Watch Dogs: Legion’s hook is the ability to recruit and play as any character in London, but this new feature is really more representative of a series in the midst of an identity crisis.
Legion opens with Dalton Wolfe, an operative from DedSec, the hacker group featured in the previous two games, dispatched beneath the Houses of Parliament to defuse bombs set up by the rival hacker group Zero Day. (Apparently every story involving terrorists and London needs to reference the Gunpowder Plot in some way.) Wolfe succeeds in saving Parliament, but loses his life in the process while failing to stop other bombs set up around the city.
DedSec is blamed for the bombings and the British government quickly hires the private security company Albion to establish a high-tech surveillance state covering every inch of London. Things seem pretty grim until you choose a new operative to rebuild DedSec and unravel the conspiracy behind Zero Day.
I started my playthrough with Riordan Doyle, a pistol-packing debt collector with a deadeye, but quickly leveled up to unlock more than a dozen other operatives with a variety of skills. For as much attention as Ubisoft put on the ability to play as anyone you meet on the streets, it never feels very fleshed out, and isn’t all that different from similar systems in the State of Decay and Shadow of Mordor games.
Recruitment begins by pressing a button to learn a few basic facts about a character and the skills they’ll offer DeadSec. These abilities range from powerful new weapons and vehicles to drone summons and unique combat abilities. But some characters also come with disadvantages like poorer stealth abilities or weaker damage resistance.
If your potential DedSec member has a positive opinion of you, you can initiate a recruitment mission, which might involve information gathering, destroying incriminating information, or rescuing one of their friends from Albion. I actually enjoyed many of these missions more than the main campaign, which quickly grows repetitive with countless missions that have you infiltrate a secure areas to hack something before making a quick escape.
Procedural generation comes with its own set of problems. For one thing, character models are pretty bad in the Xbox One X version of the game I played. I’d say they actually look worse than the characters in the first Watch Dogs released in 2014. Leaving character creation to chance also leads to characters who just don’t seem to have voices that match their models.
It leads to other inconsistencies as well. At one point, I was tasked with recruiting a lawyer who would be able to free jailed operatives more quickly. But in order to get her to join DedSec, I had to get information about two men who assaulted her father because she couldn’t get the police to do anything about them, so I don’t think she was quite the formidable criminal defense lawyer she made herself out to be.
Platforms: XBO (reviewed), PS4, PC, Stadia, XBX/S, PS5
Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: Action-adventure
And yet, when I went to recruit him, the narrative made no mention of any of this. Instead, I was told that he was a highly skilled underground boxer who had upset Clan Kelley, a local crime syndicate, with his dominating performance, and that they’d put out a hit on him. I protected him from the hit and he was on board. That his profoundly complicated personal details never came up in conversation or in any way shaped the time I spent playing as him made those details feel like what they are: weightless, randomly assigned bits of flavor text.
It’s clear that Legion could have had these personal details impact your experience. After all, while I was playing as Ian or any other Albion agent, it was common for citizens to call me “swine” or hurl other insults at me. And rightly so, as far as I’m concerned. But where is the flipside of this? Where are the citizens who enthusiastically support the takeover, who feel emboldened in their hatred of others by Albion’s suffocating grip on the city? Where are the civilians wearing Albion baseball caps and persecuting their fellow London residents because the government has tacitly endorsed such behavior?
In real life, as a visibly trans person, I can’t just leave my identity at the door when I go out into the world. It shapes my experience in ways large and small. I know that even here in Berkeley, California, there are those who hate me for what I am. I pay particular attention to any signs that the country I live in may be sliding closer to fascism in part because I know that such political shifts make the world more dangerous for me, and everyone like me. So the fact that, in the world of Watch Dogs: Legion, which is entirely about life in an oppressive fascist state, such elements of a character’s identity are just random, negligible details with no impact whatsoever on gameplay feels like a serious mis-step in the game’s sincere efforts to confront some very timely political issues.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still very glad that queer characters of all kinds are part of the fabric of Legion’s London. I love the fact that anyone who plays this game, whether they’re queer themselves or find queer people skeevy and long for the days when games disproportionately centered straight white dudes to an absurd degree, has to accept the rich diversity of London’s population. I love that Legion embraces queer people (and old people and queer old people) as would-be heroes of its near-future revolution. Legion feels like a shift in the right direction, an awkward but necessary step on the path toward games more fully reflecting the wonderful diversity of human identity. I just wish it didn’t erase the ways in which such aspects of our identity are politicized even in relatively “free” society, far more so in fascist regimes, altering what it’s like for many of us to move in the world.
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