The Watch Dogs franchise is an exercise in thinking up an interesting concept, and doing absolutely nothing with it. Watch Dogs 1: What if you're a super hacker? Watch Dogs 2: What if we made it wacky? Watch Dogs Legion: What if we fired the character writing department?
And failing to develop interesting gameplay and a storyline that revolves around this feature, or having the *balls* to make permadeath non toggleable?
"Watch Dogs 2: What if we made it wacky?" Instead of experience, we can give you FOLLOWERS! It's thematic and blends together the in-game goal of increasing your profile and the meta goal of growing stronger! Then we can completely f*** it up by having a mission where we tell you that a bunch of your followers were bots planted by your enemy, and they're gone now, but you don't actually lose any followers/experience and thus get weaker when this happens!
I disagree with "doing nothing with it". Watch Dogs does use hacking to give the player more varied gameplay and options compared to other games. Stuff like being able to complete missions without stepping foot in them or having the car of your target to drive into water and drown.
@@watema3381 I disagree with "doing nothing with it". In gamplay Watch Dogs does use hacking to give the player more varied gameplay and options compared to other games. Stuff like being able to complete missions without stepping foot in them or having the car of your target to drive into water and drown. In story, Watch Dogs 1 actually does explore how the technology ends up getting used against Aiden
@Watema 3 I disagree with "doing nothing with it". In gamplay Watch Dogs does use hacking to give the player more varied gameplay and options compared to other games. Stuff like being able to complete missions without stepping foot in them or having the car of your target to drive into water and drown. In story, Watch Dogs 1 actually does explore how the technology ends up getting used against Aiden
@@spunkysamuel you're being wilfully ignorant and picking a fight for no reason. Enjoyment is a measurement of how well he likes or dislikes the game. To him, playing with permadeath makes the game more ENJOYABLE but that doesn't mean fun. Its like having to choose between sleeping on the streets or sleeping in a car. Sleeping in a car is better than sleeping on the streets, but that doesn't make it a good experience.
@@RK9ify Y'all are having a weird argument here. A game can be fun and not good. I've played plenty of fun games that I wouldn't call good. Call of Duty: Warzone is not a well made game and not innovative at all. There are a million weird bugs and there are some severe balancing issues, the directional audio barely works, and the vehicles all suck. Nonetheless I have played it for countless hours because it is fun to play with friends, and the gunplay is good enough to carry the rest of the games flaws.
@@laffyman8218 yeah, I agree. I play Among Us sometimes and I don't think that's a good game but it's still fun but... this was OP's opinion. He doesn't think the game is good but he thinks permadeath makes it more fun. I dont care to argue the semantics of good and fun because I really don't care.
I dont think its best game but it's fun game for single player fans idk why ppl dissing this maybe they prefer gta 6 but I like game that are different instead of same game being released each year
It sounds like MGSV actually did a lot of this stuff better. Recruit anyone, fight a nebulous evil power but also have an implied creepiness due to how Diamond Dogs was basically a cult.
@RadTheLad I think that mission in MGSV would work better with Peace Walker system. I didn't really cared individually or knew much of the people that worked on Diamond Dogs, but I knew a couple of guys in MSF Venom is always the best character to play as in MGSV(due to protestic upgrades), while in Peace Walker, Big Boss wasn't the best character to play as, it sold the idea that there isn't anything particularly special about Big Boss. There was Side-Ops in PW where you needed to play as MSF Personal. IMO, PW made it easier to recognize people you recruited, because the number of people you could recruit was more manageable.
@@ChristianWS. I don't think either of them did it well. I literally always played as Snake every single time, because why wouldn't I? Why bother going through these menus and lists looking for someone who might be better when Snake is good enough? I think the only time I bothered was in Portable Ops, where I bring Snake plus three other dudes who are really fast at carrying people back to the truck. But even then, that was just because carrying people back to the truck sucked and I wanted it over more quickly. I always hated how every MGS game that revisited Big Boss/Naked Snake after 3 had to include this stupid recruitment system. I don't want to engage with all these spreadsheets and menus like I'm working a job, just let me play the "tactical espionage action" game. I get that they had to stay consistent with this idea that Big Boss is the leader of his own military, but that doesn't mean I want to manage or even play as any of his recruits.
@@mjc0961 I have to disagree with that, in PW there's Soldiers that are simply better than Big Boss in stats alone, and there's soldiers with the Channeler trait that reveals items and prisoner locations on the map, which makes 100% the game easier, or soldiers with SWAT trait that are just better to play as. Not to mention there's a few side ops that are exclusive to MSF soldiers, which makes them a little bit more relevant plot wise, since it is framed as the MSF Soldiers helping Big Boss on the background. MGSV on the other... the prosthetic makes Venom have an extra weapon and makes him a jack of all trades, with the Soldiers just having single one of the prosthetic upgrade that venom has(Like being faster), so it is harder to justify using a soldier.
@@sawkchalk6966 how would that even work? Imagine getting mauled by a crysllaid half way through the game and now you have near unkillable zombies everywhere because you didn't find a laser gun in time Or making eye contact with an ethereal and you character unpins a grenade and shoves it in their mouth
@@firuzmajid4780 you can't compare it to WD:L because the situation is different in gta 5 you have multiple PRE DEFINED protagonists that take center stage in the story In WD:L the main character is EVERYONE YOU CAN MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH Its just not the same
Honestly, games like this make me wonder how mindless of a hellhole it is working at Ubisoft. This feels like such an aimless, incomplete project that got shipped out the door for the bottom line and nothing else. Just a real depressing game. I can't imagine anyone who worked on it was satisfied with the final product.
All of the thought begins and ends with the pitch. "What if you could recruit literally anyone?" "Brilliant, now just copy/paste everything else and ship it."
That is my issue with these Ubisoft open world sandbox titles. They lack real focus. Just feel like check marks that fill a quota to sell. They should try to scale down their scope on their games and work on polishing and making a consistent experience.
This game probably could have worked with a limited silent protagonist system. Not quite Half-Life (protagonist says nothing), and not quite Dragon Age Origins (protagonist is virtually vocal, and has numerous opportunities to insert one's self into the character). Something in between, where the playable characters interact with one another using text based dialogue, and the story treats the character as a silent person (with possible avenues for dialogue options). This would have cut down a ton on worrying about each playable character having a "unique" voice, and possibly opened up more avenues on refining the world and story.
I feel like more AAA compaines ae signing onto the idea of the "less personality, more gameplay" model which leads to the games not being good at anything. Some super memorable games have one thing going for it, neat characters, and a decent story compared to the shallow mess of the rest would be seen as A+ which is a little sad.
More gameplay but less mechanical depth. They focus on creating skinner box type gameplay that funnel you towards in app purchases. Ubisoft is the worst offender of this by far.
The gameplay is garbage to though. There is just a lot of it. Hours and hours of the most routine bottom of the barrel shit that has been done better by anyone else
I have been saying this a lot recently. These games seem to aim to be jack of all trades, but nothing really stands out. These games seem to lack atmosphere, emotion, and impact. I feel so disconnected from the world I'm in. I just feel like I'm playing a sandbox and not following a narrative. These games should drop the narrative approach if they are just going to half ass it.
And the "more gameplay" isn't even literally "more gameplay", it's just "the same amount of gameplay as before, just copy/pasted more so you even more sick of the repetitiveness by the time you reach the credits. They made their open world map 50% bigger than the last game, so now they can have 15 radio towers and 40 enemy camps instead of 10 radio towers and 30 enemy camps! Wow! 🙄
I do agree with everything said in the review. The ways we, as a community (and in the video, hence my comment), address the "developers" as the direct responsible for the game directions irks me however. As "developer" is a large term that encompass a lot of people in a game development team, it does paint the whole team as a cohesive groups that made bad or baffling decisions all in agreement. The reality is that most of the team, even part of the leads and designers have little to says in the production of a game, most of the decisions are done by directors, the upper management and a design team (or teams). As baffling as the design of a lot of recent Ubisoft game may be, I hope we can shift the discussion to avoid putting the blame on most employees who may or may not disagree with the design but does their job anyways as they are instructed. You may be surprised by how rigid hierarchy in bigger companies can be and how little feedbacks and critics, if any at all, the upper management, the directors or the design team listen too when it comes from their own employee Awesome video as always! Looking forward your next ones :) (edit: slightly better phrasing)
@@Ser_Salty What about that one guy who had meetings specifically tailored for him, that was one of the project leads for a lot of the pervious games from Far Cry 3 onward? I can’t remember his name but he was ousted from the company like a year ago, roughly. He made it so many of the cookie cutter game design tropes you see in Ubisoft games were in almost every game up until his forced departure.
Although i heard there was some restructuring of that team, so maybe their influence is less, but the games are still cookie cutter monotony, so... Proof in pudding?
Yeah, I think when people mention devs, they mean people at the top who have the most power and also publishers. I don't think all of these devs share the same opinions or visions, but strive to create the vision of the lead designer.
One of the cooler features that I think every open-world game should have is the persistent NPC's I like the idea of injuring NPC's and having them show up in a hospital later, Ubisoft should've taken this a step further and had it so dead people have funerals you can show up to so you can eliminate any potential vengeful family/friends.
That is one reason I liked Divinity Original Sin 2. NPC seemed to remember stuff and your actions had an effect.on the world and how your progression went. It isn't perfect, but it does the concept better than a lot of games.
So basically, they're all just the custom protagonist aproach Ubisoft has been doing for a while but masked under a "play with whoever you want!" mechanic
Pretty much actually. It’s not even that deep of a mechanic either with how every single character feeling exactly the same, except now certain abilities feel locked behind other characters just to LOOK as if the “play as anyone” feature is deep, when in reality, it makes no sense to make features such as combat rolls or calling your vehicles as separate features behind different npc characters that all feel all the same anyways.
My biggest grip with Legion's narrative was just that: Everyone doesn't feel unique, they're all one mind. I know Dedsec is a group, they coordinate, plan, all that, people have different skills for different situations, but the fact that a guard who would shoot me on sight and was loyal to Albion could be recruited and fully commit to my cause without any regrets or second thoughts is weird. As Writing on Games said, it's weird how you are old lady one mission, then switch to a cop and continue the conversation like you were the old woman having it. It's.... bizarre as hell.
IMO the mechanic should've just been specific to a selected number of characters. It's fucking frustrating to finally find a character with a good set of skills only for him to sound like a fucking daft idiot.
This is exactly why I've remained sceptical about Legion from the very beginning. The play-as-anyone system always seemed poorly implemented, and by default means a good story with memorable characters isn't possible. Glad I didn't bite. The series has a lot of potential if it actually treated its serious themes seriously... All of your B-roll footage here looks hilarious by the way. And not in a good way. Great vid!
It really sucks the series went this direction. Not like the series has fans beyond us anyway lol. I didn’t mind aiden and the dark tone of the first. I liked the characters and setting of Botha games enough and I really wanted to get a WD game that would show people the series can be good. But they threw that all out the window now for generic ness. I am 75/25 this is the style going forward. I hope I am wrong and the next game goes back to like the first two but this is a pass for me.
I didn't play Watch Dogs Legion, so I don't know exactly how the systems are used and if there's something similar. But, what if you had big infiltration missions a'la Ocean's Eleven. A multistoried office building or a bank. You would pick let's say 6 characters and "plant" them in the location as sleeping agents - a janitor on in a corridor, a lawyer in an office, a construction worker on the roof etc. Then you would begin the mission and switch control between characters as needed, use them not just to fight, but also snear around and use create opportunities for others. That would be cool. Of course, there are problems with the execution of such idea, but the idea alone makes me exited. And sad that Legion didn't use it's potential.
So basically Hitman but with multiple agents and bigger opportunities. I can think of the things you could achieve with such a system. You have two agents hiding around opposite corners of a hallway(imagine a t-section) and there is, let's say, an armed guard down the hallway. You have to distract or subdue the guard before you go through, otherwise your cover will be blown and the mission is kaput. Your agents have different disguises. The two agents you have here are disguised as, let's say, a technician (with a toolbox) and a guy in a dress suit (has a suitcase). There's a camera at the other end if the hallway. You could choose to call the hacker of your team and disable said camera, allowing you to follow up with a direct takedown of the guard with a silent weapon, but as soon as you disable the camera, the security of the building would be alerted to that area. Now you have a timer you have to worry about before an enemy squad shows up(and ultimately blows your cover, unless you planned for that and setup a trap in the hallway). Or you could take a very different approach. You play as the technician, you reach into your toolbox, and select a screwdriver. Then you look at your agent partner in the business attire and select 'Pass Weapon' from the interaction wheel that shows up. Still as the technician, you take a few steps back and make a noise (maybe call for help with directions or something). The guard is alerted and the plan is set into action. The guard cautiously approaches the technician around the corner, not noticing the other hidden agent that he just passed by. Now you have a choice. You play a the technician and hold the attention of the guard with dialogue options and motion for your partner to attack, or seamlessly switch to your partner(gta 5 style) and either approach the guard and take him down(and risk wasting time to hide the body in a nearby room) OR let the technician continue distracting the guard's attention and instead disable the camera, head down the hallway by yourself and continue on with the mission. (I spent way too much time writing this, didn't I?)
I'd probably have put the player in the perspective of Bagley, the AI, to whom the members of DedSec really are interchangeable squishies. DedSec members could have had some sort of neural interface, with a creepy ambiguity as to how much exactly Bagley interferes with their minds. Are you recruting or brainwashing people? Is that why they all act kind of the same after joining? Plus, that way it makes perfect sense that a new character can pick right back up where the previous one died. Playing as a chipper amoral AI trying to bring down the system because that's what it's been programmed to do would have been more entertaining.
But that would ruin the entire point of playing as different people, which is to form a resistance and start a revolution. That feeling of creating an army to fight back against big brother. We as humans can relate much more to that then some AI just screwing around
At first I was going to add something about having the player characters act like some sort of sleeper agent, but then I happened to think that it'd be more thematically appropriate if you find them engaging in some form of resistance related random activities when you pick them up. Like, if a character has being a punk as a personality trait you'll occasionally find them listening to snippets of songs by the Clash with some other character with the 'punk' trait, or if they're a cop you'll find them about to "detain" someone for abetting the resistance before taking them to an alleyway, removing the cuffs and advising the "suspect" on how not to get caught.
While watching one saga came to mind, Mass Effect was a prime example of how to built an immersive game with memorable characters and moments. So for WD:Legion it all boiled down that when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Thanks for your video, it helps to get a grasp of games I wasn't looking forward to play 😅
between this and Valhalla I'm becoming convinced that Ubisoft has no idea how to make a challenging game anymore, or one where concepts don't actively hinder execution.
There is a place for challenging games or difficult games like sekiro or say a fighting game. But it definitely feels like ubisoft has a few to many people pulling every game in multiple directions.
@@SM-or1wo that's what difficulty modes are for, but i'm hearing that people are playing Valhalla on the second hardest difficulty and not finding a challenge until they're playing against content over 100 power higher than they are, which is bad design.
@@Aqua-wc2bk I find Sekiro massively overtuned difficulty wise to the point where I sold it a week after launch. I vastly prefer fames where you can adjust difficulty via modes or leveling mechanics.
@@dekdenfor9770 I agree with you on skeiro after I finished the game it was one I never wanted to touch it again. I was just saying that there is a place for games like it.
You should have played on the Permadeath mode - you care far more about getting them out alive, and they don’t just get arrested or injured - they die and you can no longer play as them. It makes you really think about who you want to play as at any point in time... the getaway driver for an escape scenario, a hitman for infiltration, get a cop to walk right into a police station and free a prisoner, etc.
They actually be arrested when they're in vehicle. Outside of vehicle they die. One of my operatives was arrested when was inside and been shot by Albion. Don't know for melee if they be injured.
I feel like the game story could be a lot more intimate if it have a "commander" character AKA actual player avatar. Meanwhile I totally in disagreement with recruting random NPCs shenanigans. I would have prefer an actual handcrafted unique cast of characters in the numbers of dozens or even hundred or so. Plenty of games did it, like SUIKODEN, VALKYRIE PROFILES, VALKYRIE CHRONICLES, CHRONO CROSS, TRAILS OF SERIES, etc. You know, like an actual LEGION of unique characters, personality, & skills, designs, etc.
I did think it was funny when I walked up to one potential recruit in full Albion gear and they were like: "You must be DedSec, I can use your help." Like, that was a 1 in a million shot to not being kidnapped and tortured for information.
Ironic that the director of the game is known for coining the terms "Ludonarrative consonance/dissonance", because this is exactly where you found it to fall short.
Man I was really hoping it would stick its landing. Combining the two of the most experimental ideas in open world design from last decade (GTA V and Shadow of Mordor) seemed like an obvious next step
Legion's "recruit everyone" function works the same as "create a character". Both lead to placeholders devoid of interesting narrative progression because there's so many options. Only Legion might be more expensive to make.
@@MUDS1P I would've loved if Legion went that route. The problem for me is since you can play as anyone, they all have a blank personality so there's no distinct supporting cast.
The dialogue could be fixed by a fairly easy method of adding lines referring to the player character as a group or telling them to pass the information that they are being given to their collective/their commander in every conversation (possibly acknowledging loss of personnel in missions while they are at it). That wouldn't make the story any more compelling necessarily, but it would make things more consistent.
To quote Yahtzee, the way you handle relevant themes is by making by the protagonist AN ORDINARY FUCKING DUDE. Not a grim gravel voiced avenger and not a neon pink roller blading scooby gang, an ordinary dude. Now to add to that, ONE normal fucking dude, not 5 million. Unless it's a strategy game such as X-Com where you're expected to throw soldier after soldier (or hacker after hacker) into enemy firing lines and have your experienced troops shoot while the enemy is reloading. But you'd expect some recognition of the fact you're throwing people into the grinder for victory in a game like Watch Dogs: Legion.
My gripe with this game is similar to yours. It's hard to feel connected to any of the people I recruit because you know literally nothing about them save for what's on their bio sheet and their skills. That's it. Like my first recruit was a Ukrainian named Oksana. Now the story of how a Eastern European woman ended up in dystopian-hellscape London and began to lead the charge to free the city would've made for a damn interesting videogame. But as it is, she's just one of 40 different faces you recruit. Indeed, I could play and beat the *entire* game as just Oksana despite having 39 other people on the roster. Granted, it has its fun perks but overall, eh. The story is lackluster, which is worsen by the fact that we have no central character or group of characters. Unless I fabricate a story in my head revolving Oksana and several other members, they're just faces, really.
Honestly, I hope they continue to build upon this because they've got a good thing going and a good foundation there. Maybe if they just focus on the Next-gen consoles and PC only with the next addition they'll be able to add to the formula and learn from the mistakes in legion and make it a more cohesive experience
Sounds like they would’ve been better off advertising it as a nanobot that DeadSec developed which can replicate across people akin to a Virus. I didn’t think it would be well executed, but I’m sure it’ll get its usual band of folks buying it due to the sheer amount of awards they won. It’s weird how gaming has turned Hollywood lately and awards and magazine reviews don’t really speak well to much. It would’ve been fantastic to have seen them develop something akin to Middle Earth’s Nemesis System for this game, but I figured they weren’t going to.
Hmm, that would be an actually interesting concept. You'd take the free will of random people for your cause but it's for "greater good", tho who decides what is good and bad in a society like this. Maybe the people would be fully conscious while under your control and when released, they would have to deal with consequences based on what you did. You could tackle mental health (most likely PTSD) and the messiah complex in the same time. Imagine taking control of someone living a comfortable life, and either killing him in the process or driving him to suicide after the mission. Now, you made another 5 Albion soldiers, because the family of the character will see you as a cult of martyrs. but, You'd need far more smarter scriptwriters for this. This is why I stand behind the opinion that the teme in Watch Dogs 1 was the most surrealistic portray of tech dystopia and they should have build upon that world, rather than completely scrap it and start again.
almost ANY mission allowed you to play as anyone. could have been more character development if only one character voice was used to play a certain mission. ie using specific characters for each mission.
Makes me wonder how interesting a game would be if you mixed this "you can play as anyone" gimmick with Darkest Dungeon's "you play as the manager to a team of adventurers" thing. It would keep the upsides of having so many to choose from while also have a singular center for the story to revolve around.
The idea behind it is really fun and appeals for a "V for Vendetta" or "Fight Club" feel: There is no one guy, one leader. There is a whole. A collective that is way stronger than the sum of it's individuals. There are an absurd amount of unhappy people loosely organized, but all blindly devout to a cause. But I totally understand your argument. It feels like there is one team building world and lore, crafting a dystopian future, but there is another team, focused on gameplay, that was paid to make a GTA-like sandbox of easy-going and light fun. A great example were the story and the mechanics sound like two different games.
What I find most bizarre is how every random citizen is just chomping at the bit to join an insurrectionist faction at the slightest prompting by the player; and yet we're simultaneously supposed to believe the citizenry is crushed under the weight of Big Brother's all-seeing eye? Like, imagine how different 1984 would've gone if Winston was just walking up to random office colleagues asking "hey mate, you look like you're sick of living in a totalitarian nightmare, wanna fight back by riding around on drone lifts and zapping security guards?", and everyone was just like "yup sounds good" EDIT: Now I've actually played it I must say, this is some of the most fun I've had in a Ubisoft open world game for quite a while! I also find that what I criticised here can be mitigated somewhat if you use the deep profiler to trigger 'investigation' missions rather than just approaching people on the street like "hey mate, join dedsec?". The deep profiler system gives the impression of individual lives being lived in a way that gets a bit lost in translation once you get into face-to-face dialogue. I'm loving how the underlying systems give life to NPCs beyond just window dressing. But the dialogue runs into limitations of using fully-voiced scripts, because the minor details unveiled in the deep profiler are often ignored in dialogue. Most people seem to forget their prior identities upon joining dedsec, and become just another walking weapon for Bagley to send into action after one of their comrades dies or gets bored. This could've been interesting to explore thematically, as another commenter mentioned, as a critique of collectivist ideologies being no better than the totalitarian regime they claim to be so unlike. It strikes me as deeply ironic that I can recruit anyone to use as pawns in Dedsec's chess game, while its founder hides away behind a TV monitor; and yet this irony is seemingly never addressed by the game. On the plus side, it's fun to run around zapping guards and setting off chain reactions of chaos, so... 9/10.
@The Mutineers interesting theory! Personally I think they just realised the limitations of "recruit anyone" mechanic too far into development, and effectively wrote themselves into a corner. But you raise a good point, if DedSec can stand for whatever ideals the player projects onto them, then arguably dedsec stands for nothing at all
@The Mutineers Exactly! They have some genuinely interesting ideas, yet the y lack the *balls* to turn it from a mediocre game with an interesting idea into a house hold classic. Typical Ubisoft is all I can say!
FWIW, saying that anti-totalitarian ideologies (e.g. anarchism) are so dehumanizingly collectivist that they're no better than totalitarianism has an edgy "everyone is bad" charm, but it's not accurate to reality.
I think the only good thing about the concept of play as anyone is that you have a plethora of randomly generated characters to roleplay with which is what I'm doing on my channel. Other than that it's so basic and poorly designed it's really annoying with how repetitive it is. Every character feels the same, happy and overly eager to fight an entire army all alone. Hopefully they can improve it with time but I'm doubtful, maybe another team can make a game with this based on their mistakes?
During my time playing watchdogs legion I spent more time just running around looking for a dude and a girl that had the look i wanted then actually playing the game. Something that made just wish there was a character creator instead.
I really don't understand why nobody ever mentions Driver: San Francisco when talking about Legion. They did the same concept years ago for a racing game, it's not an entirely new idea at Ubisoft
I'm not sure whether it's really the same concept. Driver SF are just... vehicles that you can jump between, and you can jump between them mid mission and combine the positions and traits of several vehicles to complete a given mission, which is something WDL lacks completely. In fact i found that i had to pause and keep jumping between vehicles often every few seconds, which gave me a terrible disjointed experience where i was never in the flow, i was never one with the vehicle, which is something i really look for in a driving/racing game. Building an amount of trust towards your vehicle to push it to the limit, not getting curveballs from it changing underneath you, so it plays all like a puzzle game and nothing like a racing game, which i guess goes towards your point, since WD is fundamentally a puzzle game series. Narratively, they're also the opposite, in DSF you jump between vessels, bodies and cars that you inhabit temporarily with your mind, but you retain one protagonist at all times, while in WDL you jump between what are supposed to be different people, and yet they alll seem like remote controlled robots. Funny thing is that if you were to see it as a same or similar concept, it would mean that DSF did it all better.
@@SianaGearz Well I meant "same concept" in a very broad way, since the games are totally different genres to begin with. My experience with DSF is years ago, though (normal, given it's release date), and given the reviews I don't think I will ever play WDL. So I don't think I can ever give a fair comparison :-)
The conclusion is: Ubisoft should've avoided a linear story in a game designed to be open ended. That's why many feel disconnected from the characters they play. Look at Darkest Dungeon. It has a similar hook, but the randomly generated characters get to feel LIKE characters because a) They're not bogged down by a linear story b) Playing as "anyone" carries consequence. If I pick a kleptomaniac knight as an attacker, there's a possibility that my loot gets snatched by him. They all have afflictions, problems and personality.
Ever since I played Zelda BotW, I realized that linear storytelling and open world gameplay do not mix. I have felt it before playing that game, but that game really made it clear. Both call for different game design and they seem to clash. I notice these stories lack focus as a result of sandbox approach.
“where legion briefly sets aside it’s toothless, faux political bloviating are made all the more tonally incongruous” well someone’s been reading the theasur... the theusau- the dictionary.
Man, this is exactly what I feared when they announced no central protagonists. Part of the reason I enjoyed 2 was the goofy Dedsec squad. They felt like a group that actually cared for one another as well as their community and it just warmed my cynical heart to see characters like that.
Agreed. Watch Dogs 2 was entertaining and if you played it non lethally, helped with the themes of it. Even Watch Dogs 1, though Aiden was as interesting as soaked particle board, was fun feeling like John Wick. This game just fails due to the narrative and the powerful ludonarrative dissonance.
I fail to understand why you did not play with permadeath on. Of course it's easy when everyone only gets "arrested". This is kinda weird, ACG showed that the social system is way more deeper than portrayed here.
@@WritingOnGames I get that, to me it seems like you missed an option which could have raised the stakes and could have possibly got you more invested in your crew (since you have to be careful with each one)
Man, I remember the E3 trailers where they made the graphics look super slick. (Not that that would sell me on the game, personally.) But holy cow some of those textures in your footage look really bad.
It ran like shit on my PC even on lowest settings (a problem which is getting sorted very soon as I have a 3080 build on the way), so basically all the footage you're seeing here is actually captured using Nvidia's streaming service Geforce Now as it ran a little steadier. This is actually the game running on pretty high settings within that. Not an ideal solution but like I say, I'll have a better setup in the next week or so. As someone else said though, if a graphical showcase is what you're looking for, that's not the point of this video so I'd strongly advise looking around-personally, I've not been super impressed with how any Ubisoft games look in recent years even in, for example, tightly constructed gameplay demos they've shown.
@@WritingOnGames Thanks for clearing it up! And, nah I don't really care about graphics for the most part. It was just jarring to see mostly okay textures alongside some textures that look PS2-ish.
So heres the thing. It comes down to being able to change your characters appearance. Thats it. Once you unlock that person and their skills, you have instant access to their stuff and you can switch to them whenever you want. It boils down to having access to al the guns and skills, but you have to annoyingly switch who you're playing as.
First looking at the game months back, I thought you would have to switch between your different operatives to use their specific unique abilities to help complete mission. Like switch to construction worker to lower crane, then to a drone summoner and ride crane to top of building to then summon a drone for air support, then switch to albion guard to sneak inside, ready to activate drone when im spotted.... First mission i realized I couldn't switch characters mid-mission. Fail.
The game probably could have benefited from a custom created protaganist with MGS5 style recruitment where recruited NPC's could function as contextual help during missions. This would help with the role playing aspect and still make you feel like every npc matters and has potential.
its hilarious to think that Clint Hocking is both the lead designer on this game and the person who first coined the term lundonarrative dissonance. the tone of the game is laughably inconsistent. Also, I think WD2 worked because yes, there was very little substance or motivation to take down the man, but that made sense because it was really a group of fun colourful friends with laptops and a lot of free time. The tone was consistent, and people loved being able to connect with the characters. These characters were developed by writers who put thought into how their experiences affected their individual attributes. Then, the actors put on an actual performance. They were the character in the way they moved, delivered their lines, and interacted. Legion is frustrating because they've replaced the creative process of building characters in a world (a process that applies to acting in any medium) with some randomisation system. There was literally no way to make a play as anyone system work.
Just bought this. Never played WD1 but I loved WD2 so I was feeling pretty positive about it. But a couple hours in and I can already tell that the voice acting is downright awful, and the voices don’t often line up with people’s mouths. Good example of how less is more, with limitless potential on who you can recruit means they had to cut corners with voice acting. A shame, graphically it’s stunning. Was hoping for randomized NPCs you can play similar to how State of Decay 2 handled it
idk, the game shines for me as I take it seriously. I guess you can play as a bunch of teletubbies or you can try to build up a good team and roleplay as them. I think you are doing the freedom of the game injustice.
I... really don't think I am. I talked about how the freedom the gameplay affords is genuinely quite impressive for a game like this. I just said my enjoyment had next to nothing to do with the recruitment feature.
the game's a lot of fun in that regard. And even better if they're doomed in the first place, so there's no real point in playing with any reservations.
Honestly I would have forgiven all of this if permadeath actually carried some weight. I am stuck on a certain mission near the end that has killed a few of my people and the fact that not only are they not mentioned nor remembered in some way by the team/game but also I have to redo the mission like my experience never happened takes me out of the game pretty quickly. There is no sense of loss...well, if you spent 20 bucks on the DLC characters and they die, you will feel a loss of money
What Ubisoft should have done is have it so you can pick a voice and build a character like an RPG, then recruit people with passive abilities that enhance your own character. So, for example, the player's character would recruit a boxer and the boxer could teach the main character how to fight better (new moves/combos, melee stat boost), but the player's character wouldn't be as good as the boxer in those specific areas, so if you wanted to play as the boxer they would give an advantage. Also, you could call one of your teammates then play as them, so I could call a getaway driver to one of the mission locations, then switch to them to make my escape.
story and gameplay fix: play as the watch dogs AI Bagley. He's already reset at the beginning of the game so expanding his network would account for players level progression, but you could still use NPC's as what would essentially be meat puppets if you didn't constrict your movements to drones, the spider, city cameras (and a mid game introduction of a fully fledged robot body). Players can't connect with such a massive group of differentiating non-personalities, so Bagley would have been the players personality. Even include a second ending where Bagley takes over London with greater designs on the rest of the world, if the one playing wanted.
Probably a very minor bandaid fix on a massive issue, but maybe this recruitment system would be a lot less tonally dissonant if the people you recruit had some roles they could fill based on personality, occupation, hobbies, etc. Not everyone would be the same gun toting super hacker, you could have characters do things like try to raise public perception of the resistance, or gather intel. I don't know if it would be too much to handle, but this limited role situation could lead to very interesting emergent gameplay from planning heist-like missions where multiple NPCs you've recruited can be assigned to play out a part.
A lot of the time this game looks janky and unbaked as hell (especially the character models) but driving around London at night with Ray tracing set to ultra is legitimately one of the best looking things I've seen in my decade of video gaming - and yes I played RDR 2 on Ultra 4k
Definitely have to agree with you on this one as, despite enjoying the game and earning the Platinum in a surprisingly short time, I can't say the game really resonated with me outside of the quaint charm of it's London setting. Having made a weekly ritual back in my younger days where I'd head to London each and every Saturday and spend hours getting lost in the culture, shops, cinemas and blissfully pre-Covid maelstrom of our fine capital it was initially addictive to locate old haunts and just revel in the fact we weren't thrust into another faceless identikit US city. But then things slowly began to unravel and the flaws and cracks began to show. How every mission was pretty much the same routine of hacking, downloading, shooting, fighting and listening to Bagley swear like some sort of fusion of HAL and Danny Dyer. How the police were utterly inept and never seemed to care as I stole countless cars and crashed them into buildings, phonebixes, lampposts and people yet tagged me as a 4 or 5 star getaway for simply delivering yet another mysteriously dull motorbike mission. How nobody really seemed to care as I hijaked another cargo drone and flew it across the city thus avoiding all the shitty traffic and covert infiltration down on street level. How it soon became apparent I was going to be bombarded by endless stereotypes and some of the most annoying voiceover accents in recent history, innit brut what a fuckin' malarkey! How most of the pubs were identical and served only to be where you ticked off the darts and drinking mini games because, of course, that's what all us Brits do all the time aside from football, eh? How the potentially dense and addictive hacking aspect would so often result in yet another of those rotation puzzles which kinda got old fast. How Stormzy only turned up to plug his single and allow us to play a silly drone fight whilst the video played in the background. How the potential for an incredible soundtrack full of some of the greatest music if all time ended up as a few recognisable tunes from Muse, Gorillaz and Three Bloody Lions turning up in the background so faintly as to be easily missable. How each faction arc ended so quickly as to make me wonder whether I'd missed some missions. And how I ended up completing most of the game as an elderly woman wearing just her underwear and a box on her head simply because I could ... ... which brings us back to the basic flaw of the game which is that by allowing us to play as endless characters the game ultimately loses any real character and ends up as just countless mix and match variations complete with random dodgy accent, mixed to useless skills and the sad fact that I only played as different characters to nab another trophy before reverting to my tried and tested box headed hacker stripper who ultimately saved London more or less on her own. Bless her heart, the old harlot!
I was super hyped for this game,then i saw that Baggley has more personality/story time than any other characters in the entire game.Also mention that the ending is extremely lackluster,we will probably see the true ending in DLCs.Yup you read me right.
the roadmen voice actors did a great job. i found two characters that talk like roadmen and then dressed them like roadmen. it’s the only way i could play the game cuz their voice were actually great and had emotion and personality. i soon forgot that these were characters i recruited.
I have an idea on how to make this game interesting. I'm not the best storyteller but I really want to make this game good because this games "unique selling point" - being able to become anyone, is really interesting. Yes, it is cheesy af but I still So here's the story I came up with: The game starts, you live in London, things are peaceful as they were in 2019. You are some kind of scientist, doing sciency things. You are wearing a lot of protective equipment so you can't really tell if you're a man or woman or anything. And you are working with your colleagues on some kind of holographic technology ( like a vest or a mask or something) which would allow you to change your appearance. Similar to the cloak in Outer Worlds but it lasts forever. You are really close to pulling it off. So close that you can taste the Nobel prize (or whatever they give you for being smart idk). But then Albion ( the military group in the game ) invade your lab and start wrecking your shit and kill all your colleagues. You are scared for your life, you look at the cloaking thing you were developing and realize that it is the only thing that might just help you stay alive. You put your invention on and you turn invisible. The military dudes walk by you, they don't see anything. They call in that the coast is clear and then the villain comes in to claim the prize. What is the prize? Well whatever you were working on, of course. The villain dude looks around and leaves disappointed and tells their goons to sweep the perimeter. You start walking away. Scared for your life you go to the nearest bathroom, walking past enemy soldiers. You go to the toilet, lock youself in a booth and start breaking down. Another soldier then enters the bathroom and hears you of course. He starts yelling at you to come out with your hands behind your head. You do as he orders, afraid that the bullets will come flying through the door of the toilet booth unless you do exactly as he says. He sees you and exclaims "[insert generic soldier name] ?? Why are you crying in the bathroom dude, wtf??" and starts making fun of you. But it's not exactly you anymore. You look just like one of the enemy soldiers. You take a deep breath, happy that you get to live another day. You take a second to gather yourself while the other guy is cracking jokes at your expense. The guy eventually gets tired of laughing and tells you to go back to your post. You say that you will do just that but instead get the hell out of there. And so you escape with this cloaking tech that you can't exactly control yet but work towards doing so as the story progresses. You eventually gain the ability to become anyone in the blink of an eye. But will you become so obsessed with this newfound ability that you lose your own sense of self? Or will you be responsible with your new powers? Or maybe advanced tech like this is too powerful to be controlled by a human so you destroy it? I am not going to quote uncle Ben, I think you get the point. But if we take everything I wrote above as the starting point, we have a valid excuse of why the voices sound so bad and why the voice lines are the same no matter which character you are. You play as only one character which you can kinda relate to AND you can play as a lot of people at the same time. And it all makes sense narratively. Isn't that cool? Plus we won't have the mindboggling issue where your character dies, the game switches you to someone else and congratulates you with a 'mission complete' screen. Edit: And yes, I know that this beginning doesn't mesh well with the rest of the game which very goofy. But still, I think it is more interesting than the whole "fight the power" thing that Ubisoft have got going on with the Watch_dogs, Ass Creed AND Far Cry franchises. Second edit: I don't know how you would acquire different abilities though. Maybe you could have a skill system. Ubisoft likes those.
While the crew of Watch Dogs 2 could be a little cringy it never seemed out of place. They were just young 20 somethings having fun so it made sense for them to do stupid memes. And when I played I specifically only used the stun gun and nonlethal stuff because I felt Marcus wouldn't just gun down people
Personally, above the implications of a near hive mind like organization with no free thought, they missed out on an oppurtunity to have character morality stats. Like imagine a hacker whos really good but wont kill, extremely skillful but has a low mental threshold. A single death on his hands and he may swear off the organization, or better yet may even betray you. It can really have an interesting efffect on how the player goes about controlling their characters. It could have made the play anyone more than just a flavor text. Like imagine if one of the characters you play as is a spy, and theres some sort of mission where you need to figure it out. Like, it goes deep and for it to be so surface level is a waste i tell ya.
The death of potential on this one is real. 😭 Listening to your very accurate depiction of the game is like putting salt on the wound then sprinkling it with pepper, then adding some salsa, then also a red chilli, why not, then torch it with a fcking flamethrower. Thanks! 😃
My biggest issue so far has been the new Bloodline DLC. If you thought the main game felt janky, play Bloodline. IDK if these are common problems, but for me, dialogue is often cut short for seemingly no reason, Aiden's coat will clip through a bunch of vehicle's doors, and radio will suddenly stop. My first playthrough of Legion was pretty good, but I didn't explore much, so a lot of it's flaws were overlooked. My first playthrough for Bloodline has been horrible so far, and I'm only about an hour in. Those issues I mentioned earlier have happened within the first hour of playing. I tried restarting from the beginning to see if it would fix the music and dialogue issues. It didn't.
@@Jlerpy Hah! Hitting the PoI tone would have been great alone. Watch Dogs 1 cane closest however it was still a revenge story that killed most interesting gameplay with the over use of firearms.
the issue is that you can recruit anyone, but the gameplay gives you no help from anyone you recruit except passive bonuses to quickly recover your operators after they die which is useless on permadeath. You have no team missions, no way to utilize your unused members (who could be utilized to do stuff like recruit others or gain resources) and each character is just a portion of what your character could do in the other games, you are playing a downgraded protag with no gameplay customization outside of one doodad, and these gadgets when unlocked make many operators' traits useless or redundant. This game could have been a playground, but all they made was a sandbox with no sand.
I wonder if a lot of the problems I had with this game would have been solved if you could assign a sort of "leader" character and make them from the ground up, then recruit and play as other people for missions if you *wanted* to. I don't really know if that would fix most issues, but it'd be a start. After all, I spend most open world games wondering why I have to get out developer tools or hacks to try and play as someone else for a change, and Legion's system is very good at living out a version of that without cheats. It's just that when everyone is the main character, no one is.
Resistance mode makes it an entirely different game. You are agains almost insurmountable odds and great numbers of enemies, you are alone and you are very much mortal. It is just another level. WD:L is one of the best games I've played in years.
Great Video but I would like to add that playing different characters not only felt similar narratively but also from a gameplay perspective. I never felt the need to go and switch up my character after I realized that they all play the same. They fistfight the same way, they hold their guns the same way, they run the same way (except for the old people but that gets old quick), they even hack the same. So there really is no point in recruiting characters and its jarring when the game forces you to do so in order to progress. No major spoilers here but, there's a mission in which you need to recruit a construction worker because they're the ones who have access to construction drones. So when you do the mission to recruit the construction worker you'll find the construction drones in that area.... and any character can operate a drone. I 100% agree with writing on games, the part where your infiltrating bases hacking cameras, people and etc. is the most fun part of this series and if they got rid of the mechanic to recruit anybody and instead focused on 1 person (the guy you play as in the tutorial), disable the auto-aim, and gave you more incentives to take a nonlethal approach, this would have been an amazing game
I'm really hoping in a years time after some updates and dlc this games systems evolve. I mean they have confirmed more operators will be added so I assume that will also come with new recruitment missions and personalities..... Hopefully anyway
Dalton was an interesting character and he would have made a great protagonist but nooo they had to kill him off because of this “play as everyone” shit
I think the game would have felt more cohesive to the premise if you used more than one recruit per mission. The last mission KIND OF has you use TWO recruits, but I feel like a lot of main missions should have used multiple and the last mission should have used a LOT of them. It would make it really feel more like an uprising of the people. As it is, you're supposed to be building an army but your DedSec usually doesn't consist of more than 9 members (I always keep my roster to 9 so they're easily visible).
Thanks for confirming this for me! I thought I had died inside between wd2 and legion (not unlikely given this year). I recommended wd2 to my friends for incentivizing me to roleplay hacktivist boy marcus as a nonlethal remote hacker, never even buying a gun. In legion i was looking forward to having seperated characters for this approach and gunplay- but after a few hours I just couldnt be arsed. Legion is a much more over the top hostile world and the characters way less lovable or suggesting a pacifist playstyle. Maybe its not me who died on the inside but this franchise :))
I must admit that most of the game can be taken with construction worker and its construction drone and most of other places you can ride with a spider bot. Quite shortly it gets boring game.
I have no idea how everyone's managed to spin Ubisoft's words into this extremist post-Brexit setting given how clearly they outlined their inspirations. The outline for Legion was completely solidified *before* any talk of succession began. It was only then that they began to take inspiration for plot details, but never contradicting the lore they had already come up with or overriding a decision that would make for a better story. Legion is not a post-Brexit apocalypse, but a British technological dystopia that happens to be influenced by Brexit beginning during development
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Long story short when you play a game where you can play as anyone
You end up playing no one
you end up playin yoself
@@archiltsereteli3691 congratulations
Where you cause the people downtrodden through lies and propaganda to rise up due to your own propaganda.
This game was made by NPCs for NPCs.
@@lukky6648 *Y o u p l a y e d y o u r s e l f.*
Might as well‘ve had character creation
The Watch Dogs franchise is an exercise in thinking up an interesting concept, and doing absolutely nothing with it.
Watch Dogs 1: What if you're a super hacker?
Watch Dogs 2: What if we made it wacky?
Watch Dogs Legion: What if we fired the character writing department?
And failing to develop interesting gameplay and a storyline that revolves around this feature, or having the *balls* to make permadeath non toggleable?
"Watch Dogs 2: What if we made it wacky?"
Instead of experience, we can give you FOLLOWERS! It's thematic and blends together the in-game goal of increasing your profile and the meta goal of growing stronger!
Then we can completely f*** it up by having a mission where we tell you that a bunch of your followers were bots planted by your enemy, and they're gone now, but you don't actually lose any followers/experience and thus get weaker when this happens!
I disagree with "doing nothing with it".
Watch Dogs does use hacking to give the player more varied gameplay and options compared to other games. Stuff like being able to complete missions without stepping foot in them or having the car of your target to drive into water and drown.
@@watema3381 I disagree with "doing nothing with it".
In gamplay Watch Dogs does use hacking to give the player more varied gameplay and options compared to other games. Stuff like being able to complete missions without stepping foot in them or having the car of your target to drive into water and drown.
In story, Watch Dogs 1 actually does explore how the technology ends up getting used against Aiden
@Watema 3 I disagree with "doing nothing with it".
In gamplay Watch Dogs does use hacking to give the player more varied gameplay and options compared to other games. Stuff like being able to complete missions without stepping foot in them or having the car of your target to drive into water and drown.
In story, Watch Dogs 1 actually does explore how the technology ends up getting used against Aiden
Tinker tailor soldier Teletubbie is the best thing I've heard today
Lol, I heard it right when I read your comment.
Pure poetry
Turn on permadeath, it makes the game much more fun. With it turned off the mechanic of recruiting makes no sense.
@@Largentina. I never said it was a good game, only that permadeath made it more fun. It is still a ubisoft game. Lol
@@spunkysamuel you're being wilfully ignorant and picking a fight for no reason.
Enjoyment is a measurement of how well he likes or dislikes the game. To him, playing with permadeath makes the game more ENJOYABLE but that doesn't mean fun.
Its like having to choose between sleeping on the streets or sleeping in a car. Sleeping in a car is better than sleeping on the streets, but that doesn't make it a good experience.
@@RK9ify Y'all are having a weird argument here. A game can be fun and not good. I've played plenty of fun games that I wouldn't call good. Call of Duty: Warzone is not a well made game and not innovative at all. There are a million weird bugs and there are some severe balancing issues, the directional audio barely works, and the vehicles all suck. Nonetheless I have played it for countless hours because it is fun to play with friends, and the gunplay is good enough to carry the rest of the games flaws.
@@laffyman8218 yeah, I agree. I play Among Us sometimes and I don't think that's a good game but it's still fun but... this was OP's opinion. He doesn't think the game is good but he thinks permadeath makes it more fun.
I dont care to argue the semantics of good and fun because I really don't care.
I dont think its best game but it's fun game for single player fans idk why ppl dissing this maybe they prefer gta 6 but I like game that are different instead of same game being released each year
It sounds like MGSV actually did a lot of this stuff better. Recruit anyone, fight a nebulous evil power but also have an implied creepiness due to how Diamond Dogs was basically a cult.
Peace Walker even did that better than MGSV, so WDLegion is even worst in comparison.
@RadTheLad I think that mission in MGSV would work better with Peace Walker system.
I didn't really cared individually or knew much of the people that worked on Diamond Dogs, but I knew a couple of guys in MSF
Venom is always the best character to play as in MGSV(due to protestic upgrades), while in Peace Walker, Big Boss wasn't the best character to play as, it sold the idea that there isn't anything particularly special about Big Boss.
There was Side-Ops in PW where you needed to play as MSF Personal. IMO, PW made it easier to recognize people you recruited, because the number of people you could recruit was more manageable.
@@ChristianWS. I don't think either of them did it well. I literally always played as Snake every single time, because why wouldn't I? Why bother going through these menus and lists looking for someone who might be better when Snake is good enough? I think the only time I bothered was in Portable Ops, where I bring Snake plus three other dudes who are really fast at carrying people back to the truck. But even then, that was just because carrying people back to the truck sucked and I wanted it over more quickly. I always hated how every MGS game that revisited Big Boss/Naked Snake after 3 had to include this stupid recruitment system. I don't want to engage with all these spreadsheets and menus like I'm working a job, just let me play the "tactical espionage action" game. I get that they had to stay consistent with this idea that Big Boss is the leader of his own military, but that doesn't mean I want to manage or even play as any of his recruits.
@@mjc0961 I have to disagree with that, in PW there's Soldiers that are simply better than Big Boss in stats alone, and there's soldiers with the Channeler trait that reveals items and prisoner locations on the map, which makes 100% the game easier, or soldiers with SWAT trait that are just better to play as. Not to mention there's a few side ops that are exclusive to MSF soldiers, which makes them a little bit more relevant plot wise, since it is framed as the MSF Soldiers helping Big Boss on the background.
MGSV on the other... the prosthetic makes Venom have an extra weapon and makes him a jack of all trades, with the Soldiers just having single one of the prosthetic upgrade that venom has(Like being faster), so it is harder to justify using a soldier.
Just amazing discussion every single time you put out a video
Thanks a lot man, been really enjoying the reviews/discussions you've been putting out there recently too. Hope you're well dude!
I love both of your channels and it's cool that you guys watch each other!
So basically:
Xcom and Shadow of Mordor did this better.
I really wanted this game to be an open world XCOM but looks like I'll have to keep waiting
@@sawkchalk6966 how would that even work? Imagine getting mauled by a crysllaid half way through the game and now you have near unkillable zombies everywhere because you didn't find a laser gun in time
Or making eye contact with an ethereal and you character unpins a grenade and shoves it in their mouth
Even GTA V did a way better story involving more than one protagonist (despite being inferior to other stories like IV or San Andreas)
@@firuzmajid4780 you can't compare it to WD:L because the situation is different in gta 5 you have multiple PRE DEFINED protagonists that take center stage in the story
In WD:L the main character is EVERYONE YOU CAN MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH
Its just not the same
And Darkest Dungeon. It even made me care about the people I recruited
Ubi wrote a story that doesnt work with any character in the cutscenes like it would if you were playing as a set player
Honestly, games like this make me wonder how mindless of a hellhole it is working at Ubisoft. This feels like such an aimless, incomplete project that got shipped out the door for the bottom line and nothing else. Just a real depressing game. I can't imagine anyone who worked on it was satisfied with the final product.
Not to mention the graphics which looks as if made in 2013
All of the thought begins and ends with the pitch.
"What if you could recruit literally anyone?"
"Brilliant, now just copy/paste everything else and ship it."
I really miss the old game with aiden and all the characters it was better than this futuristic burning trash
That is my issue with these Ubisoft open world sandbox titles. They lack real focus. Just feel like check marks that fill a quota to sell. They should try to scale down their scope on their games and work on polishing and making a consistent experience.
@@Drstrange3000 They took the Assassin's Creed formula and applied it to basically every Open World game they made.
This game probably could have worked with a limited silent protagonist system. Not quite Half-Life (protagonist says nothing), and not quite Dragon Age Origins (protagonist is virtually vocal, and has numerous opportunities to insert one's self into the character). Something in between, where the playable characters interact with one another using text based dialogue, and the story treats the character as a silent person (with possible avenues for dialogue options).
This would have cut down a ton on worrying about each playable character having a "unique" voice, and possibly opened up more avenues on refining the world and story.
I feel like more AAA compaines ae signing onto the idea of the "less personality, more gameplay" model which leads to the games not being good at anything. Some super memorable games have one thing going for it, neat characters, and a decent story compared to the shallow mess of the rest would be seen as A+ which is a little sad.
More gameplay but less mechanical depth. They focus on creating skinner box type gameplay that funnel you towards in app purchases. Ubisoft is the worst offender of this by far.
The gameplay is garbage to though. There is just a lot of it. Hours and hours of the most routine bottom of the barrel shit that has been done better by anyone else
No. Most of these games don't even have "more gameplay". Just "less personality".
I have been saying this a lot recently. These games seem to aim to be jack of all trades, but nothing really stands out. These games seem to lack atmosphere, emotion, and impact. I feel so disconnected from the world I'm in. I just feel like I'm playing a sandbox and not following a narrative. These games should drop the narrative approach if they are just going to half ass it.
And the "more gameplay" isn't even literally "more gameplay", it's just "the same amount of gameplay as before, just copy/pasted more so you even more sick of the repetitiveness by the time you reach the credits.
They made their open world map 50% bigger than the last game, so now they can have 15 radio towers and 40 enemy camps instead of 10 radio towers and 30 enemy camps! Wow! 🙄
I do agree with everything said in the review. The ways we, as a community (and in the video, hence my comment), address the "developers" as the direct responsible for the game directions irks me however.
As "developer" is a large term that encompass a lot of people in a game development team, it does paint the whole team as a cohesive groups that made bad or baffling decisions all in agreement. The reality is that most of the team, even part of the leads and designers have little to says in the production of a game, most of the decisions are done by directors, the upper management and a design team (or teams).
As baffling as the design of a lot of recent Ubisoft game may be, I hope we can shift the discussion to avoid putting the blame on most employees who may or may not disagree with the design but does their job anyways as they are instructed.
You may be surprised by how rigid hierarchy in bigger companies can be and how little feedbacks and critics, if any at all, the upper management, the directors or the design team listen too when it comes from their own employee
Awesome video as always! Looking forward your next ones :)
(edit: slightly better phrasing)
From what I remember, the dev studios at Ubisoft actually have quite a lot of freedom when it comes to what kind of games they want to make.
@@Ser_Salty What about that one guy who had meetings specifically tailored for him, that was one of the project leads for a lot of the pervious games from Far Cry 3 onward? I can’t remember his name but he was ousted from the company like a year ago, roughly. He made it so many of the cookie cutter game design tropes you see in Ubisoft games were in almost every game up until his forced departure.
At Ubisoft it's even worse, they have an "editorial team" who in turn tells the design teams of their various studios what to work on
Although i heard there was some restructuring of that team, so maybe their influence is less, but the games are still cookie cutter monotony, so... Proof in pudding?
Yeah, I think when people mention devs, they mean people at the top who have the most power and also publishers. I don't think all of these devs share the same opinions or visions, but strive to create the vision of the lead designer.
One of the cooler features that I think every open-world game should have is the persistent NPC's I like the idea of injuring NPC's and having them show up in a hospital later, Ubisoft should've taken this a step further and had it so dead people have funerals you can show up to so you can eliminate any potential vengeful family/friends.
Yeah and people from funeral can be recruited by you to fill in the gap and have grudge against albion for it
That is one reason I liked Divinity Original Sin 2. NPC seemed to remember stuff and your actions had an effect.on the world and how your progression went. It isn't perfect, but it does the concept better than a lot of games.
So basically, they're all just the custom protagonist aproach Ubisoft has been doing for a while but masked under a "play with whoever you want!" mechanic
Pretty much actually. It’s not even that deep of a mechanic either with how every single character feeling exactly the same, except now certain abilities feel locked behind other characters just to LOOK as if the “play as anyone” feature is deep, when in reality, it makes no sense to make features such as combat rolls or calling your vehicles as separate features behind different npc characters that all feel all the same anyways.
My biggest grip with Legion's narrative was just that: Everyone doesn't feel unique, they're all one mind. I know Dedsec is a group, they coordinate, plan, all that, people have different skills for different situations, but the fact that a guard who would shoot me on sight and was loyal to Albion could be recruited and fully commit to my cause without any regrets or second thoughts is weird. As Writing on Games said, it's weird how you are old lady one mission, then switch to a cop and continue the conversation like you were the old woman having it. It's.... bizarre as hell.
IMO the mechanic should've just been specific to a selected number of characters. It's fucking frustrating to finally find a character with a good set of skills only for him to sound like a fucking daft idiot.
This is exactly why I've remained sceptical about Legion from the very beginning. The play-as-anyone system always seemed poorly implemented, and by default means a good story with memorable characters isn't possible. Glad I didn't bite. The series has a lot of potential if it actually treated its serious themes seriously...
All of your B-roll footage here looks hilarious by the way. And not in a good way. Great vid!
It really sucks the series went this direction. Not like the series has fans beyond us anyway lol. I didn’t mind aiden and the dark tone of the first. I liked the characters and setting of Botha games enough and I really wanted to get a WD game that would show people the series can be good. But they threw that all out the window now for generic ness. I am 75/25 this is the style going forward. I hope I am wrong and the next game goes back to like the first two but this is a pass for me.
Sounds like a good framework for a Matrix game where you control the agents
Bro...
Now that would be amazing
You’re not suppose to play as the agents in the matrix tho soo no bad idea
@@reallyhimongod why not?
I didn't play Watch Dogs Legion, so I don't know exactly how the systems are used and if there's something similar. But, what if you had big infiltration missions a'la Ocean's Eleven. A multistoried office building or a bank. You would pick let's say 6 characters and "plant" them in the location as sleeping agents - a janitor on in a corridor, a lawyer in an office, a construction worker on the roof etc. Then you would begin the mission and switch control between characters as needed, use them not just to fight, but also snear around and use create opportunities for others. That would be cool. Of course, there are problems with the execution of such idea, but the idea alone makes me exited. And sad that Legion didn't use it's potential.
So basically Hitman but with multiple agents and bigger opportunities.
I can think of the things you could achieve with such a system. You have two agents hiding around opposite corners of a hallway(imagine a t-section) and there is, let's say, an armed guard down the hallway. You have to distract or subdue the guard before you go through, otherwise your cover will be blown and the mission is kaput.
Your agents have different disguises. The two agents you have here are disguised as, let's say, a technician (with a toolbox) and a guy in a dress suit (has a suitcase).
There's a camera at the other end if the hallway. You could choose to call the hacker of your team and disable said camera, allowing you to follow up with a direct takedown of the guard with a silent weapon, but as soon as you disable the camera, the security of the building would be alerted to that area. Now you have a timer you have to worry about before an enemy squad shows up(and ultimately blows your cover, unless you planned for that and setup a trap in the hallway). Or you could take a very different approach.
You play as the technician, you reach into your toolbox, and select a screwdriver. Then you look at your agent partner in the business attire and select 'Pass Weapon' from the interaction wheel that shows up.
Still as the technician, you take a few steps back and make a noise (maybe call for help with directions or something). The guard is alerted and the plan is set into action.
The guard cautiously approaches the technician around the corner, not noticing the other hidden agent that he just passed by.
Now you have a choice. You play a the technician and hold the attention of the guard with dialogue options and motion for your partner to attack, or seamlessly switch to your partner(gta 5 style) and either approach the guard and take him down(and risk wasting time to hide the body in a nearby room) OR let the technician continue distracting the guard's attention and instead disable the camera, head down the hallway by yourself and continue on with the mission.
(I spent way too much time writing this, didn't I?)
Hitman, but you play as multiple character in a sandbox to achieve the same objective.
Ubisoft be like "Let's turn all those boring npcs into our game's protagonists"
I'd probably have put the player in the perspective of Bagley, the AI, to whom the members of DedSec really are interchangeable squishies.
DedSec members could have had some sort of neural interface, with a creepy ambiguity as to how much exactly Bagley interferes with their minds. Are you recruting or brainwashing people? Is that why they all act kind of the same after joining? Plus, that way it makes perfect sense that a new character can pick right back up where the previous one died.
Playing as a chipper amoral AI trying to bring down the system because that's what it's been programmed to do would have been more entertaining.
Such a cool spin on what the game could have been! Great idea!
Very interesting
But that would ruin the entire point of playing as different people, which is to form a resistance and start a revolution. That feeling of creating an army to fight back against big brother. We as humans can relate much more to that then some AI just screwing around
I also thought it would be played like that. Rogue AI against the system sounds like a neat idea.
At first I was going to add something about having the player characters act like some sort of sleeper agent, but then I happened to think that it'd be more thematically appropriate if you find them engaging in some form of resistance related random activities when you pick them up.
Like, if a character has being a punk as a personality trait you'll occasionally find them listening to snippets of songs by the Clash with some other character with the 'punk' trait, or if they're a cop you'll find them about to "detain" someone for abetting the resistance before taking them to an alleyway, removing the cuffs and advising the "suspect" on how not to get caught.
While watching one saga came to mind, Mass Effect was a prime example of how to built an immersive game with memorable characters and moments. So for WD:Legion it all boiled down that when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Thanks for your video, it helps to get a grasp of games I wasn't looking forward to play 😅
between this and Valhalla I'm becoming convinced that Ubisoft has no idea how to make a challenging game anymore, or one where concepts don't actively hinder execution.
Honestly, I don’t think a game should be too challenging. Like yes there should be a challenge, but ideally you should get through it without dying
There is a place for challenging games or difficult games like sekiro or say a fighting game. But it definitely feels like ubisoft has a few to many people pulling every game in multiple directions.
@@SM-or1wo that's what difficulty modes are for, but i'm hearing that people are playing Valhalla on the second hardest difficulty and not finding a challenge until they're playing against content over 100 power higher than they are, which is bad design.
@@Aqua-wc2bk I find Sekiro massively overtuned difficulty wise to the point where I sold it a week after launch. I vastly prefer fames where you can adjust difficulty via modes or leveling mechanics.
@@dekdenfor9770 I agree with you on skeiro after I finished the game it was one I never wanted to touch it again. I was just saying that there is a place for games like it.
You should have played on the Permadeath mode - you care far more about getting them out alive, and they don’t just get arrested or injured - they die and you can no longer play as them. It makes you really think about who you want to play as at any point in time... the getaway driver for an escape scenario, a hitman for infiltration, get a cop to walk right into a police station and free a prisoner, etc.
They actually be arrested when they're in vehicle.
Outside of vehicle they die.
One of my operatives was arrested when was inside and been shot by Albion.
Don't know for melee if they be injured.
I feel like the game story could be a lot more intimate if it have a "commander" character AKA actual player avatar. Meanwhile I totally in disagreement with recruting random NPCs shenanigans. I would have prefer an actual handcrafted unique cast of characters in the numbers of dozens or even hundred or so. Plenty of games did it, like SUIKODEN, VALKYRIE PROFILES, VALKYRIE CHRONICLES, CHRONO CROSS, TRAILS OF SERIES, etc. You know, like an actual LEGION of unique characters, personality, & skills, designs, etc.
I did think it was funny when I walked up to one potential recruit in full Albion gear and they were like:
"You must be DedSec, I can use your help."
Like, that was a 1 in a million shot to not being kidnapped and tortured for information.
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Teletubby" is my new favorite idiom and I will use it at every possible opportunity.
Ironic that the director of the game is known for coining the terms "Ludonarrative consonance/dissonance", because this is exactly where you found it to fall short.
Man I was really hoping it would stick its landing. Combining the two of the most experimental ideas in open world design from last decade (GTA V and Shadow of Mordor) seemed like an obvious next step
7:20 Having massive tonal shift from side activity to main story isn't necessarily a weakness. Yakuza pulls it off quite well in all of the games
Legion's "recruit everyone" function works the same as "create a character". Both lead to placeholders devoid of interesting narrative progression because there's so many options.
Only Legion might be more expensive to make.
I've seen create a character work for stories, the saints row series comes to mind
@@MUDS1P I would've loved if Legion went that route. The problem for me is since you can play as anyone, they all have a blank personality so there's no distinct supporting cast.
The dialogue could be fixed by a fairly easy method of adding lines referring to the player character as a group or telling them to pass the information that they are being given to their collective/their commander in every conversation (possibly acknowledging loss of personnel in missions while they are at it).
That wouldn't make the story any more compelling necessarily, but it would make things more consistent.
To quote Yahtzee, the way you handle relevant themes is by making by the protagonist AN ORDINARY FUCKING DUDE. Not a grim gravel voiced avenger and not a neon pink roller blading scooby gang, an ordinary dude.
Now to add to that, ONE normal fucking dude, not 5 million. Unless it's a strategy game such as X-Com where you're expected to throw soldier after soldier (or hacker after hacker) into enemy firing lines and have your experienced troops shoot while the enemy is reloading. But you'd expect some recognition of the fact you're throwing people into the grinder for victory in a game like Watch Dogs: Legion.
My gripe with this game is similar to yours. It's hard to feel connected to any of the people I recruit because you know literally nothing about them save for what's on their bio sheet and their skills. That's it. Like my first recruit was a Ukrainian named Oksana. Now the story of how a Eastern European woman ended up in dystopian-hellscape London and began to lead the charge to free the city would've made for a damn interesting videogame. But as it is, she's just one of 40 different faces you recruit. Indeed, I could play and beat the *entire* game as just Oksana despite having 39 other people on the roster.
Granted, it has its fun perks but overall, eh. The story is lackluster, which is worsen by the fact that we have no central character or group of characters. Unless I fabricate a story in my head revolving Oksana and several other members, they're just faces, really.
Honestly, I hope they continue to build upon this because they've got a good thing going and a good foundation there. Maybe if they just focus on the Next-gen consoles and PC only with the next addition they'll be able to add to the formula and learn from the mistakes in legion and make it a more cohesive experience
Sounds like they would’ve been better off advertising it as a nanobot that DeadSec developed which can replicate across people akin to a Virus.
I didn’t think it would be well executed, but I’m sure it’ll get its usual band of folks buying it due to the sheer amount of awards they won.
It’s weird how gaming has turned Hollywood lately and awards and magazine reviews don’t really speak well to much.
It would’ve been fantastic to have seen them develop something akin to Middle Earth’s Nemesis System for this game, but I figured they weren’t going to.
Hmm, that would be an actually interesting concept. You'd take the free will of random people for your cause but it's for "greater good", tho who decides what is good and bad in a society like this. Maybe the people would be fully conscious while under your control and when released, they would have to deal with consequences based on what you did. You could tackle mental health (most likely PTSD) and the messiah complex in the same time.
Imagine taking control of someone living a comfortable life, and either killing him in the process or driving him to suicide after the mission. Now, you made another 5 Albion soldiers, because the family of the character will see you as a cult of martyrs.
but, You'd need far more smarter scriptwriters for this. This is why I stand behind the opinion that the teme in Watch Dogs 1 was the most surrealistic portray of tech dystopia and they should have build upon that world, rather than completely scrap it and start again.
almost ANY mission allowed you to play as anyone. could have been more character development if only one character voice was used to play a certain mission. ie using specific characters for each mission.
I was really waiting for you to analyze the play as everyone feature. Good stuff as always!
Makes me wonder how interesting a game would be if you mixed this "you can play as anyone" gimmick with Darkest Dungeon's "you play as the manager to a team of adventurers" thing. It would keep the upsides of having so many to choose from while also have a singular center for the story to revolve around.
The idea behind it is really fun and appeals for a "V for Vendetta" or "Fight Club" feel: There is no one guy, one leader. There is a whole. A collective that is way stronger than the sum of it's individuals.
There are an absurd amount of unhappy people loosely organized, but all blindly devout to a cause.
But I totally understand your argument. It feels like there is one team building world and lore, crafting a dystopian future, but there is another team, focused on gameplay, that was paid to make a GTA-like sandbox of easy-going and light fun.
A great example were the story and the mechanics sound like two different games.
What I find most bizarre is how every random citizen is just chomping at the bit to join an insurrectionist faction at the slightest prompting by the player; and yet we're simultaneously supposed to believe the citizenry is crushed under the weight of Big Brother's all-seeing eye? Like, imagine how different 1984 would've gone if Winston was just walking up to random office colleagues asking "hey mate, you look like you're sick of living in a totalitarian nightmare, wanna fight back by riding around on drone lifts and zapping security guards?", and everyone was just like "yup sounds good"
EDIT: Now I've actually played it I must say, this is some of the most fun I've had in a Ubisoft open world game for quite a while! I also find that what I criticised here can be mitigated somewhat if you use the deep profiler to trigger 'investigation' missions rather than just approaching people on the street like "hey mate, join dedsec?". The deep profiler system gives the impression of individual lives being lived in a way that gets a bit lost in translation once you get into face-to-face dialogue. I'm loving how the underlying systems give life to NPCs beyond just window dressing. But the dialogue runs into limitations of using fully-voiced scripts, because the minor details unveiled in the deep profiler are often ignored in dialogue. Most people seem to forget their prior identities upon joining dedsec, and become just another walking weapon for Bagley to send into action after one of their comrades dies or gets bored. This could've been interesting to explore thematically, as another commenter mentioned, as a critique of collectivist ideologies being no better than the totalitarian regime they claim to be so unlike. It strikes me as deeply ironic that I can recruit anyone to use as pawns in Dedsec's chess game, while its founder hides away behind a TV monitor; and yet this irony is seemingly never addressed by the game.
On the plus side, it's fun to run around zapping guards and setting off chain reactions of chaos, so... 9/10.
@The Mutineers interesting theory! Personally I think they just realised the limitations of "recruit anyone" mechanic too far into development, and effectively wrote themselves into a corner. But you raise a good point, if DedSec can stand for whatever ideals the player projects onto them, then arguably dedsec stands for nothing at all
It's not every random citizen, just the ones you chose to talk to.
@The Mutineers Exactly! They have some genuinely interesting ideas, yet the y lack the *balls* to turn it from a mediocre game with an interesting idea into a house hold classic. Typical Ubisoft is all I can say!
FWIW, saying that anti-totalitarian ideologies (e.g. anarchism) are so dehumanizingly collectivist that they're no better than totalitarianism has an edgy "everyone is bad" charm, but it's not accurate to reality.
I think the only good thing about the concept of play as anyone is that you have a plethora of randomly generated characters to roleplay with which is what I'm doing on my channel. Other than that it's so basic and poorly designed it's really annoying with how repetitive it is. Every character feels the same, happy and overly eager to fight an entire army all alone. Hopefully they can improve it with time but I'm doubtful, maybe another team can make a game with this based on their mistakes?
During my time playing watchdogs legion I spent more time just running around looking for a dude and a girl that had the look i wanted then actually playing the game. Something that made just wish there was a character creator instead.
Watchdogs: cool ideas, poor implementation
I really don't understand why nobody ever mentions Driver: San Francisco when talking about Legion. They did the same concept years ago for a racing game, it's not an entirely new idea at Ubisoft
I'm not sure whether it's really the same concept. Driver SF are just... vehicles that you can jump between, and you can jump between them mid mission and combine the positions and traits of several vehicles to complete a given mission, which is something WDL lacks completely. In fact i found that i had to pause and keep jumping between vehicles often every few seconds, which gave me a terrible disjointed experience where i was never in the flow, i was never one with the vehicle, which is something i really look for in a driving/racing game. Building an amount of trust towards your vehicle to push it to the limit, not getting curveballs from it changing underneath you, so it plays all like a puzzle game and nothing like a racing game, which i guess goes towards your point, since WD is fundamentally a puzzle game series. Narratively, they're also the opposite, in DSF you jump between vessels, bodies and cars that you inhabit temporarily with your mind, but you retain one protagonist at all times, while in WDL you jump between what are supposed to be different people, and yet they alll seem like remote controlled robots.
Funny thing is that if you were to see it as a same or similar concept, it would mean that DSF did it all better.
@@SianaGearz Well I meant "same concept" in a very broad way, since the games are totally different genres to begin with. My experience with DSF is years ago, though (normal, given it's release date), and given the reviews I don't think I will ever play WDL. So I don't think I can ever give a fair comparison :-)
It feels like you're playing the game as Bagley and all your characters are just drones with different abilities.
Good headcanon.
More egsly from kingsman if you chose a spy as your lead character
I think when Aiden Pearce gets released, everyone will use him instead of literally anyone else. But that is if anyone brought the season pass
The conclusion is: Ubisoft should've avoided a linear story in a game designed to be open ended.
That's why many feel disconnected from the characters they play.
Look at Darkest Dungeon. It has a similar hook, but the randomly generated characters get to feel LIKE characters because a) They're not bogged down by a linear story
b) Playing as "anyone" carries consequence. If I pick a kleptomaniac knight as an attacker, there's a possibility that my loot gets snatched by him. They all have afflictions, problems and personality.
Ever since I played Zelda BotW, I realized that linear storytelling and open world gameplay do not mix. I have felt it before playing that game, but that game really made it clear. Both call for different game design and they seem to clash. I notice these stories lack focus as a result of sandbox approach.
“where legion briefly sets aside it’s toothless, faux political bloviating are made all the more tonally incongruous”
well someone’s been reading the theasur... the theusau- the dictionary.
lol
Man, this is exactly what I feared when they announced no central protagonists.
Part of the reason I enjoyed 2 was the goofy Dedsec squad. They felt like a group that actually cared for one another as well as their community and it just warmed my cynical heart to see characters like that.
Agreed. Watch Dogs 2 was entertaining and if you played it non lethally, helped with the themes of it.
Even Watch Dogs 1, though Aiden was as interesting as soaked particle board, was fun feeling like John Wick.
This game just fails due to the narrative and the powerful ludonarrative dissonance.
@@PrimeHunter3195 indeed
Another example of wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle
I fail to understand why you did not play with permadeath on. Of course it's easy when everyone only gets "arrested". This is kinda weird, ACG showed that the social system is way more deeper than portrayed here.
I mean, I played on the standard setting the game allowed for. That doesn't seem like it should be too difficult to understand.
@@WritingOnGames I get that, to me it seems like you missed an option which could have raised the stakes and could have possibly got you more invested in your crew (since you have to be careful with each one)
If everybody is special; nobody is special.
Man, I remember the E3 trailers where they made the graphics look super slick. (Not that that would sell me on the game, personally.) But holy cow some of those textures in your footage look really bad.
He literally has it on terribly low settings lol. Just watch anyone else play, it doesn't look like this.
Yeah the graphics are one of the good things in the gamw
It ran like shit on my PC even on lowest settings (a problem which is getting sorted very soon as I have a 3080 build on the way), so basically all the footage you're seeing here is actually captured using Nvidia's streaming service Geforce Now as it ran a little steadier. This is actually the game running on pretty high settings within that. Not an ideal solution but like I say, I'll have a better setup in the next week or so. As someone else said though, if a graphical showcase is what you're looking for, that's not the point of this video so I'd strongly advise looking around-personally, I've not been super impressed with how any Ubisoft games look in recent years even in, for example, tightly constructed gameplay demos they've shown.
@@WritingOnGames Thanks for clearing it up! And, nah I don't really care about graphics for the most part. It was just jarring to see mostly okay textures alongside some textures that look PS2-ish.
Nearly every single gameplay clip of Watch Dog Legion in this 15 minute video has something completely absurd happening in it, bravo
Imagine if 'recruit anyone' was used as a slogan for a Syndicate reboot.
Is it me or is Ubisoft actually turning into Abstergo
I really hope he reviews Like A Dragon!
Next video hopefully!
@@WritingOnGames WOOHOO!
So heres the thing. It comes down to being able to change your characters appearance. Thats it. Once you unlock that person and their skills, you have instant access to their stuff and you can switch to them whenever you want. It boils down to having access to al the guns and skills, but you have to annoyingly switch who you're playing as.
First looking at the game months back, I thought you would have to switch between your different operatives to use their specific unique abilities to help complete mission.
Like switch to construction worker to lower crane, then to a drone summoner and ride crane to top of building to then summon a drone for air support, then switch to albion guard to sneak inside, ready to activate drone when im spotted....
First mission i realized I couldn't switch characters mid-mission. Fail.
Imagine a version of this game that has the atmosphere of WD1 and the gameplay of WD2.
This just makes me want a new Streets of Rogue but in the Watch Dogs universe
The game probably could have benefited from a custom created protaganist with MGS5 style recruitment where recruited NPC's could function as contextual help during missions. This would help with the role playing aspect and still make you feel like every npc matters and has potential.
its hilarious to think that Clint Hocking is both the lead designer on this game and the person who first coined the term lundonarrative dissonance. the tone of the game is laughably inconsistent.
Also, I think WD2 worked because yes, there was very little substance or motivation to take down the man, but that made sense because it was really a group of fun colourful friends with laptops and a lot of free time. The tone was consistent, and people loved being able to connect with the characters. These characters were developed by writers who put thought into how their experiences affected their individual attributes. Then, the actors put on an actual performance. They were the character in the way they moved, delivered their lines, and interacted. Legion is frustrating because they've replaced the creative process of building characters in a world (a process that applies to acting in any medium) with some randomisation system. There was literally no way to make a play as anyone system work.
Just bought this. Never played WD1 but I loved WD2 so I was feeling pretty positive about it. But a couple hours in and I can already tell that the voice acting is downright awful, and the voices don’t often line up with people’s mouths. Good example of how less is more, with limitless potential on who you can recruit means they had to cut corners with voice acting. A shame, graphically it’s stunning. Was hoping for randomized NPCs you can play similar to how State of Decay 2 handled it
idk, the game shines for me as I take it seriously. I guess you can play as a bunch of teletubbies or you can try to build up a good team and roleplay as them. I think you are doing the freedom of the game injustice.
I... really don't think I am. I talked about how the freedom the gameplay affords is genuinely quite impressive for a game like this. I just said my enjoyment had next to nothing to do with the recruitment feature.
This video made me realize how much I long to play a game as a foul-mouthed grandmother.
the game's a lot of fun in that regard. And even better if they're doomed in the first place, so there's no real point in playing with any reservations.
Dude your writing has come on leaps and bounds. Hugely engaging. Great vid!
It also serves as neat meta-commentary for how Ubisoft views its customers.
Honestly I would have forgiven all of this if permadeath actually carried some weight. I am stuck on a certain mission near the end that has killed a few of my people and the fact that not only are they not mentioned nor remembered in some way by the team/game but also I have to redo the mission like my experience never happened takes me out of the game pretty quickly.
There is no sense of loss...well, if you spent 20 bucks on the DLC characters and they die, you will feel a loss of money
Every operative that dies gets mentioned in the credits, but that's it
You need a character, someone, to project yourself into the game... but that doesn't mean that character can be just ANYone.
What Ubisoft should have done is have it so you can pick a voice and build a character like an RPG, then recruit people with passive abilities that enhance your own character. So, for example, the player's character would recruit a boxer and the boxer could teach the main character how to fight better (new moves/combos, melee stat boost), but the player's character wouldn't be as good as the boxer in those specific areas, so if you wanted to play as the boxer they would give an advantage. Also, you could call one of your teammates then play as them, so I could call a getaway driver to one of the mission locations, then switch to them to make my escape.
story and gameplay fix: play as the watch dogs AI Bagley.
He's already reset at the beginning of the game so expanding his network would account for players level progression, but you could still use NPC's as what would essentially be meat puppets if you didn't constrict your movements to drones, the spider, city cameras (and a mid game introduction of a fully fledged robot body). Players can't connect with such a massive group of differentiating non-personalities, so Bagley would have been the players personality.
Even include a second ending where Bagley takes over London with greater designs on the rest of the world, if the one playing wanted.
Probably a very minor bandaid fix on a massive issue, but maybe this recruitment system would be a lot less tonally dissonant if the people you recruit had some roles they could fill based on personality, occupation, hobbies, etc. Not everyone would be the same gun toting super hacker, you could have characters do things like try to raise public perception of the resistance, or gather intel. I don't know if it would be too much to handle, but this limited role situation could lead to very interesting emergent gameplay from planning heist-like missions where multiple NPCs you've recruited can be assigned to play out a part.
A lot of the time this game looks janky and unbaked as hell (especially the character models) but driving around London at night with Ray tracing set to ultra is legitimately one of the best looking things I've seen in my decade of video gaming - and yes I played RDR 2 on Ultra 4k
Definitely have to agree with you on this one as, despite enjoying the game and earning the Platinum in a surprisingly short time, I can't say the game really resonated with me outside of the quaint charm of it's London setting. Having made a weekly ritual back in my younger days where I'd head to London each and every Saturday and spend hours getting lost in the culture, shops, cinemas and blissfully pre-Covid maelstrom of our fine capital it was initially addictive to locate old haunts and just revel in the fact we weren't thrust into another faceless identikit US city. But then things slowly began to unravel and the flaws and cracks began to show. How every mission was pretty much the same routine of hacking, downloading, shooting, fighting and listening to Bagley swear like some sort of fusion of HAL and Danny Dyer. How the police were utterly inept and never seemed to care as I stole countless cars and crashed them into buildings, phonebixes, lampposts and people yet tagged me as a 4 or 5 star getaway for simply delivering yet another mysteriously dull motorbike mission. How nobody really seemed to care as I hijaked another cargo drone and flew it across the city thus avoiding all the shitty traffic and covert infiltration down on street level. How it soon became apparent I was going to be bombarded by endless stereotypes and some of the most annoying voiceover accents in recent history, innit brut what a fuckin' malarkey! How most of the pubs were identical and served only to be where you ticked off the darts and drinking mini games because, of course, that's what all us Brits do all the time aside from football, eh? How the potentially dense and addictive hacking aspect would so often result in yet another of those rotation puzzles which kinda got old fast. How Stormzy only turned up to plug his single and allow us to play a silly drone fight whilst the video played in the background. How the potential for an incredible soundtrack full of some of the greatest music if all time ended up as a few recognisable tunes from Muse, Gorillaz and Three Bloody Lions turning up in the background so faintly as to be easily missable. How each faction arc ended so quickly as to make me wonder whether I'd missed some missions. And how I ended up completing most of the game as an elderly woman wearing just her underwear and a box on her head simply because I could ...
... which brings us back to the basic flaw of the game which is that by allowing us to play as endless characters the game ultimately loses any real character and ends up as just countless mix and match variations complete with random dodgy accent, mixed to useless skills and the sad fact that I only played as different characters to nab another trophy before reverting to my tried and tested box headed hacker stripper who ultimately saved London more or less on her own. Bless her heart, the old harlot!
There's a game from 2000 called Messiah, you play a little angel who can possess any living creature. It's an action-adventure with puzzles.
I was super hyped for this game,then i saw that Baggley has more personality/story time than any other characters in the entire game.Also mention that the ending is extremely lackluster,we will probably see the true ending in DLCs.Yup you read me right.
the roadmen voice actors did a great job. i found two characters that talk like roadmen and then dressed them like roadmen. it’s the only way i could play the game cuz their voice were actually great and had emotion and personality. i soon forgot that these were characters i recruited.
No one:
Absolutely no one:
Legion NPCS: ARE YOU SAYING YOU'RE DEDSEC
I have an idea on how to make this game interesting.
I'm not the best storyteller but I really want to make this game good because this games "unique selling point" - being able to become anyone, is really interesting.
Yes, it is cheesy af but I still So here's the story I came up with:
The game starts, you live in London, things are peaceful as they were in 2019. You are some kind of scientist, doing sciency things. You are wearing a lot of protective equipment so you can't really tell if you're a man or woman or anything. And you are working with your colleagues on some kind of holographic technology ( like a vest or a mask or something) which would allow you to change your appearance. Similar to the cloak in Outer Worlds but it lasts forever. You are really close to pulling it off. So close that you can taste the Nobel prize (or whatever they give you for being smart idk).
But then Albion ( the military group in the game ) invade your lab and start wrecking your shit and kill all your colleagues. You are scared for your life, you look at the cloaking thing you were developing and realize that it is the only thing that might just help you stay alive. You put your invention on and you turn invisible. The military dudes walk by you, they don't see anything. They call in that the coast is clear and then the villain comes in to claim the prize. What is the prize? Well whatever you were working on, of course. The villain dude looks around and leaves disappointed and tells their goons to sweep the perimeter. You start walking away. Scared for your life you go to the nearest bathroom, walking past enemy soldiers. You go to the toilet, lock youself in a booth and start breaking down.
Another soldier then enters the bathroom and hears you of course. He starts yelling at you to come out with your hands behind your head. You do as he orders, afraid that the bullets will come flying through the door of the toilet booth unless you do exactly as he says. He sees you and exclaims "[insert generic soldier name] ?? Why are you crying in the bathroom dude, wtf??" and starts making fun of you. But it's not exactly you anymore. You look just like one of the enemy soldiers. You take a deep breath, happy that you get to live another day. You take a second to gather yourself while the other guy is cracking jokes at your expense. The guy eventually gets tired of laughing and tells you to go back to your post. You say that you will do just that but instead get the hell out of there.
And so you escape with this cloaking tech that you can't exactly control yet but work towards doing so as the story progresses. You eventually gain the ability to become anyone in the blink of an eye.
But will you become so obsessed with this newfound ability that you lose your own sense of self?
Or will you be responsible with your new powers? Or maybe advanced tech like this is too powerful to be controlled by a human so you destroy it?
I am not going to quote uncle Ben, I think you get the point.
But if we take everything I wrote above as the starting point, we have a valid excuse of why the voices sound so bad and why the voice lines are the same no matter which character you are.
You play as only one character which you can kinda relate to AND you can play as a lot of people at the same time. And it all makes sense narratively. Isn't that cool?
Plus we won't have the mindboggling issue where your character dies, the game switches you to someone else and congratulates you with a 'mission complete' screen.
Edit: And yes, I know that this beginning doesn't mesh well with the rest of the game which very goofy. But still, I think it is more interesting than the whole "fight the power" thing that Ubisoft have got going on with the Watch_dogs, Ass Creed AND Far Cry franchises.
Second edit: I don't know how you would acquire different abilities though. Maybe you could have a skill system. Ubisoft likes those.
While the crew of Watch Dogs 2 could be a little cringy it never seemed out of place. They were just young 20 somethings having fun so it made sense for them to do stupid memes. And when I played I specifically only used the stun gun and nonlethal stuff because I felt Marcus wouldn't just gun down people
Personally, above the implications of a near hive mind like organization with no free thought, they missed out on an oppurtunity to have character morality stats. Like imagine a hacker whos really good but wont kill, extremely skillful but has a low mental threshold. A single death on his hands and he may swear off the organization, or better yet may even betray you. It can really have an interesting efffect on how the player goes about controlling their characters.
It could have made the play anyone more than just a flavor text. Like imagine if one of the characters you play as is a spy, and theres some sort of mission where you need to figure it out. Like, it goes deep and for it to be so surface level is a waste i tell ya.
The closest thing to this I can think of that actually worked was being able to recruit any orc captain in Shadow Of War.
The death of potential on this one is real. 😭
Listening to your very accurate depiction of the game is like putting salt on the wound then sprinkling it with pepper, then adding some salsa, then also a red chilli, why not, then torch it with a fcking flamethrower. Thanks! 😃
My biggest issue so far has been the new Bloodline DLC. If you thought the main game felt janky, play Bloodline. IDK if these are common problems, but for me, dialogue is often cut short for seemingly no reason, Aiden's coat will clip through a bunch of vehicle's doors, and radio will suddenly stop. My first playthrough of Legion was pretty good, but I didn't explore much, so a lot of it's flaws were overlooked. My first playthrough for Bloodline has been horrible so far, and I'm only about an hour in. Those issues I mentioned earlier have happened within the first hour of playing. I tried restarting from the beginning to see if it would fix the music and dialogue issues. It didn't.
All they needed to do was make Person of Interest: the game and just overall they failed.
"All" is maybe underselling how much of a challenge that would be though. That show was a gem.
@@Jlerpy Hah! Hitting the PoI tone would have been great alone. Watch Dogs 1 cane closest however it was still a revenge story that killed most interesting gameplay with the over use of firearms.
the issue is that you can recruit anyone, but the gameplay gives you no help from anyone you recruit except passive bonuses to quickly recover your operators after they die
which is useless on permadeath.
You have no team missions, no way to utilize your unused members (who could be utilized to do stuff like recruit others or gain resources) and each character is just a portion of what your character could do in the other games, you are playing a downgraded protag with no gameplay customization outside of one doodad, and these gadgets when unlocked make many operators' traits useless or redundant. This game could have been a playground, but all they made was a sandbox with no sand.
I wonder if a lot of the problems I had with this game would have been solved if you could assign a sort of "leader" character and make them from the ground up, then recruit and play as other people for missions if you *wanted* to. I don't really know if that would fix most issues, but it'd be a start. After all, I spend most open world games wondering why I have to get out developer tools or hacks to try and play as someone else for a change, and Legion's system is very good at living out a version of that without cheats. It's just that when everyone is the main character, no one is.
So, ludonarrative dissonance?
"And when everybody is super...nobody else will be" Syndrome already told us back in the day
And when everyone is a protagonist, no one is.
Resistance mode makes it an entirely different game.
You are agains almost insurmountable odds and great numbers of enemies, you are alone and you are very much mortal.
It is just another level.
WD:L is one of the best games I've played in years.
Great Video but I would like to add that playing different characters not only felt similar narratively but also from a gameplay perspective. I never felt the need to go and switch up my character after I realized that they all play the same. They fistfight the same way, they hold their guns the same way, they run the same way (except for the old people but that gets old quick), they even hack the same. So there really is no point in recruiting characters and its jarring when the game forces you to do so in order to progress.
No major spoilers here but, there's a mission in which you need to recruit a construction worker because they're the ones who have access to construction drones. So when you do the mission to recruit the construction worker you'll find the construction drones in that area.... and any character can operate a drone.
I 100% agree with writing on games, the part where your infiltrating bases hacking cameras, people and etc. is the most fun part of this series and if they got rid of the mechanic to recruit anybody and instead focused on 1 person (the guy you play as in the tutorial), disable the auto-aim, and gave you more incentives to take a nonlethal approach, this would have been an amazing game
I'm really hoping in a years time after some updates and dlc this games systems evolve. I mean they have confirmed more operators will be added so I assume that will also come with new recruitment missions and personalities..... Hopefully anyway
Dalton was an interesting character and he would have made a great protagonist but nooo they had to kill him off because of this “play as everyone” shit
I think the game would have felt more cohesive to the premise if you used more than one recruit per mission. The last mission KIND OF has you use TWO recruits, but I feel like a lot of main missions should have used multiple and the last mission should have used a LOT of them. It would make it really feel more like an uprising of the people. As it is, you're supposed to be building an army but your DedSec usually doesn't consist of more than 9 members (I always keep my roster to 9 so they're easily visible).
Thanks for confirming this for me! I thought I had died inside between wd2 and legion (not unlikely given this year). I recommended wd2 to my friends for incentivizing me to roleplay hacktivist boy marcus as a nonlethal remote hacker, never even buying a gun. In legion i was looking forward to having seperated characters for this approach and gunplay- but after a few hours I just couldnt be arsed. Legion is a much more over the top hostile world and the characters way less lovable or suggesting a pacifist playstyle. Maybe its not me who died on the inside but this franchise :))
I must admit that most of the game can be taken with construction worker and its construction drone and most of other places you can ride with a spider bot. Quite shortly it gets boring game.
I Wonder why people were hyped about this feature. It was obvious how it would Turn out
I have no idea how everyone's managed to spin Ubisoft's words into this extremist post-Brexit setting given how clearly they outlined their inspirations. The outline for Legion was completely solidified *before* any talk of succession began. It was only then that they began to take inspiration for plot details, but never contradicting the lore they had already come up with or overriding a decision that would make for a better story. Legion is not a post-Brexit apocalypse, but a British technological dystopia that happens to be influenced by Brexit beginning during development