Watch Dogs: Legion – Technological Revolution?

I was one of those people who were looking forward to the first Watch Dogs in 2014. I took it on the first day and, contrary to other reviews, I had more fun with the new concept of Assassin’s Creed: Cyberbully.

Aiden Pearce he had become my idol, a legislator with the power to control an entire city in his hands. Literally, on the phone. It was a new idea, everyone theorized how smartphones would advance and Ubisoft chose a dark path: technological dystopia. And, due to the initial trauma where Aiden had lost his granddaughter due to his own actions, I somehow created an association with the Batman origin story. It also helped that a year earlier I had moved on to Arkham’s sociopathic bat franchise.

And I haven’t played Watch Dogs 2, because I was already tired of the open-world formula Ubisoft hasn’t come out of until now. But now I seem to be drawn to that more relaxed and cheerful tone. Legion is in direct contrast, based on a more brutal, dark and hopeless style of reinventing London.

I admit it, apart from the concept Play as anyone, I wasn’t initially drawn to this new Watch Dogs title. And he didn’t seem to have anything.

The most interesting thing about the narrative thread that Legion proposes is the concept: a dystopia controlled by an authoritarian government hand in hand with corrupt private companies. Take V from Vendetta (a phenomenal movie and graphic novel), adapt it for the foreseeable future, around 2030, and you have brought Watch Dogs: Legion to life. With the new framework comes the phenomenon of Fake News, 24/7 surveillance in the style of Big Brother and the government cover-ups of illegal practices globally.

It’s just that there isn’t a concrete protagonist, like V, but an entire legion / resistance / group called DedSec. The target. the goal? Down with the system! And the chosen location, London, where you can find it “oooy, man, where’s my goddamn pint, eyy ?!” at every corner, it is perfectly chosen in favor of the script.

But the dialogue is down to earth, coherence and also narrative continuity, and the complex issues faced by the new WD turn into a few mustachioed rogues with psychoanalytic problems. Aside from the holographic logos disappearing from popular landmarks like Big Ben, Tower Bridge, or Buckingham Palace, it’s not even observed that your actions, as a revolutionary force, affect the city in any way. The original frame is placed on a shelf and forgotten forever.

In terms of consistency, I was playing with a member of the Kelly clan and found that in the following scenes he was starting to slander his brothers. It is as if after having recruited her into my team of techno-terrorists, I had changed her philosophy, her principles, had converted her into another religion.

The problem with the idea of ​​procedurally generated characters that can become protagonists, in turn, is that it only serves the purpose of the gameplay. You can’t even imagine that it makes sense for a member of a group to go down the street and start: “Hey, girl! You seem to have the power to change something! What do you say, you join a dubious organization of hackers?” and she to answer “God, are you? Anonymous ?! How long did I wait for you to recruit?” (even if she works as a saleswoman in a shopping center). Not to mention that this means that all Londoners are masters of parkour and hacking.

Those villains are at least interesting, as are the secondary characters. There is absolutely nothing new about their character traits, but when they appear, they enliven the script a little.

Bagley, the most essential character, is the indispensable AI in your helmet. He makes bad, saltless jokes in which he shows how disconnected he is from the human conception of reality. I laughed at them more times than I have the decency to admit. For example:

• Bagley: “If I don’t stop Oliver from planting all those bombs, it could cost London 3 million lives.”
• Your character: “My God, then let’s move forward faster!” (seriously, lines of dialogue like this are omnipresent)
• Bagley: “Oh, right … for you humans, a few million is a lot.”

But an intriguing part that Ubisoft has added is the fact that every playable character has their own life outside of the moment you take control of them. It resembles the events where the protagonists of GTA V were caught when you swapped them with each other. These (N) PC they have taboos, meetings, relationships, a daily schedule, a personal life.

(I invite you to read the article ↑ by Austin Walker in which he recounts his role-playing experience in Legion)

Not once have I caught one of the characters in the graveyard laying flowers. Just to brainwash them and kill whoever I feel on the street right after.

But this system never steals the show, Legion also relies on direct missions to whet your playful desire. And that’s why it fails.

Everyone already knows the new concept, Play like anyone, but few know that the Romanians of Ubisoft Bucharest made a substantial contribution to the creation of the system.

For the rest, the gameplay is similar to WD: 2. The only novelty is the melee mode, consisting of 3 actions: Attack, Guard Break and Dodge. It was so deep.

It’s not necessarily a weakness, it’s also the strongest aspect of the game. Legion offers you so many ways to deal with a situation that it’s hard to get bored. In the first 5-10 hours. After that, you’ve seen everything the game has to offer.

It’s fun to discover the classes and adapt to each character’s attributes, especially since there are not only qualities, but also flaws. I had a gambling-obsessed spy and I would wake up once every 5 minutes with a message on the screen saying she was crazy again.

New drones are introduced, which are the heart of several creative levels. They are found in the main missions, secondary missions or in the mission at the end of the capture of a Borough (London sectors). It can be seen that someone has taken an interest in making them attractive.

I know it will sound weird, but one of the moments I enjoyed the Legion the most was when I was chasing a fireball. By the way, there are also electric cars, of course, but also traditional or even classic. I noticed how you could hear the speed change, but you also see how fast the electric ones accelerate and what low maximum speed they reach, compared to gas stations.

As an extra activity, don’t expect too much: darts, juggling with the soccer ball and drinking. I highly recommend the minigame with the ball for when you want to do something passive and focus, for example, on university courses.

The pictures say it all, but I want to vouch for them. At night, this game is transfigured; becomes magical. When I first arrived Piccadilly Circus, I thought I was in a game event. The contrast of lights and neon, combined with Ray-Tracing, is an unforgettable sight.

I feel compelled to say the same thing when it rains. You say it’s a party on the car body, and in the puddles of the streets you can clearly see, HD, the night spirit of the metropolis.

But I can’t believe that the streets, the buildings, the cars, everything is actually wonderful, and then a model of a character appears in the frame, with its animations. It destroys the effect described above and buries it with no respect somewhere in the field. So cruel is the transition.

Here’s how I get the following requests: Honey, Ubisoft, you can rethink any time period or place as you like, but please let another company take care of the characters’ appearance, okay?

I am the first to overlook this chapter. My motto is “if you don’t feel the delay, then what matters”. But every graphic setting of the Legion comes with its sacrifices.

I used the ASUS ROG Strix G15 laptop (32GB of RAM), because I wanted to see the next generation Ray-Tracing with which the title was praised in the promotional material. But, to reach the proposed level of graphics fidelity, I had to swap a lot of FPS.

I amplified everything I could on Ultra, including RTX, and played around with the DLSS settings, i.e. Performance, Quality and Balanced. I didn’t touch Ultra Performance because I don’t play in 4K.

In each of these modes, the game averages 35-40FPS with constant dips, more or less observing the decrease in graphic details. But in Performance mode, I personally find it a mockery. The whole image becomes blurry, as if you have set all the settings to Low.

With DLSS OFF, things change. You would be forgiven if you confuse certain frames, without UI, with images of irl (in real life). And despite the fact that a laptop with RTX 2070 Super it barely shoots to reach 30FPS, I recommend playing this way. Next Generation Watch Dogs Legion = Ultra Settings + RTX ON + DLSS OFF.

So it doesn’t matter how photorealist Sometimes it can feel like Legion, without a high-end rig I don’t see how you would like the graphics and 60FPS simultaneously.

However, I appreciate that the video settings are numerous, and if you struggle a little with the built-in benchmark, you can get satisfying results.

I allow myself a stupid comparison: Legion is like a chicken coop with a bony bone, dressed in a strip of meat, but which smells damn appetizing.

Translation: concept and brilliant picture; poor content; an original game mechanic, but too little developed.

I really wanted to get lost again in the open-world Ubisoft fantasy with a map full of continuity, even monotonous, but now I realize that either I’ve aged, or nothing has really changed in recent years in this style.

When it comes to recreating locations, the company is AS. But the dive remains correct.