Playing as Anyone in Watch Dogs Legion

so in 2014 i covered the original watchdogs and i was not particularly kind to it and with some time and distance i wondered when i started doing this video if i had been perhaps too cruel replaying the opening of the game i realized no no not at all aiden pierce remains one of the most loathsome protagonists in video game history which given video game history is a pretty remarkable feat he is an entirely self-centered abusive jerk who hurts the people around him with indifference and it only took about an hour of play to get me to hate him all over again for those who haven't played it the game opens with you on a quest for revenge that involves torturing a guy for information both physically and mentally how's your memory now then leaving the scene by staging the bodies of some people you and your friend murdered to look like a gang shootout and then causing a blackout for thousands enjoying a baseball game the next day to relieve anxiety aiden pierce casually engages in vigilante justice by killing a guy with a pistol to stop an assault you don't bother anyone now and then it's revealed that he was doing this murder instead of attending his only surviving nephew's birthday and now he was late nikki hey i know i know the party started it's almost over where are you i'm on my way oh you make me crazy he shows up at his sisters to the birthday party of a child that clearly has no friends and an uncaring uncle and when his sister gets a harassing phone call he invades her privacy by hacking her phone to listen in and find out who's on the other line but not before stealing some drugs from her bathroom once he realizes the call is coming from a nearby car he leaves his nephew's birthday early because of course and chases the culprit downtown until he crashes in a fiery explosive pileup that surely injured countless people other than just the intended that's the target this is just the first hour of play and he doesn't ever get better if anything he gets worse aiden pierce is a selfish thieving murderous villain who ruins the lives of everyone around him and the game frames him as a noble anti-hero with a cool hat and this extends to the game's tone more broadly i think the intention is to talk about how everyone has secrets they may be ashamed of and don't want to get out but the first ctos machine you hack gets access to secrets like a guy that sounds like he's gonna kill his wife maybe you are an ugly cut [ __ ] throat and put your head in a spice cabinet yeah yeah sweetheart don't worry my love everything's fine you go back to sleep okay yeah i love you too or it lets you overhear conversations and read texts between people cheating on one another or making super crass jokes so she's sitting next to me right she's pulling my hand between her legs no way of course there i am heart is a [ __ ] post so she's got one hand in my pants and man it is a nice grip it comes across less as everyone has private information that they don't want to get out and more like everyone's kind of an [ __ ] so it's fine that aiden pierce is king of the [ __ ] it's it's not great and i feel like ubisoft was receptive to this because watchdogs 2 feels like an attempt to pivot hard away from it it dropped aiden pierce as its protagonist in favor of marcus holloway a hacker engaged in activism against the huge monolithic bloom corporation the company behind the ctos monitoring software and to achieve those activist ends he teams up with the san francisco chapter of dedsec now dedsec was sort of an ambivalent force in the original watchdogs it was an antarctic amalgam of anonymous and other hacktivist groups that basically just did things for the lulz they occasionally helped aiden pierce but really they were just interested in gaining access to systems and juicy secrets however they could towards mostly morally ambiguous ends watchdogs 2 reframes the organization to be full on good guys dedsec are now hacktivists with a worldview and an ethos about helping people rather than just wanting access to hacks data and useful information they want to take down bloom because ctos is using flawed algorithms to do predictive policing among other horrible crimes hey where have i seen that idea used but framed is a good thing before oh right but the nihilistic tone that seemed to just hate people and love revenge is gone and replaced with a hopeful team that pushes for change that benefits all and the color palette is more vibrant san francisco has a bunch of bright and shiny days where chicago felt very brown and gray in 2018 and finally the characters feel like an intentional move away from aiden pierce instead of the embodiment of angry white boy rage in a 2500 leather trench coat we get a cast of characters that well a little one note feel relatable and motivated we get little summaries of what radicalized them into dead sec and what their personal beef with bloom is and how they prefer to operate as hacktivists see josh he's high functioning autistic which means he's got a very specific way of talking we got to look at a ctos profile and all kinds of nasty flags popped up emotionally challenged unstable even a low mental maturity score he's none of those things and he quickly became the activist soul of our group we caught a glimpse of the damage ctos dealt him rejected care programs cut funding overcharges we offer to help him make things right when we met josh he had the right intentions and the wrong approach like a laser putting on a pretty light show instead of burning holes if bloom's system wants to make him unemployable damn straight we're gonna snatch him up and point him right back at him and we get dialogue between them that involves them bouncing their personalities off of one another in a way that makes them feel like a cohesive group sure you can figure it properly dude i don't question you about crypto [ __ ] do i guys shut up i'm in it also allowed us to have an antagonist whose actions felt well villainous he knew how to hit marcus where it hurt doubling down on his unearned police record the feud was ideological sure but it was also personal i had to meet you and there you were pissing on your sneakers all brains and no aim what's bloom's cto doing in the office of the ceo of invite and why'd you boost our numbers uh that's the part where you offered me a six-figure salary [ __ ] no no no no you could coat circles around most of my programmers no see i can't pitch uh ctos 2.0 as a state-of-the-art security system and then hire someone that's on the no fly list it's not layered deep character work but it was a major step forward from the contemptible aiden pierce all of this adds up to a game series moving away from its angry toxic roots by focusing on characters that had enough internal life and empathy towards one another that you could care about them individually and as a team have you seen the trailer for the new jimmy cisco movie no it's out hey pull it out man no not on this for this we need perfect sound we need a big screen we need to be comfy we need quiet have you seen it yet no man i waited for you you're the best thank you all right everybody everybody watch the trailer shut the [ __ ] up shut up which brings us to the release of 2020's watchdogs legion in watchdog's legion you play as effectively dedsec itself not a single protagonist or individual character but the entire london division of dedsec to do this you can conscript more or less anyone in the game world to the cause from unexpected characters like janitors and old ladies to video game staples like assassins and secret agents the world is littered with potential playable characters you simply need to look at a person and a hacked ctos system will pull up a list of personality traits these can be good or bad an elderly person may have difficulty with mobility or someone may have access to their own car or firearm maybe they're prone to flatulence and thus are likely to get detected by enemies during stealth or maybe they have enough hacking knowledge to steal digital key codes from an unlimited distance away approach them and they'll have a recruitment mission for you to complete finish it and they're a permanent member of your team or well until they die in watchdog's legion you don't play as an insufferable 35 year old or an idealistic 20-something kid you play as whoever you want it's a bold choice that shirley presented all sorts of production woes and the need for a bevy of new game systems but it's also a choice that is a bit befuddling honestly having just released a sequel that seemed to squarely address most of the complaints about its protagonists to a largely positive reception ubisoft is again upending its entire approach to who is at the center of a watchdogs game in place of characters with their own quirks and personalities that come through with their character design writing and performances we now have procedurally generated characters arrived at algorithmically you get me that file and i'll get back everything from those pricks help me with this and i'll make it worth your while if you know what i mean help me with this and i'll make it worth your while if you know what i mean all right we'll look into it and since it's kind of the defining trait of watchdog's legion i think it's worth looking at the play as anyone's system and what the game gets out of it because it's not clear to me given the final product what the play is anybody system is really trying to accomplish the initial immediate impression given the prevalence of each character's skill set in the ui is that you're effectively choosing a loadout that plays fundamentally different than any other character my mind immediately went to prey moon crash a game where multiple characters each have different abilities that forces you to rethink how you engage with the challenges the game world puts in front of you and indeed that's what the game's creative director clint hawking seems to imply in this e3 interview you know by being able to explore the design edges of that space this character can do this but they you know they can't do that or this character has this class or that other character has these perks it gives you all these different builds all these different ways to play the game uh and also all these different identities that you can explore and play with and be but the level in game design both feel at odds with that goal story missions in particular suffer from this they tend to be big scripted sequences with only one solution which is fine i guess but it kind of negates the whole idea of having these different people with different abilities so for example you may be forced to fly a drone with a light in front of you to see the path you need to follow or use a spider bot to sneak into some area and hack some equipment it doesn't matter if the character has these things equipped going into the mission anytime you need a spider bot or construction drone they're nearby you'll be using sebastian and the rest of the microphones to bypass security but first you'll have to get by that laser array i suggest a spider bot and steady nerves on it every once in a while you'll reach a story mission that really feels like it encapsulates the immersive sim style problem solving that the play is anyone system seems to be reaching for like breaking into the stadium which can be done any number of ways from stealth to a full frontal assault i flew in over the walls on a construction drone but those find a solution to this problem highlights are few and far in between and even when they show up tend to just be a choice between stealth combat spider bots and cargo drones meanwhile equipment upgrades happen for all team members not individual characters granted each character can only have one piece of equipment on them at once but this can be changed anytime outside of a mission so it's not tied to the character really it's a player choice thing about preferring to use spider bots or electro fists or stealthy cloaks or whatever and having that kind of equipment a cloak or a close range melee attack or an emp mine or a spider bot all have way more impact on play style than the more subdued character perks if your chosen equipment is a cloak you'll be playing fundamentally differently than if your chosen equipment is a knockout punch regardless of whether your character has flatulence or earns extra money from missions the subdued nature of perks and the ability of anyone to wield any equipment results in a game where some characters find it easier to do some things than others but no character finds it impossible to do anything like anyone can hack cargo drones or summon them from a drone landing pad construction characters just have the ability to spawn them instantly out of thin air at a moment's notice it makes the use of cargo drones more convenient for construction characters but it doesn't mean recruiting a construction character fundamentally opens up new play possibilities that you didn't have before and it's the same for all of the game systems any character can parkour to one degree or another any character can hack to one degree or another and any character can do stealth to one degree or another armed combat is also always an option it's just that each character has modifiers that may make it easier or harder to do those things low mobility characters might have a slightly harder time in combat because they can't move as fast or take cover for example or a character who gets faster cooldown times on hacks might have a marginally easier time in stealth sections but a low mobility old man can absolutely shoot his way out of a situation and a hacker can absolutely end up needing to break into places physically despite his system's knowledge at the end of the day they're all ubisoft open world protagonists so you don't end up with a rich interesting possibility space of different characters that range from stealthy ninjas to expert hackers who can do everything from their bedroom to skilled combatants that are experts in combat to regular people just trying to help out all set in a game designed to facilitate multiple play styles at once you end up with a flat ubisoft style action stealth open world game that just kind of warps a little depending on who you're playing as sometimes it's a little bit easier to do stealth or a little bit easier to shoot a bunch of bad guys but anyone can do stealth and anyone can shoot bad guys this undercuts the whole play as anyone system because from a gameplay perspective the choice doesn't matter all that much it feels like one of the core design decisions was that every mission can be beaten by any character so if you want to beat the whole game as a gun-toting granny executive banker or cyberpunk teen you absolutely can which is in some sense really cool every character can be the hero of this story and again that's an impressive feat and i don't want to undersell that but the decision to let anyone be the hero all of the time is one that favors player empowerment and expression but at the expense of having a system that feels meaningfully impactful in a system where everyone can do everything more or less no one feels memorable and i hate saying that because it sounds like some brad bird john galt nonsense about wanting great characters to be unchained to achieve their fullest potential but i'm not looking for great abilities just different abilities if you're going to present choosing who to recruit as a core mechanic of the game if you're going to make that choice a focus i want to be able to feel the consequences of that choice but if it's not really beneficial in a game system sense maybe there's something else to the play as any one thing maybe it's less of a gameplay device and more of a storytelling one a means of procedurally generating a narrative and that's awesome plenty of games have personalized memorable narratives from the sims to rogue to spelunky everyone has their favorite stories from playing these games that are wholly their own and it's clear that the game has been taking notes from the shadow of mordor series it applies certain relationships between procedurally generated characters that will appear again and again in order to deepen your relationship with what would otherwise be a forgettable npc for example the game has a handful of albion enforcers the bad guys in the game that it will use throughout your adventures and if they get injured too violently or too often by your characters they'll develop a hatred for dead sec which cool we now have an enemy a nemesis and this can later manifest in them kidnapping one of your operatives off-screen forcing you to complete a mission to get them back here's something fun i was doing one of my routine head counts and it turns out one of you is completely unaccounted for probably kidnapped i'm reconstructing their ctos data now and it looks like they were being trailed by an enemy of ours right before they were kidnapped a woman who you managed to piss off during your escapades find her and she'll lead us to our operative and they may keep reappearing until you kill them at which point they stay dead and hey that's a whole little emergent narrative right there or you may see a little marker under a person's name being harassed by albion forces someone who is related to an operative or a prospective candidate in your group stopping that harassment will help their relatives opinion of dedsec and potentially get them to be recruitable other times they may have a blackmailer that you can take out to help convince them to sign up or some legal snafu that you can erase by breaking into a ctos station and wiping their records and these little generative stories are indeed pretty cool the first time you encounter them the problem is that they're rote experiences it turns out that lots of people in london seem to have blackmailers or problems with police reports that need to be erased and the third or fourth time one of your compatriots gets kidnapped by someone who hates dead sec you'll just sign frustration it's also hard to keep track of who is who in a game with dozens of characters when you see someone on the street and the ui and sister the relative of daniel smith or whatever you won't know off the top of your head who that is and there's no easy way to cross-reference it other than going down the list of all operatives and potential recruits one by one and this proc gen story stuff feels like it's a consequence of simulating every londoner but not an intended side effect of the play as anyone system and they don't actually play well together like the benefit of shadow of mordor is that talion has a personal relationship with these orcs he keeps running into sometimes they best him sometimes he bests them they level up and get more powerful but so does he etc there's a story there a history i killed you before you came back and threatened me and now look where you lie still full of shrock i see but when you can play as anyone that sense of personalized rivalry goes away the albion officer who you've beat up three times doesn't hate susan the deadset operative who hurt her most recently she hates dedsec in the abstract but albion already hates dead sec in the abstract it doesn't personalize the threat or make the story more interesting because you're playing as a team and not an individual that relationship doesn't feel personal and unlike shadow of mordor where the hero orcs have a variety of stats that fundamentally change combat encounters so that fighting them is memorable the albion agent angry at dedsec is just another albion employee who goes down just as easily consequently it doesn't feel like it's generating a personalized narrative between one of your operatives and her so much as it's another excuse to generate open world busy work where you have to save one of your kidnapped operatives it generates quests not narratives and that's kind of a bummer there's also the fact that procedurally generated characters just don't really work it's like a twitter bot one out of every 20 or 50 or 100 outputs may be perfect or amusing or hilarious but the bulk are just trash for example while getting pickup footage for this episode i ran into this man ranting to himself about revenge in front of an atm late at night ah i can't [ __ ] wait to get my revenge no it turns out he's the youngest least well-paid paleontologist ever at just 19 years old and earning 13 grand a year he also wakes up at 4am every morning to go commit vandalism and is currently investigating a counterfeit drug trade he also might just not be that bright compare this character to wrench from watch dogs 2 who loved bad movies and had anger management and trust issues but was a fierce and loyal friend we don't know wrench's income or search history or hourly schedule but we don't need to we get to know him not some data abstraction of him it kind of feels like watchdog's legion fell backwards into the trap of its own cyberpolice state premise it's doing the opposite of what silicon valley is doing in the real world instead of boiling real human beings down to a handful of data points they're starting with a handful of procedurally generated data points and working backwards to say that they've built a whole person and that alchemy just doesn't work in either direction the algorithm isn't capable of authoring people but just a handful of gameplay stats derived from pre-made labels like opera singer or assassin or software engineer it's hard to care about your teammates when they amount to a procedurally generated list of attributes and harder still to care about the uncle of a procedurally generated list of stats this flat forgettableness also extends to the voice work now it's undeniably impressive that they charted out their game script so well that it can scale depending on which voices are available on your team and how many people are on your team move one more muscle chief and i'll blow the whole place with you in it all right let's not get dramatic who the [ __ ] are you and what you doing in my flat you with albion ouch think more counter cultural what that sick it works for in-game cutscenes incidental dialogue while driving around and procedurally generated missions all of this is it must be stated an incredible feat of production in and of itself she's scared there's no other reason for it to threaten us good she should be scared send me the coordinates like no joke being able to do that is hard but because any character can interact with any bit of dialogue you get a lot of weirdly stilted conversations like listen to the naturalistic back and forth you get in this bit of dialogue from watch dogs 2 where marcus is trying to convince satara to not quit i'm trying to have a good time me too so we as in dead sec we are going to enter that hacking challenge and we're going to win and the others are okay with this they will be i got a nice smile oh you do have a nice smile see no problem we're gonna do this everything's gonna be okay you've got it all figured out huh nah but i do know if i get you back in satoru mode you'll figure out most of it for me damn you are dangerous meet us by the ugly sculpture when you're ready all right see you there then listen to this recruitment conversation it's about time someone stands up and does something for this city don't you think you're with that would you help me destroy my magnum opus please excuse me well i worked in a pharmaceutical lab until my supervisor sold my research to albion and fired me i've heard they're running top secret tests in their own military lab now god knows what file business they're getting up to could you destroy my old files i'll tell you everything i know all right we look into it thank you dear i never forget a favor help me and i'll help you however i can again it's impressive that any characters can have any conversation but the conversations themselves are awkward and soulless exchanges formalities that establish yes i have given you a mission or thank you for completing my mission and they sidestep this rigidness in mission cut scenes by having everyone just sit on a couch watch a video from the unrecruitable plot characters and then give one-liners about that's horrible malik probably worked out the same thing yeah we've been thinking about this subject tell em bugly they come off as game show contestants being given a task by the charismatic host and they're about as deep and disposable the point is the play as anyone system is part of an overall effort by watchdog's legion to swing for procedural narrative in multiple ways by generating events and relationships with other characters to respond to or generating characters for people to play as but the problem is that the narratives it generates are flat and static none of the structures or characters or relationships between them change the game just adds little labels to characters to present the illusion of higher personalized stakes in the context of gameplay that is already there and putting a little they particularly hate you message under bad guys or they're your potential recruits father's uncle's college roommate tags under people being harassed by albion don't generate new narratives by simply being there to be meaningful those tags need to integrate with game systems in a way that players care about and feel and they're not that's not a pluto-centric systems first the mechanics are all that matter statement i keep comparing the game to watch dogs too because that game exuded a warmth and emotional core that's lacking here well i will get this little [ __ ] prepped while you go get us some caffeine uh wait you want me to get you two coffee he's a robot i want you to get us caffeine he'll take a decaf so i'm not saying game narratives need to be systems driven i'm saying if you're going to step away from traditional authored stories to focus on procedural narrative you need to figure out how to make those procedural narratives compelling watchdogs legion doesn't can you send some reinforcements so the play is anyone concept doesn't really offer a ton of interesting gameplay changes and it doesn't really successfully generate procedural narratives but there is one unique-ish way i found myself interacting with the play as anyone system and i can't tell how much of the game itself deserves credit for it and that is as a springboard for role-playing role-playing is always an act of shared collective storytelling usually between multiple people but occasionally between just a player and an absent game designer via a role-playing system or book and we can get into conversations about whether single player role playing is a masturbatory exercise or not but at what point does a player projecting meaning onto procedurally generated characters become head canon and fan fiction rather than something the text and the player are working together to generate how hands off can a game be before the player is doing all of the work for example i had a dead sec agent whose day job profession was comedian and who owned a car but when i played as him i like to steal other people's cars because in my head i thought that he thought it was funny a guy who owns a car in downtown london but used his membership to a hacktivist group as an excuse to hotwire motorcycles rather than remember where his keys are it was a bad running gag like the wet bandits leaving sinks running in every house they hit and it underscored why he was a failed comedian come hacktivist cool motorcycle but it's a running gag almost exclusively extratextual to the game the only thing the game provided was that his job was a comedian so he probably liked a good joke and that he did in fact own a car i could summon at any point but i chose not to is this role playing and character building entirely of my own creation or is it something the game and i worked together to build given that the game doesn't actually recognize it and it's not like while playing watch dogs legion i just came up with one-off character gimmicks for the first third of the game or so my main character was christopher butler a dapper opera singer with an upper crust accent he didn't do every mission but he was in my head the backbone of the team responsible for recruitment and tactical planning until he died tragically when i got a little bit messy this left the team in a bit of a lurch but along the way the team had hired carmen chioka a waitress we just happened to bump into while she was bussing tables she was already sympathetic to the cause with family being up for deportation and we recruited her easily she didn't have a ton of interesting skills other than a non-lethal tranquilizer but she slowly transformed her entire life into being a dead sex operative she started dressing differently and she was good at it and when christopher died it was she that took over she was the one that brought down billionaire sky larson and had a hand in every other major operation we undertook i watched her grow from a lady begrudgingly wiping down a table to make ends meet to the head of an organization that embodied her fight against inhuman deportations but and this is important none of that is in the game that's my headcanon effectively what the game provided was her original job as a waitress the ability to change her clothes the perma-death of christopher butler and the background detail of a family member being deported that she was actively fighting against and that does paint a picture of a woman who would fight for dead sec but the internal team dynamics and her growth as a character that she fell into the work of fighting albion obsessively that she quit her day job that she hated that she felt like she'd finally found her calling and family that she totally changed her style to reflect this new found self and that she was the one that took over once christopher butler died that all came from me it effectively does not exist in the text at all the game does not recognize it the game does not care and i'm torn on this because it comes back to some fundamental questions about single player role playing on one hand the game does open the possibility for creating your own unique dynamic narratives compared to that person who hates you has kidnapped a random one of your members again carmen's growth was compelling the death of christopher butler was compelling because dedsec had to figure out who if anyone would take his place as leader but how much should the game systems be doing to reflect those stories because the more the game formalizes stories the more constrained the possibility space is there's no actual leadership role in the game there's no difference between a casual and hardcore deadset member and there's no internal life to characters other than a list of factoids and it's exactly the absence of formal systems that recognize that stuff that let me come up with a story where there wasn't one if they did have internal systems i'd be constrained to whatever stories those systems were designed to tell in the same way that the people who hate dedsec just become recurring kidnappers but the less the game facilitates reflecting those stories in the game space the more it's just kind of some made up fan fiction i've written about my own playthrough i feel like there's an equilibrium to be found between giving players systems free blue sky expressive spaces that have no limits on them and shoving them down a handful of pre-packaged narrative paths like the generative missions do reflecting player expression in ways that make it feel like the game is collaborating with players to tell a story is critical for role playing especially single player role playing ultimately i feel like watchdog's legions play as anyone system can provide prompts but players do the rest i take the death of christopher butler and turn it into a power vacuum i take a woman waiting tables change her clothes and call her a leader i take a comedian with a car and invent a stupid joke he tells watchdog's legion's play as anyone system is great at giving me role-playing prompts but it fails as a role-playing system because it can't respond to the role-playing act itself it throws me some action figures gives me a of the box blurb for each of them and then says i don't know figure something out it invites role-playing but it is not itself a role-playing game ultimately it's hard not to marvel at the boldness of watchdog legion's play as anyone system but it ends up feeling like it's pulled in too many directions at once to succeed if it was a more systems-focused game it could have made player selection a meaningful mechanical choice or a trade-off again pre-moon crash is probably my high watermark for doing this kind of thing really well it can be done but it requires designing levels for it and being comfortable telling players no which this game refuses to do if it was interested in generative stories it needed to figure out ways to make those stories personal and core to the experience rather than incidental and about other characters in the game world above all make the generative stories about the people you've recruited and spent time with rather than the strangers you've yet to recruit who cares if susan who works for albion hates dedsec all of albion hates dedsec but if christopher butler was losing faith in the cause that'd be an interesting challenge and if the play as anyone system wanted to facilitate role playing it needed to have more means of reflecting the stories players are telling to themselves any one of these would be noble goals and a reason enough to keep this system around but as implemented it's kind of a tepid toe dip into each of them and that sucks because i'd love to see something like this tried again just with more focus an open world game where you can play as anyone each of whom have fundamentally different play styles and abilities requiring you to build a team to achieve your goals an open world game built around generative narratives where your relationship with the individuals in the city and even whole districts depends on your choices a cyberpunk role-playing game about leading a team of vigilante hackers against the worst of a sprawling metropolis well we'll see about that last one i guess but any of those could theoretically be great and a big temple game taking a stab at these kinds of things isn't a bad thing but a big tentpole game also has to satisfy a lot of other interests which limits the ability to really push these sorts of experimental forward-looking designs play as anyone fails but it doesn't fail because the idea that anyone can be a hero is bad or that games taking a more humanistic approach to their systems is bad it fails because it's unsure how it wants to use its protagonists to tell its story and really that feels like a microcosm of the entire franchise at this point you

Channel: Errant Signal

Views: 63,644

Keywords:

Id: kdEL4pf9tlg

Length: 33min 11sec (1991 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ChrisRR]

Speaking as a brit, the draw of hiring anyone is killed by the fact that they all have such awful voice acting.

I find myself choosing characters based on the least offensive voice work rather than actual skills. It's so obvious when they've asked a posh person to talk like a builder, or a young woman to talk like a swearing geriatric

[u/hiddentheory]

I hope they'll keep improving that aspect in next game, like adding character traits and habits. And giving more interactions between teammates like in WD2.

Most reviews pointing it out that no matter who you play, protagonist has same personality.

[u/boqeh]

Great take on this game. Almost makes me feel like the tone and protagonist shift from WD to WD2 wasn't actually Ubisoft learning from what didn't work in the first game, but was more a top-level view that sequels in the IP should alwayscenter around someone new to show DeadSec's influence around the world over time.

In that regard, the Play as Anyone system makes a lot of sense in theory as a logical end-point for that strategy, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

[u/MrSunbro]

So I tried this game, got like 9 people recruited for different things, before the 2and story mission. And it runs out operatives from missions make the entire recruiting process literally pointless when they are just so much better

[u/Maelstrom52]

So, I was actually a huge believer in the systems marketed in WD:L. In my mind, I envisioned a much broader array of skills, perks, and personality quirks that I would use to create a vibrant and colorful motley crew of well-intentioned misfits who would all become the unlikely heroes of a dystopian London. And to be totally honest, I felt like I was definitely able to do this though I agree with the complain in the video that it all felt a tad too generic. While not quite as assorted an colorful as I would have hoped, there's certainly a massive difference between doing a mission as a hitman as opposed to hacker. To be sure, I like the game a lot more than Errant Signal appears to, but I also think his criticism is well-deserved. That said, whereas his primary complaint seems to focus on the absence of creating a more personality-driven narrative, I think my main criticism was more the lost potential of world-building that could be done with this mechanic.

I had hoped that depending on who you recruited, you could help shape the world of WD:L and manipulate systems that could be used to gain leverage from a gameplay perspective or potentially open up different mission types. For example, recruiting a doctor might give me access to a database of patients who were in dire need of medicine that was overly priced making unavailable for most people. This would mean that I could either steal the medicine myself and perhaps send it to a free clinic. Or, if I wanted to go a more complex, but permanent route, I could possibly either recruit or blackmail a charge master at the hospital to force them to lower the prices, but this would require more steps to solve. Instead, recruiting a doctor means that I can simply enter a hospital without being harassed by security for a slightly longer than a non-doctor.

Here's another scenario that might have added an additional layer of complexity to mission planning: Imagine that I have an upcoming mission that takes place in a construction site. If I were to recruit or coerce 5 construction workers or a union rep, I could convince them to go on strike which would force the workers out of the building, which I could use to my advantage for the mission. Instead, recruiting a construction worker simply gives me access to a drone and allows me to wander around without being harassed by the security offices as much. One of my favorite aspects of Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, was that with enough time and planning you effectively recruit every single Orc captain to your cause, so that when you finally did storm the castle, all of the captains would be betrayers and it was a simply jaunt over to the orc leader. It felt like I had masterminded the entire thing, and while it took a SUPER long time to do, you felt really rewarded when it all came together.

I never expected the individual characters to have as much personality as they did in Watch_Dogs 2, but I would have gladly settled for more world manipulation. This is where the bulk of my criticism of the game comes from.

[u/Uday23]

Hmmm this video kinda killed my hype for that game. Crossing it off my list.

Did anyone have fun with it or should I expect another Ubisoft open world grind?