My disappointment with Watch Dogs legion's recruits

My disappointment with Watch Dogs legion's recruits

What is Legion?

Watch Dogs legion is the third entry in the Watch Dogs franchise. Every game tried something new. The first Watch Dogs being an open-world crime game with a morality system and hacking, watch Dogs 2 expanding on the hacking aspect and lowering the health of the main character and restricting the character's loadout to 2 guns and a non-lethal taser to make strategised stealth a better option. Also for the first time in any watch Dogs game, they added Dogs. Legion Has the unique gimmick of there being no main playable character but instead, any NPC in the game including enemies can be recruited into dedsec and then being playable and when those characters die, they are forever dead and can't be added to your team again. The characters you recruit are even fully animated in story cutscenes and all have unique voices. In the trailers NPC's were portrayed to be unique and change the way you play, some being spies, others being boxers or ralliers who can get citizens to beat up the police for you.

My problem when starting the game

But when the game came out it wasn't as special as the trailers made it seem. Most NPC's you see walking on the street around you don't have any interesting abilities that drastically change your playstyle and the people marked on your map as special recruits are most of the time normal NPCs who get extra eto (money) or just medics and people who can bail out your teammates from prison. Which is confusing because they already have their own dedicated icon and sometimes a spy or someone special would be near you but isn't marked which means you would walk by a good recruit but the game thinks a cryptocurrency trader is what you would be interested in. The actual unique recruits that change your playstyle are special operatives that you unlock by liberating a chunk of London by disrupting and taking down propaganda then doing a mission tied to it. The special operatives are pretty badass but the problem is else who aren't special operatives are okay or mediocre in comparison to them and this game has a permadeath option that was also a big selling point. You are meant to make a team of characters with abilities suited for missions you want to tackle. Whether it be stealth, loud action or being an unstoppable hacker. Most of the people you see walking on the street simply summon a car. and most enemies don't have much going for them other than different weapons and extra faction damage.

It wasn't that bad

That was my first impression for the first 5 or 8 hours (now way more after writing this.) when ignoring the story missions and messing around in the open world as anyone would do in open-world games. I was heavily disappointed after buying the game for €49.99 and felt like I wasted my money. And after playing 16 hours of the game I still feel like I could have better spent my money but I enjoyed the game more and noticed my issues with the recruitment system weren't as bad as I thought they were for the most part. And some things about it were cool. Luckily the special operatives I talked of aren't exclusive to when you liberate chunks of London and are actually in specific areas or times in the world that would make sense, at night time in alleyways you would find hitmen killing guys, on top of roofs you can find beekeepers, spies standing next to their old fashion cars and so on, special recruits generally have the same traits which make them always fun but people who aren't them have maybe one or two traits the specials got which makes them okay at best and mixed bags at worse similar to what I complained about before. I played more story missions and more types of enemies were unlocked that had unique abilities which you can use yourself when you recruit them. Their abilities stack with the ones you give them in loadout editor which helped make characters feel less shallow since the moveset is a downgrade from watch Dogs 2 after they removed mass hacks, grenades, the taser, air and ground drones can no longer place bombs and the spiderbot can't call enemies dickheads to attract their attention or sprint. Some of these abilities are in legion but now they are individual abilities an NPC you hire may have.

For example, in watch Dogs 2 mass hacks are a category of special hacks that affects an entire area you're in, such as the car hack which makes every car in the area drive in random directions which can throw off police or cause a distraction, Communications hack which messes with enemies communication devices and hurts their ears which stuns them for a few seconds. Which lets you damage them or escape and system crash that turns off all electronics and lights around you which can help you be hidden in the night. Minus the blackout these abilities are back in legion with a few tweaks to make them less overpowered and now one character can't use all of them they are split into individual abilities that an NPC you recruit may have. 

I don't know how to feel about this change. Not only does it leave the moveset feeling small which gives you fewer options on dealing with encounters thus making the game get repetitive quicker but it also makes some of the characters who have one of these mass hacks feel weird. The getaway character can easily escape pursuits and is unable to be chased by drones plus has the car mass hack that clears the way for you on the road and crashes the police. But everything else about them is normal, This doesn't make them terrible but makes it gameplay outside driving an above-average experience. They changed melee combat to be like assassin's creed. How they did it isn't necessarily good or fun so it makes playing as characters who aren't suited for fistfights (which are most people) not fun in stealth. If you want to play stealthily you will most likely get into a fistfight to avoid pulling out your gun or else the enemy your fighting will alert everyone or if you are already surrounded by lots of enemies you will have to stick with the mediocre combat because if you pull out a gun you will die in seconds from all the bullets you will be penetrated by, the only purpose for a character like this is to end car chases quicker which is good for very specific missions where you go in and out of a building or steal a vehicle but nothing else.

I think the idea they were going for was that every character had a purpose for certain but in practice, some characters feel like they are missing skills like they are on the lowest tier on a skill tree. Look at the controls for a drone in watch dogs 2 Then the spiderbot in watch dogs legion

The Positives

On to positives though, because despite the problems it's still fun and has cool things to like. All your recruits are fully voice acted in story cutscenes but also have interactions with the ai, Bagley throughout the game and have conversations with other recruits in missions and side stories which are cool. in the dedsec hideout, you start meetings multiple times in the story which makes people you recruit all have conversations about the situation you're all dealing with and reply to each other which is amazing to see after customizing your characters and makes you feel attached to the team you created even if all the characters have the same blank personality to simplify NPC generation. When you boot the game and enter the world you will get different cutscenes of your character sitting down talking to each other before they part ways. And I know I complained about a lot of NPC's you find being average but part of what I learnt after the first 5 hours of playing is not everyone is a good character because you have to search or be lucky enough to find them. After scanning through ten or thirty average joes you pass by, coming across a good character with multiple positive traits and abilities is a good feeling. And recruiting an enemy that is trying to kill you that you can't hurt them or else they won't consider joining dedsec makes missions or fights more challenging and fun.

The positives that could use more work

Every NPC has feelings for dedsec, wait that sounds weird. An opinion on dedsec. If you shoot an NPC, and they are hurt so badly they need to go to a hospital they will dislike you and won't talk to you unless you use the deep hack upgrade to look at their logs and see what task you could do to make them like you like beat up a random citizen they don't like. I'm not even talking about crime lords just ordinary people, The NPCs you hurt will show up again and if you harm them the second time they will hate dedsec and will never join you. If you make an enemy hate you they might randomly kidnap one of your dedsec members and hold them captive, making you not able to play as them. You will then have a mission to hack the kidnapper to find out where your teammate is located and break into the base, free them and get them out. If you don't free them in 3 or 2 days in videogame time, they will be killed and be removed from your team forever. except I this is wish would happen, the last part about this event, I made up. you have all the time in the world to save your teammate. One of my useless teammates who had 6G mobile data and the ability to summon a motorcycle was kidnapped and I forgot about them until I was running low on teammates and saw that the motorcycle guy was still chilling in the enemy base for past 3 days. I did the mission to save them, and I saw the guy tied up, being kicked and tortured by a gang member. there were lots of enemies and I decided to go the gun blazing route, gunning down everyone in my way and untying my teammate. An enemy I left alive called for backup and five or six people showed up and I was afraid that they would kill my motorcycle guy but I later realised after you untie someone they can't be killed or even before that, they don't even pick up a gun and fight with you but just follow like ordinary people. It would be weird when you hire a master hitman who can headshot people with pencils and when you save them they act cowardly and hide. Oh, wait that's exactly what they do in the world.

On top of your teammates interacting with each other, they have lives of their own and are out in the open world all the time walking among citizens, you will drive by and possibly run over a dedsec member, which is pretty immersive and makes you feel like you're growing a legion. The only complaint is your team act like citizens when you pull a gun or when you crash a car and run away, it's very weird especially since when you switch characters you get a cutscene where the previous person you play as talks to the one you are currently, then you get to control the character, but then when you pull out a gun and shoot a street light, their memories of killing multiple policemen and gang members, breaking into vehicles and nearly being shot to death by cops. Joining a hacker resistance and agreeing to put their lives in danger to save their country from fascism fade away and they curl into a ball and cry for their life to be spared, you are a fucking hitman! This is very weird since citizens that like dedsec will fight your enemies with you when you are in a fistfight. I think they should make allies be calmer than average citizens and watch what crimes you're doing and walk away to not get involved after a few seconds. And if Ubisoft wants to go the extra mile let them shoot your enemies and run away from the scene when all of them are down or if the police chase level reaches two.

 it's a mixed bag at the end

The recruitment system sacrifices the huge moveset from the second Watch Dogs game To split them between characters. Most Characters that aren't special operatives are mixed bags and it feels like they missed the potential with the recruitment system overall and it's too late to change a lot of these problems. But there is still hope. A stealth game called Ghost recon breakpoint is the latest ghost recon game in the franchise made by Ubisoft. the game was met with terrible reception at launch in 2019 and was forgotten as another bad Ubisoft game. One year later and on December 5 youtube recommended me an update trailer for the game called the ghost experience. The update added player features and revamps that changed the game, stealth damage, detection range and time it takes for enemies to alert each other were some of them. Then I was surprised when they added new additions to the moveset like throwing a bullet on the floor to lure enemies, changing the item selection hud and increasing the slots, making the enemies show a reload animation when they are out of bullets to let you know when to shoot, and adding game modifiers.

Watch Dogs legion had a trailer promising post game updates and I think that while I can't imagine them to do something ambitious involving their voice actors or change mission design. I want to make a part two to this. Talking about features and ideas I would like to add to the game that is realistically possible and could make this game be remembered for more than just another watch Dogs game.

By the way, they got rid of dogs. Play Middle Earth: Shadow of war