Last year, Watch Dogs: Legion emerged from Ubisoft's coffers with an ambitious pitch for the open-world genre: play as any character in the game. Security guards, grandmas, and even members of rival factions can be "recruited" to become a playable character (with some being trickier to convince than others). It's certainly a first for a GTA-like: why run people over with your car when you can sign them up to your cause?
But is this twist enough to boost the Watch Dogs series to a compelling romp, years after its "GTA with hacking" conceit was already wearing thin? After a delay from its original 2019 launch window, players across the world will find out October 29 on PC (UPlay, Epic Games Store), Stadia, Xbox One, and PS4. (The game will also launch on next-gen consoles "upon their launch," Ubisoft reps have told Ars.) In the meantime, I got to play a preview build for nearly four hours last week to find out for myself. And while the play-as-anyone conceit really works as advertised and is impressive as a feat of engineering, its execution within a video game is currently hard to recommend.
Taking the “N” out of NPC
Look, it's the hero of Watch Dogs Legion! No, I'm kidding. Every single person in the game can be your controllable hero. (Note: Every image in this article was captured from live demo gameplay.) Ubisoft Notice that each member of your crew has different perks in that right-hand sidebar. This construction worker, for example, can more easily sneak into construction sites. And this tagger can access a graffiti side-quest chain more easily. You can spend in-game currency to upgrade your range of skills, but a character must have a built-in proficiency in that skill or weapon before they can use it. How do we grow your WDL troops> By enlisting their services in the wild. Some people are agreeable by default. Some have a red thumbs-down icon and must be persuaded… …by helping them with any worrisome issues in their itinerary. (Which you can scan and spy on.) Yes, even this gun-toting guard can be swayed to Dedsec's ranks. Sadly, because every single NPC in the game can become playable, their dialogue is all quite generic. I heard this specific speech from two different new recruits. Sadly, I was unable to convince this cranky woman to join my team before my demo's time ran out.
This version of Watch Dogs is set in a near-future version of London (with most of its historic landmarks intact) on the eve of a terrorist attack. A spate of explosions goes off across the city, and the evil mastermind behind it frames a vaguely anti-government, anti-corporation group called Dedsec. A privatized, automation-minded security firm wrests control of London's police forces, then ramps up body-scanning checkpoints and security drones. Dedsec's ranks are arrested and otherwise detained, but their message—of, uh, fighting the power, but not in any specific or controversial way—lives on, carried in part by an AI entity.
Though Ubisoft didn't show us the game's intro, the intro appears to revolve around a single converted Londoner starting a grassroots Dedsec revival. One citizen takes up the mantle, then does someone a favor (in WD:L's case, a series of open-world video game missions) to convince someone to join the group. Do that again and again to enlist more strangers.
In my demo, Ubisoft was clearly proud of this core play-as-anyone functionality, as I was told to recruit whoever I wanted. Like in Watch Dogs 2, players can use a supercharged smartphone to scan anybody walking past, revealing deeply personal information. Now in WGL, you're expected to leverage this information for the sake of Dedsec recruitment. If the person is already sympathetic to the cause, then it's a matter of asking them what favor they might need done, at which point you take on a chain of two to three missions.
Thumbs-down
More stubborn Londoners will have a red "thumbs-down" icon on their scanned profiles, which means you'll need to study their entire itinerary (yes, your phone can reveal all of their calendar data). Find a moment in their schedule that looks sensitive, like dealing with a debt collector, then show up at the listed time and location to help them out (usually with brute force). This will unlock a similar "please do me a favor" chain of two to three missions.
Ubisoft compels you to recruit strangers by locking specific perks and abilities to different NPCs, instead of offering a robust skill-tree system. Some characters can wield certain weapons. Others have location-specific disguises that let them blend in and temporarily stealth-walk through areas (like a construction worker for the game's seedy construction sites). And others have specific abilities, like generating new drones on the fly, having faster stealth-kill moves, or going temporarily invisible. Each can have up to two weapons and up to two active abilities, along with a few passive perks.
Before you choose to recruit anyone, their specific abilities appear in their background scan, so you can choose whom you bother to help and/or enlist. Once you have a roster, you can freely swap from one Dedsec member to the next—in fact, new ones warp exactly wherever your current player already is, as if your HQ has a working transporter from Star Trek.
Disposable lives, imperative exploding vans
In related news, WD:L doesn't sport any sort of quicksave system, and neither does it have "lives." If your current character dies, they'll either be "arrested" or "injured"—meaning, they're in video game timeout. An in-game timer begins ticking until they can come back to the action (about 10 minutes). Once they're back, they're good as new: no penalty, no hospital bill, no posted bail.
This allows players to cheat their way out of certain challenges. One example: nearly all of the missions I played during my preview test ended with some form of "escape the enemy-filled zone," which you can do either via combat or stealth. One time, I died by foolishly rushing into a mess of enemies. I expected the game to rewind upon my death and make me try again, but instead, I became one of my other comrades, who warped into the zone to replace my "injured" character. That new comrade happened to spawn into the zone's exterior, away from the baddies. "Mission complete," the game told me. Ubisoft reps said that worked as intended. Really? Hmm.
However, some deaths will cancel an entire chain of missions in progress, particularly the multipart missions you must undertake to conscript new Dedsec-heads. Twice during my session, I got to the final portion of a mission, only to fail; in my case, both failures were thanks to vans exploding for seemingly no reason. This was unfinished software, of course, and I was assured that spontaneously combusting vans aren't slated to launch in the final game.
Learning what is (and isn't) precious
The thing is, glitches happen in open-world games. Failing a single mission because of some wacky glitch is an unfortunate price of the genre. But failing a 20-minute chain of missions (driving, battling, driving, battling, driving, and battling) because of one mess-up is a lot harder to swallow. In these moments, the game tells you your new prospective Dedsec member has changed their mind. Move on. Find another NPC. But in one mission's case, I couldn't move on without getting that specific NPC to join Dedsec, and I imagine other WD:L missions revolve around similar "enlist a certain person to move forward" premises.
Pushing forward to reenlist that specific NPC brought up a new 20-minute chain of missions, and this is when I grew concerned that the way WD:L generates missions could prove redundant fast. Because these recruitment missions are attached to generic characters, they're all randomly generated from within the game world. You'll find yourself repeatedly hacking into hospitals by crawling around similar-looking outdoor pavilions, or hacking into construction sites that look the same. And once you're inside one of them, the level design and mechanics have to work for any character, so you're not expected to leverage any of the recruited characters' unique abilities. Just generically rush or stealth to an objective. If the full game doesn't do a better job guiding players to using unique abilities, WD:L is in serious trouble.
Back to the vans, though. To clarify, I didn't fail those missions because my character died. I failed them because a van blew up. The same can happen when you're expected to recover other cargo or specific hostages. Certain things in WD:L are precious… but not the members of your action-stealth collective.
Pithy philosophy, mild open-world tweaks
Time for a cargo drone to make a special delivery: ourselves! Ubisoft Hack giant cargo drones to ride them like massive hoverboards. You can pilot smaller cargo drones to make deliveries as part of side quests. Or use a little spiderbot to finish line-matching side missions. Step one: Hack the drone. Step two: Use that drone to infiltrate someone else's phone. You get access to a variety of cars to traverse this version of futuristic London, and most of those cars are electric. New to this sequel: Boats! Electric cars, funnily enough, are usually empty, since they function pretty much like Waymo taxis. It's weird to jack a WDL car and not throw someone out of it. Instant torque and hard-gripping tires are a common thread in WDL's electric cars. I do apRead More – Source [contf] [contfnew] 
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