You May Be Playing Watch Dogs: Legion Wrong

When I end up talking with people about Watch Dogs: Legion or I see others (Mike) talk about it online, I always have to ask: how are you playing it? See, some are playing games completely wrong. I know, I say this as someone who has admitted to just walking around San Andreas and Liberty City, selling drugs, people watching, and ignoring the plot for the most part. Yes, I sometimes enjoy playing games differently, because it gives me a new perspective on how they are made and their limits.

However, I don’t mean these people are just playing the game differently for a short while. They’ll complete Legion with their start character, never hire anyone else, and then yell the game is bad. That’s not what Legion is about or designed to be, that’s never what it was designed to be, and you are doing yourself a disservice in that. If you don’t know, Watch Dogs: Legion‘s biggest feature is a spreadsheet, but not in that Eve Online or Football Manager way. While you go about the game playing as a psycho or a granny, the game takes note of every person you punch, kick, taser, shoot, run over, or sneeze nearby. When it takes down the name, the job, and their details, it creates friends and family that you’ll stumble across in the street.

Never before in a game have I had to cross a street just to avoid someone I know, at least not someone selling the Big Issue or a side quest. For those of you still not getting it in the back, the game is creating a living breathing world. Ok, maybe it is not the most detailed or alive world. However, it is one that is filled with all the people Desmond has slightly knocked over with his cargo drone, Derry knocked out with his right hook, every time Erin shotgunned a patient in the face, and Ian shouted at Albion before being hit. My point is, if you are willing to put in the work, there is a story going on under it all.

For example, there was a woman I found called Agathe, a cosplayer with a fast hacking ability. Now Agathe is a lovely young woman, though she looks about 40, she hates my cell of DedSec because my hitman injured her friend and we failed to fix her problem. Now, I can go into her day as she enjoys a meal with Bonnie Reid, that friend I hurt before, and terrorize the two of them. I could be a complete monster and do that, or go and find her parole officer and kill him instead. There is something grotesquely dark about admitting that is something I could just do.

The ability to follow someone throughout their entire day, taking my San Andreas and Liberty City-based observation to the nth degree, and have this feed entirely back into the world is the next step in gaming. I’m, at the time of writing this, writing another article on how core systems in games have sometimes been forgotten about, creating games without something in the middle driving you the player. The core of Legion, beyond the typical Ubisoft open-world with crap writing, is that next-generation system and I’d argue it doesn’t tell you what it is doing well enough.

I’m of the belief that to make a game fun, sometimes you need to put something of yourself into it. Watch Dogs: Legion is just that, something you need to invest in. This is the reason while playing games with friends, you end up having more fun. You and the people you already enjoy spending time with are putting little bits of yourselves into the experience. So playing as whatever character the game first gives you, and only that character is limiting. Specifically never role-playing them, never reading their traits, nothing. You aren’t putting yourself in there. You aren’t getting stuck in, as it were.

The core of Legion is the little stories, the moments where I’ve come across characters like Agathe in the street. As I did while writing this very article, I stumbled across her again while shopping and saw that she’d been arrested alongside someone else. Now, I could have ignored her and moved on with my day, but instead, I took on Albion and I risked one of my operatives to save her and some other geezer. Now, in her recent activities section of her bio, it notes who arrested her and that I, as my wonderful crossdresser Joel, saved her.

So let me break this down: Joel attacked a cop called Marckus who now hates him, Marckus attacked and arrested Agathe so she hates Marckus, Agathe who hated DedSec would now be willing to join the cause as a result of Joel saving her from Marckus’ attack. That was a tiny moment that now means if I stumble across Marckus again as Joel, he’ll attack Joel indiscriminately if he notices my very luminescent crossdresser. With Joel alone, I’ve done this four times, nine with Desmond, and Derry killed a man.

I don’t think there has ever been a game with so much weight to killing someone, period. A simple thing such as hitting some random pedestrian, can result in tiny things happening and changing how you play. Say you try to stealth into an area and get spotted by someone you’ve injured or their friends/family. They might come up to you and accost you or hit you. I don’t think there has ever been a game where a character has followed me after I’ve angered them in such a way. Characters usually lose interest after a few minutes, and I’ve had characters either hours or days later decide to shout at me for simple things. I can name these people; That says it all really.

The point is to read the bios of characters. You are supposed to role play as each of them, and play into those traits. My lovely Desmond is a killing machine, but I’ve done that because he’s damaged from watching his parents being murdered and has a history of sleeping with so many sex workers. He’s like Batman with a nailgun. My sweetheart Derry, a 73-year old economist with a dead husband, loves electro-shotgunning people. Erin isn’t all there after the brain injury, but she loves using her dart gun and stun-shotgun. Clare is my legal assistant that bails us all out early. I only got her after I saved her client and her wife from Albion.

You can’t play Watch Dogs: Legion like other games, you can’t expect to understand the core system when it is something you aren’t giving anything to. That (I think) is the problem here. While Watch Dogs: Legion is wonderfully unique in this one respect, it didn’t lean heavily enough on it to make sure you noticed that weight it has. If you play on Normal without permadeath, you can lose all that weight instantly with very little in the way to pull you into the systems the game has set up. However, I’d argue the game itself lacked the courage to give people negative effects.

You get a fair bit of detail alongside the text telling you where they were born, how many prostitutes they’ve hired, or that they voted for Brexit because they don’t want foreigners in London. You also get traits with characters. A notable example of this is the lack of mobility in Helen and other elderly people. Some have those minor traits that slow them down, but beyond glass cannon or frail and a couple of others, there aren’t enough to go around without feeling contrived. A majority of them are rather positive, or at least don’t negatively affect you too much in the long run.

I’d argue it is too easy to pick characters with only moderate to great traits, while you let everyone with the Doomed trait die somewhere else. There just isn’t enough of an incentive to push you into picking a famous hard drinker with a hammer and the berserker trait. The system itself is clearly in its infancy, requiring a larger focus and more given to it to develop the idea a bit further. Sadly that’s the trouble with the triple-A market in games. If an idea isn’t obscenely popular and people don’t get it straight away, we’ve lost all hope of seeing it again. Developers opt instead for whatever is safe rather than taking a risk on something unproven.

I’ve said it before, there was risk and ambition in making Legion, something we don’t see enough of in the big-budget games industry. However, I think there was more that could have been done in several respects. Something to push you into more difficult spots with characters could have shown the value and overall weight the system puts on them. I’d even argue that Albion are rather light on their response, never feeling like too much of a threat once you clear out a borough or two.

I get it, some just don’t want to play with permadeath and risk having their save file deleted, being forced to restart. Though, that’s the point: Weight is put on stealth and your ability to survive those hairy spots where it does go a bit wrong. Without that risk, without something putting your operatives in some form of danger, I don’t see a point to it all. Maybe a system where your cell of Dedsec moved from hideout to hideout, giving you a few chances before the save file is deleted would help. It could have also played into leading Albion back to base, knocking down the number of lives left to be a backup.

Without the weight, the system doesn’t work. When the system doesn’t work, people play the game like a Grand Theft Auto and don’t understand it. They shrug it off as if there isn’t something impressive being done, claiming the game to be bad as it is just like everything else in their eyes. Yes, the game does have major flaws, with writing being messy and an even grimmer and depressing world than the UK’s reality. It is not always putting its best foot forward. Shockingly enough, I partially agree with Mike that the series as a whole doesn’t have many other places to go. Though, wherever the series lands, New York, Seattle, Paris, or Berlin, I want to see this system continue on and grow.