Watch Dogs started out as Ubisoft’s Grand Theft Auto, but with hacking mechanics. But with Watch Dogs: Legion, it has now carved its own identity, at the sacrifice of some of the best parts seen in Watch Dogs 2.
It’s a bold move, but I like where this is going. Watch Dogs: Legion tasks you to build your own group of the hacker resistance DeadSec by recruiting any Londoners you can find walking the streets. And you know what, it bloody works.
We Are Legion
Watch Dogs 2 did good with the character and cast. Marcus Holloway is an interesting protagonist with a loveable DeadSec crew supporting him. In Watch Dogs: Legion, however, outside of a few key characters, DeadSec London is made up of NPCs you recruited. After the tutorial intro, the game begins with you picking an operative from a random pool of characters, but from there on, all the recruits are from the NPCs you see on the streets.
Watch Dogs: Legion expands on the profiling mechanic where you can privy into the digital footprint of pedestrians. But instead of just getting flavour texts, you also get to see what sort of abilities they have should they join DeadSec.
Most of them makes sense, a courier gets access to a scooter and a parcel drone. Some of them needed the flavour text to make sense – a 70-year-old baker owning a gun and can do gun-katas because he signed-up for alpha tests for upcoming guns. Some are just unintentionally ironic – my first recruit is a guy who failed a motorcycle license test, but still owns a personal motorcycle he can summon at any time.
Oi! You Look OK, Get In
And if you love the flavour text, once you mark them as a potential recruit, you can see a longer selection of information and past history. Some are just fun flavour texts (a politician with recorded searches of specific sexual fetishes? Spicy) and it also includes relationships with other NPCs that you can also find on the streets.
These NPCs also have schedule- they’ll go to work, meet with friends and visit other places during the 24-hour cycle. It’s kind of like a Nemesis System, but for keeping track of allies, not nemeses.
I’ve spent a good five hours just strolling the London streets to find for suitable recruits, ignoring the first few missions that begins the game properly. And impressively, the folks of London are diverse. Not only in skin colour, but also in the variety of jobs and traits they can carry. I also love the variety of accents the voices can be. From Irish to Indian English, there’s quite the variety to capture the diverse backgrounds of these Londoners, and that should be applauded.
Recruiting these folks are also fun (for a while). Some are just willing to join the cause after seeing your heroic deeds on the street, or helping them or their close associates directly. I once got a potential recruit immediately agreeing to join DeadSec after rescuing his daughter from being abused by the Albion private cops that you want to take down. Some NPCs require additional convincing- like doing some delivery of sensitive information or wiping sensitive data from a server.
There’s also recruitment missions, where a potential recruit will ask you a favour like saving a friend who’s being deported, or steal two years worth of drugs, or stop them from unknowingly supporting a human trafficking ring.
Randomness Has Its Limits
That being said, it does fall apart. There’s a limited pool of voice actors for these NPCs and when you have two characters with the same voice talking to each other, it just sounds rather silly. Same as seeing the same face preset on the NPC a few times.
The recruitment missions also can be repetitive. That’s why I can specifically mention what some of them are- it’s been on repeat for too many times. The locations for the mission objectives may change, but it’s still the same flow. If you hate the usual “go to restricted area/outpost and do objective”, you probably won’t be eager to recruit that many operatives as I did.
The randomness of the NPCs also mean building the optimal team can be a dice roll. Especially if you are looking for a very specific archetype. For me, getting a football hooligan to spawn was too rare. Or I just don’t where to look for one.
Luckily it’s offered as a reward for clearing a borough so there’s a guaranteed way of getting that. Good luck finding that exact grandma that’s also a professional killer seen in promotional materials. Though there are a variety of elderly people that can join DeadSec.
Watch Dogs: Legion Made Me Appreciate Watch Dogs 2 Better
The “Play As Anyone” really made me appreciate Watch Dogs 2 more in retrospect. Marcus has earbuds where he can play music anytime and his banter with the DeadSec crew really keeps the story beat worth pursuing.
In Watch Dogs: Legion, you can’t listen to music anytime (at least as far I’ve been playing right now). The DeadSec crew you recruit will appear during story missions, but you won’t get witty banter- just normal lines. Though it’s still cool to see who from your crew will the game pull into the main story and cutscenes each time.
Watch Dogs: Legion also makes you play with a limited toolset, instead of having Marcus’ full-range of stealth and combat skills. Gun choices are limited, and so are the hacking gadgets.
However, I’d argue that it’s a good choice overall. There’s so many open-world games that lets you be the one-man show with all the tools and solutions to a problem available. Having these recruitable NPCs with limited toolkit encourages you to play a certain style, or find the right recruit for the circumstance.
You can’t instigate gang wars as easily in Legion like it was in WD 2, sure, but the game encouraging you to a different playstyle based on who you are playing as helps give the game variety, and avoid you burning out of going to the same outposts and clearing it the same way over and over because it’s the most efficient way to do so. Because those outposts are still here in Legion.
Either way, by making Watch Dogs: Legion not just a Watch Dogs 3, the second game from 2016 now feels like an even better game when it was just another sequel to a Ubisoft game. And this is why we should encourage sequels to make big changes once in a while.
Side Note: The Day-1 PC Experience
I played Watch Dogs: Legion on launch, and like many of you, the experience was rough. PC performance was sloppy since graphics card drivers didn’t arrive on game launch.
I am also not sold on the Nvidia RTX features here. The ray-traced reflections are too costly in performance for my RTX 2060 running on a gaming laptop. Turning ray-tracing off and having the reflections on high still produced good enough puddle reflections for me. And I haven’t found any performance benefits with Nvidia DLSS yet.
Another problem plaguing the PC version is cloud saves not properly working. There are instances where the game is stuck while autosaving when quitting to the main menu, with the only way to close the game is via Alt+F4. Many folks have reported on loss progress, and it’s something we have to deal with too, which sucks.
Closing Thoughts
Watch Dogs: Legion is a bold move. Considering this is from Ubisoft which usually sticks to a proven formula to their games, it’s a move we should encourage.
Some will see the reliance of emergent gameplay elements as a step back, as it lacks that sense of polish or personal touch. Which is a fair point. If that isn’t pulling you in- then this is still another open-world game you’ve probably played before.
But if you love messing around with a sandbox that lets you have your own fun thanks to the recruit any NPC system, Legion will definitely appeal to you more than any previous Watch Dogs entries.
And personally, I love seeing more AI shenanigans, especially with this new console generation coming. It’s about time we see NPCs doing more than just scenery fillers and obstacles to run over.
Impressions based on the PC version. Review copy purchased by reviewer