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Watch Dogs Legion is the next game in the Watch Dogs franchise, and it looks to be the most interesting as you can play as any NPC to shoot and hack your way through an authoritarian London.
Here’s everything you need to know.
Watch Dogs Legion Release Date
Watch Dogs Legion is releasing March 6, 2020 on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Google Stadia, according to Ubisoft’s website.
Watch Dogs Legion Gameplay
At Ubisoft’s E3 2019 presentation, Creative Director Clint Hocking that you can “recruit and play as anyone” in the population of the game. Ubisoft said that the characters aren’t randomly generated. Every character is fully simulated with backstories and fully voiced and animated. Every cinematic will change depending on who you’re playing as.
Each NPC has their own traits. You can recruit people who can deal with drones better, have higher melee damage, be better at stealth and more. Some recruits may even have traits that are negative, such as dying randomly. You recruit them through origin missions. The website mentions that you can also improve their skills and tools through leveling them up.
If an NPC dies in the game, they die for good and you have to pick a new one.
It seems that enemies will take different actions depending on what you do as the player. The website mentions that if you fight with fists, enemies will attempt to arrest you or take you down non-lethally. But if you draw a gun – even one that’s non-lethal – enemies will use guns too and try to kill you.
Driving returns, or course. Weapons include raw fisticuffs along with your standard assortment of handguns and assault rifles. Stealth is still an option with actions such as taking control of drones, distracting people and making cars drive on their own. You have a new spider drone that looks to act similarly to the Jumper in Watch Dogs 2 but it can take out people and shoot them with a turret.
Watch Dogs Legion Story
In Watch Dogs Legion, the people of the United Kingdom are gripped by criminals, a corrupt private military corporation and the surveillance state among a collapsed government. It’s up to the player to build a team of DedSec members to take down the authoritarian regime.
At Ubisoft’s E3 2019 presentation, Creative Director Clint Hocking mentioned Brexit and that London is at a turning point in today’s history. During an interview on Ubisoft’s YouTube channel, Hocking said that the game was in development before Brexit happened and that allowed them to go further with their story.
Watch Dogs Legion Pre-Order & Special Editions
Ubisoft’s website gives a rundown of the pre-order bonuses and special editions.
Pre-ordering the game gives you the Golden King Pack with a special mask skin, pistol skin and a car skin.
The Gold edition includes the base game, season pass and three day early access.
The Ultimate edition includes the game, season pass, early access, and ultimate digital content including the Urban Jungle Pack which grants three new characters as well as four weeks of VIP status which lets you earn experience and money more quickly.
The Collector’s edition includes everything in the Ultimate edition along with an LED Ded Coronet Mask Replica (along with the mask in the game itself), a Steelbook case, three stickers and a recto-verso propaganda poster.
The Rumors Leading Up to Watch Dogs Legion
Rumblings about a sequel appeared in February 2017 after a patch for the game extended the ending of Watch Dogs 2, as reported by Metro Gaming. The very end of the ending cutscene includes a brief audio conversation between two unnamed people discussing the rise of hacktivism around the world, specifically in Europe and the Middle East. While they’re talking, onscreen coordinates point towards Brixton in London, England.
Kotaku reached out to a representative at Ubisoft who said that “the production team wanted to include a little something extra at the end of the campaign to expand the Watch Dogs lore and hint at the potential future of DedSec.”
On March 31, 2018, Twitter user @AllHailJacko uploaded multiple videos where he played the song Spaz by N.E.R.D on Spotify (Which is the song played during the reveal trailer for Watch Dogs 2) while the Uplay client is open and then a flickering “admin_console” appeared by his profile icon (however UbiCentral was able to get the admin_console to appear without using Spotify). By clicking on it, you are taken to what appears to be a command prompt which has a list of commands.
One command lets you artificially increase your profile level and other drops virtual coins from above. Another command, list-unreleased-games, is for supposedly listing all of Ubisoft’s unreleased games. However, what appears is a garbled mess of slashes and asterisk as if the list of games was corrupted by a hacker.
In the mess you can make out bits of text resembling “Far Cry,” “Assassin’s Creed,” and “The Division” (which may be a reference to the recently announced The Division 2).
Typing the #start-map command found in the mess you can play a game styled after classic text-based adventure games. Solving the puzzle will give you a link to download a nifty wallpaper.
@AllHailJacko isn’t the only person to see this. Video editor John McLeish also found it along with multiple people on YouTube.
We got even more evidence of an impending Watch Dogs sequel announcement on April 4, 2018. As Gamerant reported, the official Watch Dogs Twitter account sent out a tweet reading simply “This is everything” before it was quickly removed.
A Watch Dogs sequel was seemingly confirmed by Sam, Ubisoft’s AI assistant in the Ubisoft Club app, according to VG247. Back in April 2018, several users asked Sam about Watch Dogs 3. Sam’s response was “Watch Dogs 3 is not finished yet, but from the last early build I tried it’s very solid. The Dev team works wonders! Can’t wait for you to try it!” You can see YouTube Channel UbiCentral using the app and getting the response below:
User Cakebytheocean02 asked Sam about Watch Dogs 3 in December 2018 and it told them that “You’d think that I’d know what was brewing in the Watchdog universe with my DedSec contacts, but I haven’t heard a blip from them about a sequel. I’ll let you know if I get new info on this.”
When if they didn’t know, then who will, Sam replied that “‘They’ will come. Or ‘He.’ There’s a debate about that. But who cares.”
We tried asking Sam ourselves before the announcement and we got the following response: “Wait a minute… Are you trying to trick me into saying something I shouldn’t say? Or revealing something that doesn’t exist? I may be in Beta but not that easy to fool.” Asking again gives us a similar response, just worded differently.
In February 2019, YouTube Channel Skullzi TV found a listing for a brand new trademark for Watch Dogs filed in December 2018.
Later that month, an anonymous user posted on a messaging board that Watch Dogs 3 will be set in London, which lines up with the updated ending of Watch Dogs 2 as well as a tweet from Kotaku‘s Jason Schreier.
They also said that players can choose to play as either a male or female character but play through the same story. So instead of having two different stories with two different characters like in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, it would be more like Far Cry 5 where you customize your own character and go through the same story as everyone else. That seems to fall in line with the ambiguous way that Sam described to Cakebytheocean02 the person who may have more info on the game. Though keep in mind that we got a completely different response from Sam.
The anonymous user also claimed that the game will focus more on smaller firearms and knives for combat but place a larger emphasis on hacking. Many complained that it wasn’t congruent with the fun, plucky protagonist in Watch Dogs 2 to use rifles, shotguns and other weapons to deal with enemies. So if the change in focus for combat is true, then it would appear that Ubisoft listened to that feedback.
Watch Dogs Legion was leaked completely on June 3, 2019 in a listing from Amazon UK, according to users on Resetera. Kotaku then confirmed that the game is real, having heard from multiple sources keeping tabs on Ubisoft.
According to the listing on Amazon UK, Watch Dogs Legion is set in London, as was originally teased. However, the game’s version of London is dystopian where technology, society and politics have changed in a post-Brexit world.
“London makes total sense for WD, as the city has one of the highest surveillance levels in the world making this the perfect playground,” said the listing.
One of the game’s big features is the ability to play as any NPC you recruit in the game, according to Kotaku. Each character has their own set of animations, voice over, character traits and visuals generated and guided by gameplay systems, according to the listing. Kotaku added that the story and gameplay will change depending on which NPC you’re playing as. The system is so ambitious, Kotaku said, that it caused the developers a lot of hardships and may have even lead to at least one delay.
The official Twitter account for Watch Dogs tweeted a teaser for Watch Dogs Legion as well as its NPC-centric gameplay the next day.
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