Watch Dogs 2 will debut on Wednesday before hitting the stage at E3

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You won’t have to wait until E3 to get your first good look at Watch Dogs 2. A countdown clock on the official Watch Dogs site (opens in new tab) confirms a world premiere video set to debut on Wednesday, June 8 at 9 am PDT / 5 pm BST. Better still, the clock’s looping video background seems to give us our first official look at Watch Dogs 2 (opens in new tab)‘s new protagonist.

You can only see his phone, his lower arm, and the back of his pants and shirt, but there are still plenty of details to extract. First off, chances are good that he is indeed the young bespectacled man (opens in new tab) played by actor Cort King; he’s wearing a different shirt and jacket but those look like the same pants as in the picture, and his skin tone is about right.

Second, you can see the DedSec logo in the background of several of the command line scripts on his phone (the programs themselves are too small to read). The new guy may be a member of the hacking group – which saw a major leadership shakeup in Watch Dogs’ Bad Blood DLC – or he may just use their tools. Original protagonist Aiden Pearce had a sometimes cooperative, sometimes adversarial relationship with DedSec, though he’s supposedly in hiding now. 

And third, the word “Empire” shows up in big ASCII letters on the background of his phone. It looks a bit Star Wars-y, as in Empire Strikes Back, though that’s probably just a nod to the geeky pedigree of the software. New York is the Empire State, and if Watch Dogs 2 is moving on from Chicago, New York City would be a likely destination (it was good enough for The Division (opens in new tab)). That’s a lot of speculation to pull from one little piece of ASCII art, admittedly.

Ubisoft has confirmed that Watch Dogs 2 will also appear at its E3 stage show (opens in new tab) on Monday, June 13, so we’ll hear even more about it soon after the debut event. Oh, also the website’s source code has a troll face at the top for folks who go snooping around. I would have been more surprised if a meme wasn’t hidden somewhere in there, honestly.

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