I found it much more interesting to try and hack drones and steal info with a British-Caribbean granny who couldn’t run or crouch than with one of the overpowered superspies that came with my review copy of the game. Anyone on London’s streets can make a difference and push back against the fascist forces that have taken over the city, if you carry out a couple of favours so they’ll join up with you. Watch Dogs: Legion wants to be a game about the power of collective action, one that challenges the hero narrative that dominates the medium. 2020 has hardly been a normal year, however, and it’s obvious that the final bug-squashing phase of Watch Dogs’ development was complicated by global lockdowns and distributed working. The worst of this now appears to have been fixed with a patch, but it is unusual for a game to be released in such a shaky state these days. Another time I accidentally killed one of my operatives when trying to save them from a kidnapper, only to have them promptly reappear in my roster. I was once sent to steal a car for someone, and the vehicle appeared parked vertically in the middle of a wall. In the build I played, a game-breaking bug halted my progress and temporarily disabled my Xbox just a few hours in. There are many technical problems and weirdnesses. Because this isn’t a game about violent resistance – there are guns in Watch Dogs: Legion, but if you have to bring one out it usually means you’ve messed up badly – it’s free to include the most diverse cast in gaming history. And yet there I was, infiltrating Scotland Yard with Hassan and his nailgun. After 20 hours I had a team of spies, former hitmen, adult film stars, baristas, barristers, publicans and transients, some of whom could summon personal getaway vehicles or silenced submachine guns or, in one case, swarms of bees. I became rather attached to him after that. But then I accidentally took Hassan into the bowels of one of Watch Dogs: Legion’s autocratic tech giants, on a mission that I thought would be easy but turned out to involve hiding in a vent from heavily armed private security guards while using a spiderbot to steal encrypted information. I picked him because he was nearby, and I liked his haircut and accent: not too EastEnders, not too plummy. He has no particular special skills he can summon a cargo drone and ride it up to rooftops, but he hasn’t got any useful weapons or technical expertise. I played most of Watch Dogs: Legion as a construction worker named Hassan. You can recruit any of them to your hacker resistance movement and step into their shoes. Walk from Camden to Nine Elms and every person you see has a name, a cluster of attributes (gambler, fashion expert, paramedic, low mobility) and a custom-generated voice and appearance. This makes Watch Dogs: Legion’s attempt to simulate the entire population of a futuristic, technocratic London one of the most ambitious things a game has tried in years. But they are still no good at simulating people, and their cities are populated with reactive automatons who forget you tried to run them over two seconds ago. Video games have become extraordinarily adept at simulating geography, from Assassin’s Creed’s detailed, architecturally accurate takes on ancient Egypt or 18th-century Paris to Microsoft Flight Simulator’s virtual simulacrum of the Earth’s surface.
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