I’ve been playing quite a lot of Watch Dogs Legion, and I honestly do think that it’s a perfect game. I mean that in the sense that you can sit there for hours and get loads done in the game, but the overall story hasn’t moved forward in the entire time you’ve been playing. The world is so engrossing that there’s very little point in progressing the story sometimes. Whether you’re taking part in the side activities, or recruiting as many Londoners into DedSec as you can, there’s always something smaller to be doing than taking down Albion. However, the systems in place in the game have highlighted to me that this game should really be set in a cyberpunk future city.
A side game that I’ve been playing in addition to Watch Dogs Legion is Cloudpunk. The game is a low-fi version of Cyberpunk 2077 set in a sprawling city known as Nivalis. Every village or city is a platform, where people have their own lives and troubles to contend with. I think that a city like this is perfect for the recruitment system in Watch Dogs Legion. If you think about it, the ability to swap between controlling different characters would actually make getting around a checkpoint system very easy.
To me, the setting makes total sense. A futuristic version of Albion could have control of the city, leaving it to DedSec to wrestle that control back into the hands of the people. Each checkpoint presents an issue though. DedSec recruits can’t go through them because their technology will be scanned and picked up as inflammatory. That’s why it’s easier just to swap to a recruit in a different platform, making it possible to complete missions across multiple areas of the city without the futuristic version of Albion ever picking up that something has happened.
If you haven’t played both Watch Dogs Legion and Cloudpunk, you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. Think about it though. A sprawling cyberpunk city, sectioned off by a fascist regime. The only way around it is working together, which is why Watch Dogs is poised to jump into a cyberpunk future in the next entry in the series.
