Crowd Control
Ubisoft’s boldest blockbuster in years takes the N out of NPC
Watch Wa Dogs Legion takes the ‘N’ out of o NPC to form Ubisoft’s boldest bold blockbuster in years
No city is anything without its people. Yet they’re often the last thing we think about when it comes to urban open-world games. We marvel at the number of square miles of real estate we’ve been given to explore; we gaze longingly at the toys and tools we’ll eventually accumulate to help make the place our own; we stare at map screens pocked with icons, spoilt for choice about what to do and where to go next. Meanwhile, the people are often little more than hapless victims. They’re there either to sell us an illusion, the ideal of the so-called living, breathing world, or they’re targets – for violence, comedy, or perhaps both at once. Watch Dogs Legion at last gives them the opportunity to take centre stage, as you play the role of starmaker, picking one out from the crowd to recruit – and then, soon after, to become. You can be rich or poor, old or young, a middle-class espionage expert or a street-smart council-estate kid – not forgetting the women of Bletchley Park, who were hacking decades before DedSec. ‘Play as anyone’ is Legion’s exciting and wildly ambitious pitch: “The three most challenging words of my career,” creative director Clint Hocking tells us.
It is, you have to say, a very Clint Hocking kind of idea. After all, he’s well accustomed to confounding expectations. Far Cry 2 is the quintessential case in point: from forcing the player to regularly take malaria jabs to making their guns jam at critical moments, he’s always been fond of injecting a little unpredictability into tried-and-tested formulae. He’s been in charge of the game at Ubisoft Toronto from day one – “Wow, almost four years ago,” he says, as if even he’s surprised how much time has passed since his arrival. When the studio’s managing director, Alexandre Parizeau, first recruited him, it was partly for continuity’s sake – the team that had started developing the original Watch Dogs was largely the same as that which Hocking had overseen on Far Cry 2. Parizeau needed someone he could trust in leading development as the series moved over from Montreal. But he was also well aware that Hocking would offer something extra. “I told him, ‘If you bring me in, we’re going to do something really ambitious’, Hocking laughs. “And he did, so we did.”
And how. In many respects, Legion is a natural extension of what Watch Dogs has been doing since 2014. We’ve hacked into NPCs’ phones and webcams, intruding into their private lives through their tech, so taking over those lives entirely is a logical next step – albeit a large and technically complicated one. (The studio has had some help, of course: teams at Montreal, Paris, Bucharest and Kiev are all working alongside Ubisoft Toronto, while in Newcastle, Reflections is handling Legion’s vehicles and driving model.) Here, every piece of data you see when you profile a character is part of the game’s simulation. You’ll see their name, age, job and any current social issues they might be dealing with: Hocking highlights an example of a man who’s being blackmailed by a gang. Go a step further and add that person to your contacts list, and you gain details of friends and family members, alongside their daily schedule. Hocking points to a group of people on the screen. “If you were to pick any one of these people, you could follow them around, see them meeting with all their contacts, going for a drink in the pub maybe, or a jog on the waterfront – and then, say, meeting with their bookie in a back alley and making payments on their debt.”
It sounds like a fanciful notion, but once it had first been floated, Hocking says, it soon felt like the only way forward. As the concept solidified, he and his team quickly reshuffled their list of potential settings. To
WE’VE HACKED I NTO NPCS’ PRIVATE LIVES THROUGH THEIR TECH, SO TAKING OVER THOSE LIVES ENTIRELY IS A LOGICAL NEXT STEP
make the most of its big idea, Watch Dogs Legion needed a vibrant city with character and flavour, a place of rich cultural and ethnic diversity. “London quickly shot to the top of that list,” Hocking says. “And once those two ideas crossed, it really felt like a no-brainer very, very quickly.”
But the London of Watch Dogs Legion is not London as we know it today. The game’s speculative fiction puts us sometime in the 2020s – Hocking is keen not to get too specific about dates, but suffice to say, the capital is not in a good way. It’s a time of deep social crisis, when the rise of automation and artificial intelligence has sent the country’s economy into a downward spiral, leaving millions out of work – and not just blue-collar workers. The pound has been supplanted by cryptocurrency, and organised crime is rife, with gangs uniting to form large and dangerous families. People
“LONDON IS ONE OF THE MOST-WATCHED CITIES I N THE WORLD, BUT IT’S ALSO NOW BECOMING ONE OF THE MOST DEPRESSED”
are being taken from their homes and sent to deportation centres. “London is one of the most-watched cities in the world, but it’s also now becoming one of the most depressed,” Hocking says. “The Met have been massively defunded, the military is being drawn down and a private military force called Albion has taken over policing in the city.” Meanwhile, surveillance is being used to spy on the population, with dissenters being flagged and persistent offenders, well, disappeared.
It’s a scenario not unfamiliar to dystopian fiction, though its powder-keg politics are unusual for a publisher that has studiously avoided discussing any political elements in its games. It’s a surprise, then, when Hocking mentions the ‘B’ word before we even get a chance to ask him about it. “We went to London for a long research trip in the February before the Brexit vote,” he recalls. “At that point, no one was even really talking about it, and then it came upon us pretty suddenly. So we had to kind of roll with the evolving political climate.”
So yes, Watch Dogs Legion could well be the first post-Brexit blockbuster. Here, the UK is no longer part of the European Union, and people who aren’t British citizens are being kicked out. In Legion, The Oval cricket ground (here renamed after a fictional car company) has been repurposed as a deportation centre. “It’s a pre-clearance centre for sending people back to the European Union,” Hocking says. “And bureaucracy is swamped and overrun, so it’s become kind of a slum. And that’s one of our main locations in the world.”
And yet, as crowds of protesters with placards make plain, this is more a story about the one percent versus the 99 (indeed, thanks to Legion’s unique hook, you are the 99 percent) rather than the current 52/48 split. In other words, Brexit might be part of the game’s backstory, but it’s not the most important part. “It’s more about global issues,” Hocking says. “The rise of authoritarianism, increasing automation, people being displaced, the separation of rich and poor and the increasing wealth gap, and how that’s impacting the entire world. Those were our themes [before Brexit], and they’re still our themes.”
SURVEILLANCE IS BEING USED TO SPY ON THE POPULATION. DISSENTERS ARE FLAGGED AND PERSISTENT OFFENDERS DISAPPEARED
Having grown from a hacker collective to a much larger resistance movement, DedSec represents a solution of sorts – if not to all those problems, then at least a start towards fixing some of them, a way for people from different backgrounds and beliefs to put aside their differences and fight for a common cause. As such, those unfortunates in the Oval are likely to be particularly sympathetic to your cause. But even here you can’t just select a character and become them: every individual has problems, and first you must solve them. Hocking uses an example where a character’s sister needs medical treatment. “So I can go to the hospital, prioritise your sister’s healthcare treatment, pay her medical bills, and that will make your sister like me more, but it will also make you like me more.” That will encourage them to ask you for help with something trickier, which will generate what Hocking calls a “heavily templated” mission; complete that, and you’ll be able to recruit them. That’s the long version. In other cases, you might merely come to the aid of someone who’s being assaulted by Albion goons, and they’ll happily join you there and then.
Not all potential allies are equal; nor is there necessarily a correlation between the effort required to recruit one and their overall utility. You might well get lucky and find a valuable asset that doesn’t need much encouragement to join the cause. With others, it’s clear you’re wasting your time trying to change their mind. The point being, you’re free to choose – if you’re keen on creating a team of one particular archetype, you can. Though filling your squad with octogenarians might not be the best idea: it behooves you to assemble a team with diverse traits and abilities. Each character, Hocking says, will represent “a unique build that you can customise to allow you to approach the challenges of the game any way you want.” In other words, you can spread a wide range of perks between your crew rather than being forced down a particular path, giving you more flexibility in your approach to any given mission.
Though each recruit has their own quirks, they fall under three main classes. Infiltrators are stealth-focused and take advantage of a new addition to Watch Dogs’ fiction: an AR device developed by the Blume Corporation, controller of the CTOS operating system from the previous two games, which everyone owns – “a sort of personal nextgeneration mobile device,” Hocking says. Infiltrators can cloak themselves by hacking into those AR devices, to ‘delete’ themselves from view. By the same token, they can use AR cloaking to hide bodies rather than going through the old routine of dragging them into bushes or stuffing them in lockers.
YOU CAN SPREAD A WIDE RANGE OF PERKS BETWEEN YOUR CREW RATHER THAN BEING FORCED DOWN A PARTICULAR PATH
Hackers are more of a hybrid, able to complete tasks remotely, but capable of switching easily between infiltration and aggression. That’s partly thanks to their class ability, a spider-bot which can double as a turret when needed, and their ability to hijack combat drones. “It makes them fairly formidable in battle,” Hocking says, “Especially if you use perks to double down on some of those things – like the Spider Army perk, which allows you to have multiple spider-bots. And there’s another where you can directly control the turret on the spider as opposed to it being automated.”
Finally, for those who prefer to go loud, there are Enforcers, who have access to heavy weapons, as well as a sticky mine
that can be used to set traps. It’s non-lethal, too; indeed, fully half the weapons in the game fall into this category, which is divided into four sub-categories including concussion and gas-based options, representing an even bigger shift away from traditional guns than Watch Dogs 2. That, Hocking admits, was partly informed by the setting. “One of the big challenges with setting the game in London was, ‘How do we deal with police in a city where the police don’t even carry guns in most situations?’” This in turn led to the introduction of Albion, with the police essentially limited to an investigative branch of this new and powerful PMC, and also a more involved melee combat system, with dodging and blocking, grappling and combos; no one-button takedowns here. Hocking is keen to point out that lethal options are still available where necessary. “However you want to play is really important to us,” he says. “But it’s more than that. It’s whoever you want to be.”
This is a point he keeps returning to, and little wonder. An enormous amount of time and effort has gone into individualising each potential player character, so that any one of them can become the star of the story. As Hocking puts it, “There’s no dude on the box who’s there to start all the cinematics and the people you recruit are just the supporting cast.” Whoever you’re controlling, whether they’re a Shoreditch hipster or a middle-aged gangster, will appear and perform in the cutscenes you see. There are, Hocking says, 20 different versions of Legion’s script. “And I don’t just mean people saying the same lines. We’re talking different characters, different personas, different voices, different acting.”
All of which raises an obvious question: how? “We’re using technology to alter all the voices so that even if you happen to recruit Joe and John and they have the same actor and the same personality, when they talk to each other, you won’t know it’s the same actor because we modulate the voices,” he says. The studio has used photogrammetry to capture dozens of different faces, which have been combined using innovative animation techniques to produce “literally thousands” of unique heads. Couple that