Watch Dogs: Legion Wraps Up Development

Is it too soon to say that the only reason Ubisoft wrapped up Watch Dogs: Legion is because they can’t ramp NFTs into a game that nobody is playing? I love Legion, not because of the story, but the world itself is what we don’t see in open-world games too often. A contemporary/near-future London or other location in the UK is a rare thing to find in games. There is only one game I can think of that showed Edinburgh, for example. However, for many others, the story’s rather lackluster and depressing premise didn’t excite them. So it is not surprising to see Ubisoft announce that the 5.6 update would be its last.

The update came about 4-months ago, just short of a year following release, and was mostly to update to the latest online season. The Watch Dogs Legion team stated in the blog post as of the 22nd the current focus will be on Season 5 Stripes. Following that, seasons 3-5 will begin to cycle until the servers will be presumably switched off, several months from now. Once again, none of this is surprising, as the game wasn’t particularly well-received by some. Reasons for that included a trite story, under-developed characters in the new system that was promoted, and to some, the world wasn’t as magical.

Watch Dogs: Legion was only released on October 29th of 2020 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, followed by Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 releases on the 10th and 12th of November. It came as the follow-up to 2016’s highly under-appreciated Watch Dogs 2, which was set in the very near-future San Francisco instead of a dystopian post-Brexit London 50-60 years from now.

As for the future of the series, I personally don’t think we should see another for at least 3-4 years, and let the hiring of non-NPC system thing really find its place in the series. That or return to a single character’s story with a fleshed-out world, but that’s not going to happen. Either way, update 5.6 fixed a number of issues for all versions, including the Xbox One edition crashing, supposedly.