I don't think liquid water is sufficient by itself - first, aside from water, life as we know it requires some source of energy. Since surface water seems much less common than subsurface water, that means life will need to get energy from some sort of chemical process similar to the bacteria that live around hydrothermal vents. That means those vents need to exist in the first place, and need to expel sufficient chemicals for energy creation.

There also may need to be some source of extremely high bursts of energy such as lightning, to create the compounds that are precursors to life (amino acids, RNA, etc.), and those bursts must also not be so frequent/widespread that they kill all life.