Topic: Watch Dogs - Wii U: constantly accessing disc drive?

I've seen Watch Dogs going for £11.60ish and am very tempted to buy for my collection, but have seen a couple of comments suggesting the game constantly accesses the disc, potentially at the expense of disc drive lifespan.

Can anyone who has owned the Wii U disc and played any significant amount of time with the game provide any input on this issue?

It has to since the wiiu only has 1 gig of usable ram for games. i wouldnt worry about the lifespan of a disc drive.
will say this, the game suffers from some horrible framerate problems to the point I found to be unplayable.
I ended up getting rid of the game and picking it up for the xbone. Really liked this game, unfortunately its not great on the wiiu.

A situation like this one is why I'm saddened that Nintendo hasn't implemented Xbox 360 style optional disc installations.

For someone such as myself that buys retail, that would actually give me an excellent reason to add an external hard drive to my Wii U to ease wear & tear on the console's disc drive while speeding load times. But as it is, the built-in 32 gigs of memory will never come close to being filled with game saves, patches, the occasional expansion, and eShop exclusives like Virtual Console downloads.

Thanks for posting. I think I'll hold off until I see it dirt cheap some time in the future

I'd say £11 ish is a bargain for this. I've not noticed any frame rate issues & think its a far superior version than PS360. Its a unique game (in my opinion) & haven't stopped playing it since I got it in December. As for disc access, I guess most games are constantly updating from the drive which should be able to cope with it.

Digital is the only common sense option for 3rd party Wii U games given that only Nintendo seems to be able to optimize their games well for that system. That said, the price is of course about 4 times higher so I'd recommend not getting it at all until a huge eshop sale (e.g. £9.99).

Now here is a topic I can respond to with exstenive personal experience. I've played nearly 100 hours of both WD and AC4 Black Flag on WiiU. I also played about 10 hours on PS3 of WD. The framerate and overall look is smoother and cleaner on WiiU than PS3 for Watch Dogs. The framerate still isn't great, especially during high speed chases, but I am almost at 100% completion, so the framerate isn't show-stopping, either. And although the game has a lot of high speed driving, it also has sneaking and pop-and-fire cover shooting. The later is very little impacted by the framerate, especially in doors, which some of the combat is. As for AC 4 Black Flag, that's also a very fun game on Wii U, and the gamepad map is even more helpful there than in WD, but the framerate is a notch worse than in WD. In that case, the PS3 version is my choice.

As for the disk drive, yes, it spins a lot for W_D, but at some point you have to ask yourself, isn't that what it was made for? I don't think it's as bad as some of the Call of Duty games on the original Wii, as far ash sound and extent of disc seeking. WD on Wii is REALLY fun, I loved it.

The solution for this as always is to just do the "DIGITAL 4 LYFE BABY!" thing.

(Kind of irrelevant images tangentially relevant to D4L).

Digital drives are subject to failures from extensive use too.

Played it on the PS4 and it was one of the first of many truly terrible "AAA" titles that led me to sell my PS4.

Slow, and boring are my best two words to use to describe Watch Dogs.

However since the Wii U will never have GTA V. It's the best alternative you can get

Yes but the cost to replace a flash drive/external hard drive is way cheaper than a disc drive. Plus you don't have to send your system anywhere

You're assuming the internal flash memory won't fail. That's not (easily) replaceable as far as I know.

Flash memory can fail just super unlikely to. No moving parts and low power consumption makes this live for a really long time lol

None of my disc drives have failed either. Some are even 20 years old.

Can someone explain what is meant by the "life of the disc drive" and how running a disc on the system (which is what it's supposed to do) would damage it?

With any mechanical part such as a disc drive the more the parts move (disc spins) it wears out the part. Eventually a mechanical part can give out