I had a very strange relationship with Watch Dogs. For some reason I don't know, I want to love this series of games, but I can't. On the one hand, Ubisoft took a big risk, creating a rival to the GTA series with a large open world, freedom of movement and original game mechanics. But as soon as I sit down to play it, I quickly get bored. Watch Dogs: Legion revived in me the desire to give the series another chance: I liked the London setting, the visual design, the more serious plot, and also an interesting twist with the playable characters added. The first two parts of the series did not work for me for objective reasons - the emphasis on crooked stealth, repetitive activities with towers and the lack of side storylines. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to play Watch Dogs:
Let's start with the fun part - the character system. The game starts somewhere after the end of the prologue, when we already have a small cell of four terrorists and we get down to business. You can choose a playable character at any time and he appears in the place where the player was at the time of the character change. You can change your character during a quiet period even during active missions - for example, in transitions between locations. Let's say the first stage of the mission included surveillance and you conducted it with one character, but the second part of the mission contains penetration into a closed territory and hacking the tracking system - you can switch to a character with hacker skills without any penalties or replaying the completed part of the mission.
The characters differ from each other significantly in different ways. First, of course, visually - the models in the game are high quality, each character has some kind of background, maybe even a real day job and a unique voice acting. I honestly don’t know how this is implemented, but cut-scenes, offscreen dialogues and big missions are played up by a dozen characters. You can go on a mission as a black cop and he will speak with a London accent, or you can take a spy woman on a mission and she will speak with a Nigerian accent. It is unknown whether they recorded unique lines with different actors or dialogues and script for all characters, simply voiced by different people. In any case, the result is impressive when the story is played out by the characters you recruited - you can create an army of homeless alcoholics,
Before moving on, it's worth mentioning what happens after a mission fails. The player can be arrested or shot, but this does not mean Game Over. Some characters die once and for all - there's nothing you can do about it, while others are critically injured and go on timeout for several hours. Which characters this applies to - I can't say. I think that the unique shots that the player receives for completing challenges, etc. unable to die, and random recruits from the street die forever.
The differences between the characters are not only visual - they differ from each other radically. Firstly, some characters bring global passive effects: he recruited a lawyer and he will excuse the arrested characters, reducing their term. He recruited a doctor to help the injured characters recover. Honestly, I didn’t do much recruiting, so I cannot say how many such specialties and bonuses there are in the game. Some characters give a bonus when recruiting - he recruited a rich girl and she donated her father's money to a good cause. Others allow you to get inside access to restricted areas - this is the most interesting moment.
The game features several factions and types of objects with access to the territory only by passes. For example, a story mission “to infiltrate a police station and steal evidence” - you can go through it in different ways. You can rush inside with a Kalash and shoot everyone, you can sabotage and get through the back door, or you can go into the open - if you recruited a police officer. Watch Dogs: Legion fits the gameplay mechanics very coolly into the setting of the game, and this applies to the recruiting aspect. For example, a particular police character I recruited has 4 unique features: wears a police uniform that allows you to enter the territory with a pass control, carries a taser pistol (not every cop has one), carries a police baton and hiccups, which attracts to him the attention of others. You try to blend in with the crowd at the police station, hiccup and look at you, “Are you from our station? Who it? Do you have a pass? " Fun.
You can recruit a gangster from an enemy gang, the leader of which is one of the main antagonists of history. You can recruit a Pole from a construction site, who will help you penetrate unfinished objects, etc. Moreover, each of them will bring unique elements of the gameplay. The builder can turn out to be a shitty hacker or a weakling that even a child can beat, and if you recruit an old woman with sore knees, then forget about sprinting or stealth - she will not be able to run fast or crouch. The random generation of characters adds a very fun aspect to Watch Dogs Legion, typical of the roguelike genre.
All characters have access to common gadgets and common skills - everyone knows how to hack phones, everyone has access to shock grenades or electric knuckles. The unique gadgets and features are more interesting, however. You can run around the city, scan passers-by and find a character who carries a pistol with him, because a year ago she was robbed on the street. Another character will turn out to be a journalist who will bring a bonus to reduce the time of arrest, and the third carries homemade smoke grenades with him. Watch Dogs: Legion seriously expands the possibilities of passing and adds different styles of passing missions in accordance with the strengths and weaknesses of the characters.
The design of the location is more open and this has a direct impact on the gameplay: any location can now be penetrated from several sides. You can climb in with a drone and hack the security terminal by opening the front door; you can use an agent in uniform and enter a closed object; you can climb the fire escape and get in from the back door; you can use hacker techniques and open the necessary doors in front of you through hacking mini-games; or you can break into an object with a Kalashnikov at the ready and start a massacre; or arrange a sabotage - take control of a police car and enter the bandit territory, arranging a firefight between bandits and cops.
This approach has both pros and cons. Due to the open design of the missions, there are not so many scripted routes - it's easy to skip the "cinematic" approach to the walkthrough and do something dumb. For example, during one mission, where I had to intimidate one bandit, I accidentally killed him. I went to the gate of the facility where the bandits sat down, saw a parked minivan and decided to open the gate with it. Hacked, asked to go back, he flew into the road and crashed into a police car. On the one hand, armed bandits came running to check what had happened, and on the other, the police. In the confusion, all the bandits were shot, including the character I was supposed to simply “intimidate”, which changed the scenario of the mission and led to the consequences that I was trying to avoid. It seemed funny, but I deprived myself of a potentially interesting mission.
A more obvious flaw has to do with the level design itself. Due to their open nature and full integration into the game world, this imposed certain restrictions. Penetration into an IT company is to go through the reception, one corridor, a large hall and immediately into the server room. Literally 15 seconds sprint from the main turn to the point of completion of the task - no complex patrols, multiple levels of protection or gags in the style of "Mission: Impossible" simply not there. Large story missions are longer, more complex and deeper, but side missions and small quests look somewhat comical and strongly out of the general design of the game world. No one will keep confidential information in plain sight with such leaky security protocols.
This inclusiveness in approach also partly influences the balance of the game. The mission does not fail because the player triggers an alarm or firefight - you can always complete the mission successfully. You can suffer bullshit in some office building for 20 minutes, killing all the employees of the company and no one will send reinforcements. In GTA, the cops would have driven ten cars, and in Watch Dogs: Legion, a maximum of a couple of additional dummies will come running to help. It is also possible to be arrested for murder or using a firearm and with minimal consequences. And in my opinion, this is a point that could be improved. I used a firearm on the street - and all the police in the city have your sketch or photo from surveillance cameras - you go out with this character and you automatically have two stars and all the policemen look askance at you.
It's the same story with car theft - well, it doesn't fit into the idea! It would seem that you are playing for a "terrorist organization" - you cannot attract attention to yourself! But aggression is not punished in any way. You can play cops, steal cars, kill people and do it without any fear. The policeman will remain the policeman. Ubisoft dug in the right direction, but somewhere in the middle they stopped and OCZUALE, and could get to the real treasure. A system of "public opinion" could have been made, when open actions attract the attention of the police, raise the level of protection at the levels and force the authorities to act more aggressively towards the player. But in the end we have what we have.
A lot of gameplay is tied to the use of a spider drone, which turns the game into a 3D platformer: you climb through ventilation shafts, jump between tables and chairs and climb into places inaccessible to people. Mechanically done very high quality - it's easy to control the bot, the collisions are excellent, the jumps are accurate, but in four hours I got tired of this aspect a little. And I saw only a small part of the game. Hacking is available to all characters - even grandmothers and homeless people. Whoever recruited - everyone knows how to hack computers, phones, cameras, etc. Some come with debuffs on the speed of hacks, their cooldowns and other things, but everyone has access to the main functions.
While I complain a lot about missed opportunities, it's more of a wet fantasy of what could have been. Judging by the progress of an already established franchise, the progress is huge, with improvements on all fronts. The scale of the city, the design of streets and locations turned out to be excellent - London of the future is felt in all design elements. Fast travel was tied to the stops of the London Underground - he pressed the button and found himself at the exit of the selected underground station. Shopping and character customization are super awesome - you can dress up your grandmother in a swimsuit or abibas, hand her a baseball bat, swell in a local pub and start a fight on the way out. Or go to the club of clandestine fistfights - the melee mechanics, albeit simple, but interesting.
The map of London is divided into districts where, as part of the side activities, we need to win the trust of the locals by turning them to our side. To do this, you need to complete a number of activities in the region: get rid of local usurpers, help local activists, pull down a couple of graffiti walls and go through a couple of mini-games. There is much more variety in activities than in the previous parts of the series - no towers and stupid hacks. As a reward, we get unique characters - a spy with cool gadgets, a repulsed football hooligan or a former special forces soldier with an assault rifle under the bed. You also have to collect points for pumping skills - there is no way to avoid grinding.
Recruiting is a big part of the game, and consists of small storylines. We found a potential recruit, convinced him to our side, showing that we are on the same side, helped him in personal matters and he became a playable character. Partly the missions look very tattered and crumpled, but on the other hand, spending 40 minutes of real time on the discovery of a new playable character, of which there are hundreds, is such an occupation. It's better as it is, but I would like to see more conscious stories.
In total, Watch Dogs: Legion is played much more cheerful than its predecessors. Starting with exploration, performing side effects, dressing up games and ending with the passage of the story itself. The absence of scripted tracks in most missions allows you to play in a relaxed way, choosing your own path. The variety of character traits encourages recruiting and missions for different heroes. But there are also annoying disadvantages. The same storyline can send the player to five different districts of London: received a quest in the south of the city, hacked a terminal in the north, took a picture of a person in a cafe in the west, and brought a photo to a mailbox in the east. All this is more convenient to do through the fast travel system: I looked at the loading screen, left the subway station and ran two blocks to the mission area, hung out there for a minute,
Collecting skill points is still fun - I despised this development system, I despise and will continue to despise until it completely disappears from the games. Running around town and looking for chests in dark nooks and crannies to gain access to new game mechanics and skills is a dull, artificial way to increase the length of the game. Hopefully Immortals Fenyx Rising turns out to be a successful game and it will tilt future Ubisoft projects towards a mini-game progression system rather than looking for chests and hunting deer.
The approach to storytelling is also highly controversial. Due to the fact that the action is played by random characters, the emotional response is weaker. We do not know their background, the characters will change during the game - I'm afraid that Ubisoft won't be able to tell a good, emotional story. But I managed to see the prerequisites for success. The story in Watch Dogs: Legion is very serious and brutal. There are stories about concentration camps, about massacres and abductions for the sale of organs, slavery, rape, dismemberment and natural sadism. The rating of 18+ is absolutely justified - the antagonists in the game are very, very scary. Thus Ubisoft shifts the focus from a few good guys to villains and their crimes. The lack of personal conflict of the protagonist is compensated by hatred of the antagonists.
The player does not have to sympathize and worry about the main character, observing his life's journey and overcoming difficulties. You can hate the enemies of the DedSec organization and watch them fall. If Ubisoft managed to shift the focus of the narrative, then a very emotional story of victory over evil with all the necessary experiences, suspense and catharsis can emerge from the game.
I don't think Watch Dogs: Legion will become a masterpiece or a new standard for the genre, but progress over the previous installments is obvious. The game gets rid of many of the shortcomings of its predecessors and brings original ideas that can be realized if not 100, then 70%, which is very, very good for a large-scale blockbuster from a large company. For me, what I saw in the sum of the positives significantly outweighs the disadvantages and some annoyances from the gameplay. Watch Dogs: Legion I am waiting and believe that the result will be a high-quality, interesting game.
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