Watch Dogs: Legion Preview: Smash The System Alongside Grandma
Watch Dogs: Legion looks like a brilliant mix of catch ’em all recruiting and open world system-hacking mischief in a slightly futuristic London.
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Who are all of those people on the street in video games walking past, living out their dramas, distracted by AI routines? Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs series tried writing these lives out beyond the usual simplistic NPC clone out of hundreds. The second game subverted many expectations of open world games, emphasizing platforming, hacking puzzles, social engineering, and B&E, along with some action and drone warfare. Now, finally, Watch Dogs: Legion reveals the series’ greatest leap forward in the AAA open world experiment: the chaotic recruitment of any of those selected passersby.
We’ll get to that facet, but introductions are in order; Watch Dogs 2 wasn’t just an open-world game with a few twists, but a persuasively forward-reaching contemporary narrative invoking the fears and kinks of the hyperconnected world, all with a cheeky joie de vivre. Unlike the first Watch Dogs, the plot in the sequel tracked the growth of the mostly-young, mostly-hip hacker collective DedSec as they enacted subversive escapades against the status quo dot coms vice grip on the present era, impolite stand-ins for the Facebooks and Apples of the world. The ironies were, of course, rampant – Ubisoft sits among a select group of AAA corporate gaming megaliths contending with a litany of their own critical housekeeping, to put it very lightly – but the tone and intentions of the game’s plot were admirable and much more genuine than Wrench’s arch visage implied. The main character, young Black hacker Marcus Holloway, was a fascinating and upbeat personality, and the story took him from street-level hacks to the penthouse suites of dangerous startup sociopaths.
Watch Dogs: Legion ups the stakes, bringing the setting to a near-future, near-dystopic London and introducing a well-connected collective compared to the DedSec we saw in Watch Dogs 2. The city is beset by apparent domestic terrorist bombings being countered by the energized authoritarian government and their Signal Intelligence Response Service (SIRS) division, the most sophisticated intelligence organization yet witnessed by mankind. Rather than simply messing with the system or taking down a single target, the new DedSec represents a sprawling underground resistance movement set to capture the terrorists, neutralize the authoritarian state, and subdue the growing criminal presence in London… and maybe still spray paint a day-glo smiley face on the city after all’s said and done.
The most unique part of Watch Dogs: Legion stems from its insistence that the player doesn’t take on a specific character role, but “plays” DedSec itself. There are fully-voiced characters to meet, as well as a presently under-explained snarky supercomputer AI known as Bagley, but the player-character is any given DedSec agent you recruit and activate in the game. There are campaign missions that feed into the arching narrative, but any individual you pass by on the street can be converted to your cause, bringing their own series of quirks along for good or ill.
Watch Dogs: Legion Players Play As DedDec, Not a Specific Character
It’s impossible to play through a demo for Watch Dogs: Legion and not immediately compare and contrast the present political moment with the daydreamed absurdist theatrics of this hacker collective’s quest and ethos. Whether the game is successful in cleaving the high-tech altruistic fantasy of its obviously violent plot in practice from any recognizable signals to our contemporary reality of resistance is impossible to determine at this stage, though doubtful. It’s going to be a challenging note to dismiss on release, perhaps similar to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s criticized commentaries on discrimination and apparent use of apartheid and iconography reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter movement in its narrative. For the purposes of this preview, we’ll largely dismiss these topics all the same, but it may prove more inflammatory and crude by time of release.
The gambit of basing a game upon a decentralized concept centered on recruitment has been explored before, though rarely; readers may recall contemporary examples like the XCOM series and its revolving collection of disposable freedom fighters. Watch Dogs: Legion has a somewhat similar architecture in that sense, with each controllable character able to be arrested or even killed, and certain character traits may increase those chances. A quick scan of any individual with your “magical” hacker smartphone reveals a character’s quirks, dramas, and even present state of mind. Rescuing an individual from an arrest or beatdown is a quick way to inure them to the DedSec cause. Others may need to be lured through surprisingly intricate quests and tasks, like punishing a nemesis or erasing some photos being used as blackmail against them. All of this is trackable through a growing in-game dossier, and the sheer amount of randomized or written backstories and intrigues (whether this is all handcrafted or algorithmic isn’t obvious) is daunting, in a good way.
Remember how you could jump into any of the three characters in GTA V, loading into their skins and whatever conflict or comfort they were pursuing at the time? Multiply that by ten and you’ll start to get the picture here. Recruitment in our Watch Dogs: Legion demo was largely optional, but we just wanted to spend most of our time looking for interesting NPCs and trying to catch’em all, and the experience on that front is absolutely engrossing.
Beyond their individual quirks, NPCs also arrive with a complete kit of differentiated gear. Some had stun guns, rifles, spider drones with mounted turrets – a septuagenarian ex-rocker gal came equipped with an amazing pair of electrified brass knuckles, for some reason. You can also recruit NPCs with useful employment roles, which becomes immediately helpful for certain story missions. Having trouble sneaking into a SIRS office to hack a server? Spend some time recruiting an employee to the cause, then walk confidently right past the security cameras. A mission inside a construction zone drawing police suspicion to your current character hanging out at the worksite late at night? Turn a construction worker on to DedSec and trespassing becomes a leisurely stroll as you take the system apart from within.
One of the best parts of Watch Dogs 2 was stealthily figuring out the best entry points into a secure location, and the Legion demo featured plenty of these opportunities. Players can hack a cargo drone and ride it over a rooftop, have their spider bot patter through a ventilation shaft and scan for security access, or just approach a target head-on and tangle with armed threats directly. The stealth approach is arguably more fun, of course, but players should notice a better handle on gunplay this time around (pulling on a wacky face covering in advance of illegal activity is also silly and slick), which will be needed when dealing with ground forces and flying drones during a full alert. There’s also a hilarious set of finishing moves, which can’t help but look extra ridiculous when being performed by a granny in a gas mask.
Clothes can be customized and purchased from kiosks and shops, using money accrued through missions and hacking crypto terminals. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to see how multiplayer links all of this together just yet, but hackers freely cosplaying in a shared online world is a worthy draw. There’s a good variety of vehicles to commandeer but the driving in the demo did feel a little stiff, although it doesn’t seem like Watch Dogs: Legion is trying to closely emulate driving physics from the real world.
It’s hard to register the precise tenor that the game is shooting for. There’s copious drama and death in the story, as well as what appears to be a serious narrative about uniting the common people against the brutalities of a system empowered by terrorism and fear gone dangerously awry. But… there’s also an elderly masked woman in a floral print miniskirt drop-kicking a cop unconscious before stealing his Hummer. Some of the tension of the plot may be dislodged by the over-the-top energy found in the surrounding game, but this didn’t make the demo, any less fun to play.
Much has been said of Ubisoft’s token-scattering approach to open world design, but it’s a different matter when each visible NPC in a game has a slew of missions, characteristics, micro-stories, and needs which players can choose to fulfill or ignore. It makes the world of Watch Dogs: Legion seem more dynamic and alive, and it was very difficult to put the game down without wanting to seek out dozens of additional DedSec recruits. One wonders, though: can they eventually betray the player if left to their own devices? Is it possible to recruit a spy by mistake? Will the ones with the shopaholic quirk run DedSec bankrupt by blowing the bank on clothes?
When the game was first announced, a lot of its promises seemed hard to believe, but if the demo we experienced represents just the tip of the iceberg, Watch Dogs: Legion might actually successfully deliver the weirdest hacking cyberpunk open world human Pokémon game ever made.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/watch-dogs-legion-preview/