Board 8 > I want to talk about Watch Dogs: Legion

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Johnbobb
01/10/21 9:31:26 PM
#1:


nobody has talked about this game since it came out so I'm going to

I was excited going in, because the series really intrigues me. I was super hyped for the first only to be completely disappointed, but was shocked at how good WD2 was. Silicon Valley was a blast, the characters were fun, and the gameplay felt like what was originally promised.

WDL isn't going to win anybody over with its general gameplay. It definitely suffers from "Ubisoft disease;" it's an open-world game where you do side quests and mini-objectives to clear territories, climb buildings, fight people in third-person, etc. Most of the gameplay from the last game returns, but now you're in London (which wasn't as fun as Silicon Valley imo but was decent enough of a locale.

The story is decent enough. The side missions are very cyclical and forettable and the main story does the typical thing of having a couple mini-boss questlines to do before you can take on the main boss questline. One of the mini-bosses is really interesting, the others are fine. The best character is easily Bagley, the sentient, passive agressive AI that constantly directs you to quests and mocks you along the way.

None of this sounds like a rave review, and it isn't, but I still absolutely recommend playing the game, and that's for one reason: the gimmick. It's hard to recommend a game for its gimmick alone, but WDL's gimmick is so godamn cool.

The whole gimmick is that any random NPC (not including the story ones) can be recruited to your team. This includes enemies (though if you've done enough harm to them they will become unrecruitable). That sounded interesting to me at first, but it's so much cooler in action. Every single person in the world has a name, a job (which they will go to), abilities, family members (that also appear in the world), and a bunch of randomly generated personality and backstory factoids. Every time I recruited a character, all these little pieces (in addition to their different voices, speech patterns, unique weapons, disadvantages, etc.) really made every character feel unique, despite ultimately being randomly generated code. I would find myself writing stories for the characters in my head, becoming more and more developed as I played with them. On my team I had a lovable asshole bare knuckle boxer, an ex-military contractor who would gamble my savings but was a beast with a rifle, a ladies man bouncer with a motorcycle and a studded bat, and a useless old woman who had no abilities and would alert nearby enemies by farting randomly and I'm not sure why I had her drafted to my team but it still crushed me when she died.

And that's what made it even more powerful. The game has a permadeath option, and it's not like the normal rpg permadeath where dying means starting over, it just means that when a character dies, they're dead for good. They're off your team, and you can never play as them again, and while ideally there's literally an infinite number of other potential characters to play as, goddamn does it hit hard to lose a character you've come to love because you ran into a gunfight you weren't prepared for or pissed off some people you shouldn't have.

And what makes the game even more wild is that these characters all continue to live in the world after you've interacted with them. Characters you've recruited can still be found going about their lives when you're not playing. Helping a character will make it easier to recruit people who are their friends or family, while hurting or killing someone will get you new enemies you weren't expecting, and if you wrong a person enough, they'll remember and actually start to hold a grudge against you. One time I was fighting a guy who hated me and I didn't know why. I checked his bio to find out that I had hospitalized him three times prior, either in fist fights or gun fights or hitting him with my car.

And as you see people in the world, even if they're not your character, you still start to wonder about them. Hey, that street performer carries a banjo on him, but also has a concealed revolver. That internet celebrity has a fancy car and will get recognized in public and gets a discount in stores, but also has a death wish? That court reporter has a news drone but also has a grenade launcher? Why does he have a grenade launcher???

tldr: the bones of the game aren't anything special but goddamn is it flavorful

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pjbasis
01/10/21 9:47:47 PM
#2:


Sounds pretty cool. I own the first game but haven't gotten around to it yet. Hearing good stuff about the sequels will probably get me to play it sooner.

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Underleveled
01/10/21 9:48:10 PM
#3:


Underleveled posted...
Watch Dogs: Legion (PS5)
I have a lot of feelings about this. It's... very different from the first two. I felt it was mostly an espionage game. In fact, it outright told you to play it that way, and save shooting as a last resort. Even then, most weapons were non-lethal, and there were potential consequences for using lethal force, whether on enemies or NPC civilians. The intense shoot-outs and relentless car chases from the first two were largely absent until very late in the game, and even then were far less intense than even mid-ish-game ones in the first two. Even the hacking seemed much less a part of the game than in the first two. I remember I'd be like halfway across the city (exaggerating but pretty fucking far) and chaining cameras together to set off explosives, wipe out half the fleet, and hell even complete half of my objectives before sneaking into a forbidden zone. Nothing of the sort in this one. Nor could I rack up cash by hacking everyone around me and draining their bank accounts. The missions were mostly very repetitive and because of the multiple operative feature you could actually fail some objectives (usually escapes) and still pass the mission. It felt less urgent, especially since I didn't turn permadeath on (if I ever play through this again, I will).

Speaking of the multiple operatives feature, I have mixed feelings on that too. I thought it was a neat idea but I didn't spend too much time on it because I found a small handful early on that I liked using and mainly stuck with them. But more than that, it made for a less personal and engaging story. Aiden and Marcus might not have been the greatest protagonists (well, actually I take that back, Aiden was pretty fucking great) but I still felt invested in their fates and the fates of their loved ones. By design that was absent here. If this series continues (and I really hope it does), I hope the next game abandons all the changes made to this game and acts as a true successor to the first two. Oh, and the game had an annoying tendency to glitch, specifically the NPCs. Enemies would just derpderpderp into walls and sometimes disappear entirely. Thankfully this didn't happen often enough for me to feel like I got a ton of cheap victories but often enough to notice.

On the positive side of things, the music was great and I've found some songs to add to my playlist. The villains were truly vile and while I'll probably forget their names tomorrow, they were a lot of fun to take down. And it was still a pretty fun play, if a bit frustrating at times. But the true best thing about the game was Bagley, who is an instant candidate for my all-time top 10 gaming characters. Hell, maybe even top 5. He was that damn amazing.


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darkx
Games beaten in 2021 - 1; Most recent - Watch Dogs: Legion
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scarletspeed7
01/10/21 9:49:06 PM
#4:


The mechanic is exactly why I planned to pick this up as well. WD2 had surprisingly good writing and a really solid satirical take on modern culture that didn't feel like a GTA-clone in the way it very easily could have, and I totally am excited about the experience Legion could provide.

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Johnbobb
01/10/21 9:51:17 PM
#5:


pjbasis posted...
Sounds pretty cool. I own the first game but haven't gotten around to it yet. Hearing good stuff about the sequels will probably get me to play it sooner.
To be completely honest I would skip the first one and go straight to the second. It's night and day and the first might just turn you off of the series

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pjbasis
01/10/21 9:52:58 PM
#6:


Eh third person sandbox shooter stuff is very easy for me to digest and enjoy even when it's subpar so I think I'll be fine.

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scarletspeed7
01/10/21 9:58:26 PM
#7:


Johnbobb posted...
To be completely honest I would skip the first one and go straight to the second. It's night and day and the first might just turn you off of the series
It's the same level of difference between Assassin's Creed 1 and 2, which was a freaking chasm.

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Underleveled
01/10/21 9:59:29 PM
#8:


I must be the only person who liked the first one lol

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darkx
Games beaten in 2021 - 1; Most recent - Watch Dogs: Legion
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Dancedreamer
01/10/21 10:01:33 PM
#9:


I've played a little of it. Haven't really got to use the gimmick yet though. The last mission I did was SUPER confusing.

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JackMan
01/10/21 10:07:49 PM
#10:


I got this for Christmas. I've only played a couple of hours so far, but it's fun enough. The spider robot especially is a highpoint.

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Turducken
01/10/21 10:12:02 PM
#11:


Did they ever bring back Adrian Perez?
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Johnbobb
01/10/21 10:19:49 PM
#12:


Dancedreamer posted...
I've played a little of it. Haven't really got to use the gimmick yet though. The last mission I did was SUPER confusing.

Dancedreamer posted...

So if I remember right it takes a few missions before it becomes available, and a few after that before perma death becomes a thing


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Johnbobb
01/10/21 10:20:44 PM
#13:


Underleveled posted...
I must be the only person who liked the first one lol
Yep

First one was super boring and I couldn't really stand Aiden

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Khal Kirby, warlord of the Super Star Khalasar
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Shaduln
01/10/21 10:28:27 PM
#14:


Johnbobb posted...
it's an open-world game where you do side quests and mini-objectives to clear territories, climb buildings, fight people in third-person, etc.
Sold

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Johnbobb
01/11/21 12:42:26 PM
#15:


Underleveled posted...
I hope the next game abandons all the changes made to this game and acts as a true successor to the first two.
so I think what I want most is to see them branch this off into maybe two different series or something. I would love another successor to the first two, though they'd have to really come up with something creative to stop them from repeating themselves.

On the other hand I really want to see this mechanic expanded. One thing I thought was a missed opportunity was not being able to use multiple characters in one mission. From a story standpoint it makes no sense for, in a game that's all about recruiting allies, to have everyone going on these dangerous infiltration missions solo. From a gameplay standpoint, it'd be a lot of fun being able to plan missions out like heists with a handful of characters with different skills and be able to switch between them on the fly. It wouldn't even have to be a hacking thing, this mechanic just has a ton of potential

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JonThePenguin
01/11/21 1:31:25 PM
#16:


Turducken posted...
Did they ever bring back Adrian Perez?
Pearce, and I believe hes a DLC character for Legion.

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Johnbobb
01/11/21 5:14:53 PM
#17:


JonThePenguin posted...
Pearce, and I believe hes a DLC character for Legion.
I cannot imagine who the hell would buy DLC characters in this of all games


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JackMan
01/11/21 5:37:45 PM
#18:


I think he comes with the season pass. Though there are special characters you can buy with premium currency.

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VintageGin
01/11/21 5:41:43 PM
#19:


Wanted to like it, but I feel like it didn't do much for me. The recruiting missions feel very weird-- you just stop a person on the street and say something like "Yo, we gotta do something about the state of things" and they respond with "Deadsec? Big fan! Please do this one thing for me and I will join without question."

Also it bugged me that the optimal strategy seemed to be to abuse spider bots because you basically don't get punished at all if one gets caught/blown up.

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VintageGin
01/11/21 5:42:49 PM
#20:


Also the fact that they don't allow you to have multiple people on a mission to switch between like you mentioned feels like a huge missed opportunity.

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JonThePenguin
01/11/21 5:59:34 PM
#21:


Johnbobb posted...
I cannot imagine who the hell would buy DLC characters in this of all games
Well I think they have story missions too - at least Aidan does. The other unique characters are:

  • Aiden Pierce from Watch Dogs
  • Wrench from Watch Dogs 2
  • Mina, a subject of weird experimentation with the power of mind control
  • Darcy, a member of the Assassin Order from the Assassins Creed series



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Johnbobb
01/11/21 6:07:51 PM
#22:


JackMan posted...
I think he comes with the season pass. Though there are special characters you can buy with premium currency.
ugh I like Ubisoft games a lot but their premium currency that they've gone all in on over the last few years is the fucking worst

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