Watch Dogs: Legion
Open world game set in a cosmopolitan drone-infested London where you can recruit any non-player-character into your team of misfits, effectively making all NPCs leading avatars.
The creative director of Watch Dogs: Legion was Clint Hocking, who also directed Far Cry 2, the war-is-stupid-and-futile FPS, my favorite, which is what first made me interested in playing this.
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Watch Dogs: Legion videos streamed live on Twitch:
Another Ubisoft game I wish was moddable, each NPC in Watch Dogs: Legion has an improvised digital life, walking out of doors with schedules, workplaces, relatives, and so forth, including corrupt police and hapless security guards.
You can hire and eventually control any of them, even enemies, to be your avatars with their own special or bizarre abilities. This is the game’s most unusal and interesting feature.
Sneaking and shooting, puzzling and hacking, parkouring and meleeing, and driving on the wrong side of the road around the post-Brexit stupidity city adds fun-fuel to the total emergent chaos fire.
Enemy reactions to you are proportional, a bit like the wanted levels of GTA, with the nice touch of enemies using melee at first if you haven’t pulled out a ranged weapon when causing your “disturbances” around the city. This gives space to trying all the wonderful melee takedown styles, from slaps (nutritionist grannie) to wild head butts (football hooligan youth).
4-player cooperative multiplayer was added some time after the game launched. I have not had the chance to try it thus far, but look forward to strutting about this apocalyptico London with friends, looking for account executives, investment bankers, and other weirdos for the team.
The game has a dissonant feeling when your A.I. supercomputer assistant Bagley makes humorous remarks about extreme violence like torture rooms. Maybe intended to make one ponder the “banality of evil”?
A bit much, if so, but understandable, should video games aspire to be works of art, even if I prefer using them to escape from rather than face reality head on.
A fun, unique video game that I look forward to playing again.
I ran into a few Watch Dogs: Legion bugs, noted below:
Update 2023-11-29: The crashes stopped when I turned off raytracing and DLSS in the graphics quality settings. ＼(＾O＾)／
I cannot continue my playthrough as there is a recurring crash when drones are after me in the Smoking Gun mission, or anywhwere. I’ve tried several solutions suggested by Ubisoft support (case #19387703), but none have worked, including stress-testing my PC using OCCT with no errors. This is the only game crashing like this at this time, so I’m assuming it is a Watch Dogs: Legion bug. More evidence of a problem here. Hope this gets fixed so I can finish the game.
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Possibly Related:
- Thief: The Black Parade
- Legging it Inside Stations like Garrett Orbital
- Thief: The Dark Project
- Keep Starfield Running With Music Playing in the Background When Not in Focus
- Abandoned Listening Post then off to Sol 💫 Starfield #4
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