Legion had a great concept, but fumbled the execution. According to a reliable leaker, the Watch Dogs franchise is “dead and buried,” due to the reported poor performance of the series’ third entry, Watch Dogs: Legion.
That game’s lackluster sales may be down to timing in part — it launched less than two weeks before Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — but I suspect that its failure was due more to Ubisoft’s unwillingness to let the game live up to its bold pitch. Watch Dogs: Legion promised something interesting and new: a game where you could play as anyone.
You began in near-future London and are quickly recruited to a resistance group which is fighting back against the oppressive government. As you play, you recruit new members with new skills, then swap between them at will over the course of your playthrough.
There is no main character; every member of the resistance has an equal claim to being the game’s hero. That pitch was made more exciting by the fact that Clint Hocking was leading development.
Hocking had previously directed Far Cry 2, the boldest entry in the long-running open-world series, which used mechanical friction to make the world around you feel alive and terrifying. Legion stepped back from the brink of boldness at every turn.
You could recruit every NPC in the game, and there were some cool mechanics related to this, like finding out information about a potential recruit, then doing quests to make them eager to join your side. But, the problem was that, with so many NPCs, these quests quickly started to repeat and blur together, becoming busywork.
This might have worked if the game was more of a meat grinder; if you were constantly losing party members, the need to find backups would create tension. But, from the beginning, you could choose to turn off permadeath, which would lead to your character getting sent to jail when you fell in combat.
From there, you just needed to break them out, and they were quickly back on your roster. Characters were too disposable, but also not disposable enough.
You could recruit anyone in London, but your characters didn’t feel very distinct. You could get a hacker, a soldier, an old granny, and plenty more, but they all played like a video game hero.
You ended up with dozens of uninteresting characters, instead of one well-rounded protagonist. Now, Ubisoft is reportedly ditching the series, and that’s a bummer.
Watch Dogs: Legion was a disappointment, but Watch Dogs 2 is a terrific open-world game. Ubisoft shouldn’t stop supporting the series.
It should start supporting interesting ideas.
