Watch Dogs Legion
Liberate the city with buskers and beekeepers in WATCH DOGS LEGION.
Acouple of hours into Watch Dogs Legion I look at my small team of DedSec agents and think to myself: These people actually suck. The concept seems sound—rather than playing a traditional protagonist, you recruit a team of heroes from randomly generated, ordinary citizens of London. The problem with ordinary people, though, is that they’re ordinary. I have a filmmaker on my team. An ambulance driver. A legal assistant. A lady whose only skill is that she owns a car.
It’s not exactly a dream team, and initially I’m so uninterested in my collection of ‘heroes’ that when one of them (the car owning lady) is kidnapped by an enemy I don’t even bother rescuing her. Go ahead and keep her, I shrug. I can steal a car if I need one.
But a few hours and several new recruits later, another member of my team is kidnapped, and this time I fly into an absolute rage. This is another team member who owns a car, but it’s an extremely fast car because he’s a getaway driver. He has a skill that prevents police drones from chasing him while he’s driving, and another skill that forces every car in his path off the road, parting traffic like the Red Sea. Both are indispensable to me. He also has a cool leather jacket and driving gloves and shades—he just looks like a driver from an action movie. I like this guy a lot, and I like playing as him, and the thought of some enemy stealing him from me is absolutely unacceptable. That’s when I realize Legion’s play-as-anyone system is actually working for me, and that I’ve gotten invested in it. It just took a while to assemble a team of anyones I actually cared about.
PEOPLE PERSON
In Watch Dogs Legion, hacker group DedSec has been framed for a series of terrorist bombings in London, and its members are all dead, missing, or jailed. An oppressive private military firm, Albion, is now running London, a ruthless mob boss is running drugs, weapons and human trafficking operations in the city, and there’s also government intelligence and a billionaire tech mogul to contend with. Starting from scratch with a single, largely unremarkable citizen, I slowly assemble a new DedSec crew to fight back against Albion.
Looking for new recruits in London is an engrossing and time-consuming activity in and of itself. Scanning citizens as I pass them on the street or peeking at them through security cameras gives me a look at their attributes, both good and bad. An elderly mechanic might wield a heavy wrench for melee attacks, but have low mobility and damage resistance due to his age. A medic may have a uniform, useful for infiltrating hospitals, and a dart gun for non-lethal takedowns, but they also might be a compulsive gambler who will regularly lose DedSec’s money. A beekeeper I met has the ability to send swarms of cyberbees to attack targets, but also has incurable hiccups that can alert guards when they’re trying to be stealthy. Every trip through the city adds someone new to your shopping list, either because they seem useful, like a hacker or combat specialist, or they’re a novelty, like a guy who farts uncontrollably, or someone who may abruptly drop dead.
Each citizen has a schedule, and relationships. Even enemy guards don’t work 24-7. They leave their posts and walk around in civilian clothing, which is both a nice detail and can provide the opportunity to safely dish out some revenge when they’re not in heavily restricted areas (like I did with the one who kidnapped my getaway driver).
Now and again you’ll run into a person you met earlier, or someone who knows someone you’ve met: a relative, girlfriend, their doctor. If you’ve helped their acquaintance, they’ll know about it and have a positive opinion of you, making them easier to recruit to the cause. If you’ve beaten up their friend, they’ll know that too, and they’ll dislike you.
Most missions in Legion’s open-world are pretty similar:
DedSec has been framed for a series of terrorist bombings