Unboxing: Watch_Dogs Dedsec Edition

Long time no post!  It's in part due to the fact that I'm actually writing The Rose Queen—I know, me, writing; whatever is the world coming to—and partly because I am a lazy arse.  I'm pretty sure you've already noticed the latter.

I didn't feel like I was making much progress with The Rose Queen to be honest, until I actually paid attention to my total word count last night and realised it's currently at 21,000 words.  So... not a novella then.

Short update aside, that isn't what this post is about (I'll maybe do a dedicated one later on).  Nooo, this post is about the downright huge box that arrived this morning.

Meep.  AC:IV for size reference.

 I normally preorder games from Game due to things like shiny reward points and supporting British game stores, but in this case they'd actually sold out of the Xbox One version(!) so I bought it from Amazon instead.  That comes with the added advantage of coming via Amazon's delivery network, which now they've worked out the kinks is pretty good and means deliveries arrive when they're supposed to.  Anything using the Royal Mail here is at the mercy of the postman—which can mean anything from the delivery driver shoving a "You Weren't In" card through the door when I plainly was, to returning items without attempting to deliver them because they were damaged by postal staff, to outright theft.  (Yes, all three have happened to me; the first and last most recently.)

Rant aside...  I thought the size of the box would be misleading, because sometimes things are packed to the gills with paper and plastic, and the contents are tiny.

And to be fair, when I opened it, this was the first thing I saw, so you can't blame me.  So I dug in, started fishing around in the box and realised...

I hereby claim this box...

It wasn't misleading at all.  I was not expecting that.  The last special edition I ordered was DmC, which came with a hoodie, soundtrack CD and DLC, and all items were separate in the cardboard box.  To have it arrive in a nice box was... unexpected, although possibly shouldn't be because Ubisoft have a history of nice packaging.

The skinny little legs in the background belong to Q, a cat with a pathological love of boxes.  He'd perked up when I bought the box in, and now he was going to nonchalantly come and 'look'.

Once I unwrapped the packaging (so much for Amazon's eco-friendly stuff, the amount of plastic that went into covering this!), I was again surprised.

The box is nicely designed and the inside packaging is designed with a place for every piece of the special edition kit—although in my case, a lot of it had slid down during transit.  You can see the bottom of the Augmented Reality card box beneath the game box, which should have been much higher up, but all the contents were safe and undamaged.

The full extent of the contents is still surprising, considering IMO the price isn't that much higher than a standard Xbox One game.  It comes with a fairly large and very nicely detailed Aiden Pearce figure, soundtrack, AR cards, map, artbook and three badges as well as the steelcase box.  Aiden comes in his own safe packaging to protect him, so he hadn't budged in the slightest in transit.  I've yet to find a good home for him (he's bigger than Shiki and Akira on my desk, so between them doesn't work) so he's gone back into his box for now.  Everything seems nicely detailed: the artbook is hardback and filled with beautiful concept art, the cards come in a staggered file-type packaging with their own box, and the map is made of glossy, good-quality paper and fits neatly into the steelcase box for handy reference.

By this point, I'd moved the packing box and paper contents to one side; you can see Q eyeballing it.  He hopped in not long after and proceeded to traumatise the parrot, who thought a kraken had moved in under his cage...

So, that's the unboxing of the Watch_Dogs Dedsec edition.  If anyone wants closer, more detailed pictures of anything, just let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I've not even had a chance to play it yet!  That's this afternoon's entertainment...