well.

Erik Kain did a preview of Legion where he found to perfectly solid, but a little tedious in that way that Ubisoft open world games can be, a particularly keen problem when we’ve also got Assassin’s Creed Valhalla coming out.