On October 29, Watch Dogs Legion will hit stores, the third installment in this series created by Ubisoft that combines urban exploration, stealth and gunfights with hacking skills worthy of Neo himself. After almost four years without knowing anything about DedSec , we put on our cap and with well-charged mobile batteries to face a quasi dystopian adventure in which players will find very interesting news.
The first game (2014) introduced us to the tormented Aiden Pierce, a ghost without a past who stopped at nothing until he took revenge on those who took what he loved most. In the second (2016), Marcus Holloway delved into the dangers of new technologies and misused cybersecurity with a much more hipster environment that included drones and 3D printers. Watch Dogs Legion seems willing to return to that darker tone by transporting us to a not-too-distant future in which private armies, dictatorial governments, and criminal empires vie for territory while citizens survive on the leftovers of that great banquet at which they have not been invited.
In addition to the new visual style and narrative tone, the setting and the basic mechanics that this third installment will offer, the most striking thing about Watch Dogs Legion is the play as anyone function and the permadeath mode. To better understand both aspects and understand what they mean in a video game, we have spoken with Clint Hocking, creative director of Watch Dogs Legion who carries behind him the memory of projects such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory or Far Cry 2 .
What is ‘play as anyone’?
Let’s start by talking about what will undoubtedly be the most distinctive feature of this new installment : the play as anyone game system. While in most titles we have a clear protagonist who, perhaps along with two or three other characters, we drive throughout the story, Watch Dogs Legion breaks that limitation and converts “any unknown person that we cross the street into a playable character. With this new mechanic, a recruitment system is deepened in which we will have to find out information about our target (perhaps our future MVP), get closer to him and help him in some way to join the DedSec resistance.
But this raises a question: does any character mean ANY CHARACTER? Well yes and no. According to Hocking, the player will be able to recruit “all the characters that we meet in the open world .” This, for example, also includes gangster thugs or members of the evil cooperation we fight against who may want to change their lives. The only exception that is out of our reach, for obvious reasons, is a small group of bosses who must play a specific role within the plot, “a dozen main characters who must follow the story .”
The ‘play as anyone’ will allow us to recruit any NPC, from the retiree who walks through the park to a container-burning hooligan
With this clarified, it remains to be seen how that particular small army that Watch Dogs Legion puts in our hands will be handled.
Players will have a Team App , a system through which we will see all our recruits, their equipment and skills and we will be able to customize them and start managing one or the other. Clint Hocking told us that this application will allow us to have “about 40 playable characters” available at any time . The only restriction when switching between them will be activated when we are in full combat or in a territory controlled by the enemy and they are looking for us This has a certain logic, since it would not be good to abandon our characters to their fate in the middle of a shootout or when we have a rival gang on our heels. What we can do is “change characters to flee from an area ”Or“ at any time during a mission . ”This second scenario will be very interesting since different characters, different abilities and therefore different results when planning and executing a mission.
Hocking clarifies that in Watch Dogs Legion “ there are no classes . All the characters start with skills according to their history and background, but from there they can learn new skills ”. Thus, we may meet a mechanic in Picadilly Circus who drives like Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious but doesn’t even know how to send an email; the game will allow us to teach you to hack security systems or hack cars and drones.
Let’s look at the detail that the initial abilities of the characters vary “according to their history .” Play as anyone presents a new game system but also, in the words of Clint Hocking, has been “one of the biggest challenges in Watch Dogs Legion.” NPCs are no longer just little characters that populate the open world, interact with us from time to time and react to what is happening in the environment to give it credibility. The team responsible for the title has developed a massive database (large enough to generate an ecosystem representative of the nine million inhabitants of London) in which skills, trends, jobs, customs, clothing style and many others were analyzed. factors so that each and every one of the NPCs we meet has a unique personality. Hocking and his team “have not created individual characters, but a system of jobs, skills and backgrounds” that allows them to generate countless different stories and provide enough depth to the play as anyone system .
What is ‘permadeath’?
We are going with the second great novelty that players will find in the title, the permadeath . While in any other game our characters can die and revive ad nauseam and there are even some who enjoy killing the player (I don’t look at anyone, Dark Souls ), Watch Dogs Legion gives us the opportunity to make the death of our characters permanent. and definitive . The incorporation of permadeath seems logical and brought into account with play as anyone , since if we have an army of playable characters, it makes sense that they can die when things go wrong and we have to recruit new ones. The cycle of life, what they would say in The Lion King .
The first thing that Hocking clarifies when talking about permadeath is that “it is a mode that the player can activate or deactivate at any time” . If we have it deactivated, the characters who fall in combat will be locked up in a maximum security prison from which we can remove them, for example, by recruiting the director of a major law firm. On the other hand, if we have it activated, the permadeath mode will ensure that there is no going back if one of our characters dies .
During the interview, while we were talking about the permanent death mode, we wanted to go one step further: what about those exclusive characters already announced that will arrive with the DLCs? Aiden Pierce, protagonist of the first title, will make an appearance with his own story arc and will also be playable during the main story. The same with a mysterious character from the order of assassins (crossover with Assassin’s Creed ) or with Rubius, the famous youtuber who will have his own playable character. Laughing, Clint Hocking clarified that “the permadeath mode will affect all characters, including those in the DLCs.” The advantage is that, if one of them dies, we can download it again and pretend nothing had happened (video of 1000 ways to kill the Rubius in 3, 2, 1…) .
“It’s hard when one of your favorites is killed,” admits Clint Hocking as he remembers that anarchist punk to whom he had spent so many hours and who ended up at the bottom of the Thames during a chase (to say the least). The permadeath mode will make players more careful in their missions and plan them so that that pub bartender they like so much does not end up underground.
The most Orwellian London of video games
The last topic we talked about with Clint Hocking was the setting and the world that we will find in the game .
The first Watch Dogs took place in today’s Chicago (then, in 2014) and Watch Dogs 2 took us to a San Francisco in which new technologies began to take to the streets. Now, Watch Dogs Legion breaks that mold a bit and transports us to the other side of the pond, to a futuristic London but close enough to the present as to be familiar and scary. It is true that the map “does not include all of London”, but it does include a more than considerable area in which we will have the opportunity to walk through Camden Town or start a riot around Buckingham Palace .
Asked about the reasons that motivated the team to bring the story to England, Clint explains that they wanted to change and try “other things” . They considered that “ play as anyone would be better in a city with a great diversity of population, and in London some 300 languages are spoken”. Nor can one deny the “rich dystopian fictional history of the country” and how interesting it could be “to see how the British respond to totalitarianism” such as the one posed in the game. “The idea of fighting for privacy and freedom is not unique to the United States” and in Watch Dogs Legion it will be the Londoners that we recruit who will fly that flag.
Long live the Resistance. Long live DedSec.
