They're about Hollywood-style hacking, designed to look and feel like elite code cracking and cybercrime without requiring much - if any - actual hacking knowledge. These are games that make the player a cyber hacker in the way popular culture imagines this to be. HackMud developer Sean Gubelman points to both Uplink and Hacknet for the strong theming of their core hacking mechanics. Hacknet and Uplink - Hollywood-style hacking coolness TAKEAWAY: If the theme and story allows for it, arming players with a hacker's toolkit of special skills and gadgets can be a delightful, refreshing, and possibility-laden way to escape the dominant modality of 3D action and open-world games. ' Watch Dogs 2 never explicitly says it,' he continues, 'but everything about the character personalities, dialogue, and tone of the game steers you away from weapons and toward the way-more-fun gadgets and hacking tools.' 'Even though a wide selection of firearms and weapons is included,' notes Quadrilateral Cowboy and Thirty Flights of Loving developer Brendon Chung, 'using them just kinda feels like. Watch Dogs 2 is a fine example in how to give players a large range of ways to interact with the world while simultaneously nudging them to favor a subset of available options. The player can hack into security cameras around the city, remotely hijack cars (either one or many at a time), drain people's bank accounts, redirect electrical currents to power gates and elevators, and much more. It's little wonder, then, that the player is armed with a plethora of fun hacking tools - in addition to all the usual open-world fare. Whether it's the InfoSec-rooted storyline or the hacktivist credentials of its lead character and his team, or the remote-controlled contraptions and Internet of Things trickery, this is a game that's as much about the ethics of tech-powered vigilantism as about holding technology corporations accountable for their wanton breaches of customer privacy and the security flaws of their products. Watch Dogs 2's satire-laden cautionary tale on the dangers of unchecked, unregulated technological progress has hacking woven into its very DNA. Watch Dogs 2 - an open-world hacker's toolkit With that in mind, we reached out to several developers for their help building a list of games with hacking mechanics that every dev should study.

These days hacking is more topical than ever, and for anyone making a game that even flirts with the implications of the growing interconnectedness and networking capabilities of objects and devices all over the world - and the sometimes-questionable security protocols protecting them - it's rife for potential as a video game mechanic.

Pc hacking games