5 Years Ago, Ubisoft’s Sleekest Franchise Literally Lost The Plot

The core ideas of Watch Dogs have always been as engrossing as they are prescient. Playing as a hacker on the fringes of a surveillance state is an inherently cool setup for an open-world game, and when you add in a bunch of novel tech-based abilities that let you alter the world around you, you’ve got a franchise that meaningfully breaks away from more popular titles in the genre.

The first Watch Dogs was a decent if forgettable Chicago-set romp with an unlikable protagonist at the center of its glum story. Watch Dogs 2 made this world as fun to exist in as it was to play, with a much better lead character and the sunnier setting of San Francisco. The steady improvement between the first two games set up the third title for a hat trick. Instead, 2020’s Watch Dogs: Legion took the foundation and experimented. And while I commend developer Ubisoft Toronto for taking a risk, the result wasn’t something any fan of Watch Dogs asked for. Five years after it hit the PlayStation 5, it seems that big swing did more harm than good.

Legion takes the series’ tech dystopia to London, as perfect a setting for a new Watch Dogs as can be. Residential streets, bustling historic districts featuring old architecture, and the modern techy glitz all lend themselves well to the pseudo-cyberpunk aesthetic that Watch Dogs has always embraced.

Like Chicago and San Francisco before it, this recreation of the Big Smoke is probably the best video game representation of the city to date. Taking in the sights and atmosphere of London, is the best part of Legion and a testament to what Ubisoft games always get right. Unfortunately, the game fumbles almost everything else.

At the start of the game, the series’ central hacker group DedSec is framed by a rival crew called Zero Day for bombing the Palace of Westminster (among other iconic landamarks). In response, Britain turns to a private military corporation and ctOS (the latter being the same city infrastructure management system from the first two games) to hastily restore normalcy and safety to its shaken city.

The strong premise provides some compelling stakes right from the jump. Who is Zero Hour? How does DedSec, a rogue hacker group trying to do good, convince everyone they weren’t behind such a heinous attack? And how has the further proliferation of AI, labor automation, and digital management empowered the dystopian ctOS? The setup feels like the perfect sequel to 2016’s Watch Dogs 2, which wrestled with the tech industry's real-life global takeover.

But Legion wastes this premise by ditching the traditional protagonist, instead giving players the ability to recruit any NPC off the street to DedSec’s cause. Every operative you recruit has special skills and traits based on their career and background, letting you build a ragtag group of unassuming locals to fight tyranny.

As a gimmick, perhaps featured in a spinoff DLC, this mechanic would be a fun novelty (and a technical marvel). But as the central feature of a full-blown sequel, this is a spectacular waste of Legion’s potential. When anyone and everyone is a protagonist, you sacrifice any semblance of a coherent story where a main character has meaningful agency. Sure, the novelty of playing as someone’s sweet old grandmother will get a chuckle or two, but I don’t think that laugh was worth sacrificing what could have been Watch Dogs’ most prophetic story yet.

In the absence of a protagonist, Legion tells its story through villains and side characters who never feel connected to you, nor to the game’s implied themes. Because you can be anyone at any time, your chosen character never has anything of actual substance to say, even during the most dramatic moments. The game’s biggest sin, however, comes in how it does as little as it can to rock the boat like its predecessor did.

Watch Dogs 2 centered a Black lead who fights against the impact of big tech’s takeover of predominantly poor and non-white areas. There’s a real texture to the impact citywide surveillance has on the people of San Francisco, and it's felt everywhere from the game’s story to its emergent open-world scenarios. It didn’t always stick the landing, but it was so cool to see one of the industry’s top game makers present an underrepresented perspective.

Legion has none of this. And I don’t think the lack of a protagonist is to blame, but Ubisoft’s cowardice. In the post-Trump and post-Brexit world, the publisher has consistently turned away from touching anything deemed divisive, and Legion is one of the worst offenders.

The conflict the player is constantly told about rarely manifests beyond quippy street graffiti and the occasional security checkpoint. The people on the streets seem unbothered by the supposed overbearing (at least according to the plot) existence of Big Brother. There isn’t a pervading sense of citywide paranoia. There are no clashes between citizens and private military during in-game protests, nor any examples of authoritarian brutality. All of this could have been powerful imagery that called back to the series’ legacy of reflecting the real world (remember, this game was released in 2020).

When the very premise of the game is that the people of London are ready to join DedSec’s fight against tyranny, it’s wild that none of that comes across during actual gameplay. We’re told the populace is pissed off, yet driving through London feels like an idyllic cruise. Ubisoft’s aversion to even the most surface-level controversies results in a sterile, toothless game that loses all of the sauce of Watch Dogs 2. It’s the video game equivalent of that awful Kendal Jenner Pepsi ad, which Ubisoft seems more and more comfortable aligning with.

Legion washed away the strengths of the first two games, replacing a strong narrative with something to say about the world with a gimmicky gameplay mechanic that quickly loses its novelty. Watch Dogs was once one of the industry’s most interesting new titles, but within six years of its release, it was turned into an impotent facsimile of what the franchise strived for, missing the very point of its own existence.