(yes, really) in such a surprising way that it makes you wish Ubisoft’s teams were allowed to indulge outside the realm of open world checklist game design more often. The attempt to explore his damaged psyche is at one stage done quite literally in what is undoubtedly Bloodline’s most memorable sequence, channelling Hideo Kojima’s ill-fated P.T. By focusing on Aiden Pearce, the writers use the six-to-eight hours you have with him (depending on your commitment to side missions) to dive deeper into who he is, how he’s changed, and how the events of the first game affected him. The result is something more by the book – if anything this feels like it tries to make good on much of what the first Watch Dogs was going for before addressing the issues with Legion. Rather than using the expansion as an opportunity to refine the main game’s interesting concept, it gets rid of it. In my case, I never looked back once I’d recruited a construction worker who’s special skill was calling in an enormous drone that could be used to fly around the city, bypassing combat and stealth scenarios in order to reach objectives with a minimum of fuss.īloodline’s approach to fixing this problem is blunt-forced to say the least. As so excellently analysed here by Game Maker’s Toolkit, Legion’s developers made a clever and complex system without having the game design take advantage. Whilst recruiting unique characters with their own skillsets was an interesting idea on paper, it became easy to quickly fall back on tried and true methods rather experiment with everything the randomly generated citizens of London had to offer. Ironically enough this ended up being somewhat true of Legion, too. Its fun cast of characters and comparatively sprightly story made engaging with the hacking mechanics far more enjoyable than in the first game, which far too often fell into the trap of ludonarrative dissonance (a term in fact coined by Legion’s lead director Chris Hocking back in 2007) by making straight-up guns a far more viable and effective method of getting stuff done than actually utilising the game’s USP.
It’s become something of a cliche to suggest that any follow-up to a conceptually interesting but deeply flawed video game needs to have an ‘Assassin’s Creed II’ moment, but – fittingly – Ubisoft did deliver similarly with the adventure of Marcus Holloway and friends. The tepid critical reception to Watch Dogs when it eventually released in 2014 and sense of betrayal many felt over what was delivered undoubtedly made its 2016 sequel a tough sell, which proved to be a shame given what an improvement it was. After an enormous change in tone from the revenge-fuelled tale of the first game in Chicago to the levity of Watch Dogs 2’s teenage hijinks against Silicon Valley, followed by the experimental nature of Legion, Bloodline marks yet another stark shift in focus for Ubisoft’s big budget hacking franchise.
Legion takes a somewhat different approach with Bloodline, which completely strips out the main game’s ‘play as anyone’ pitch in favour of having you step into the shoes of Aiden once again.
WATCH DOGS LEGION BLOODLINE RELEASE TIME FULL
Valhalla’s had story content boasting a new location and suite of quests that could sustain most full releases, whilst Immortals has offered more of its mix of puzzles, exploration and combat. Both of those games have already received hefty slices of DLC, doubling down on what defined them.
WATCH DOGS LEGION BLOODLINE RELEASE TIME SERIES
The third entry in the series feels like it somewhat came and went upon its release late last year, as Ubisoft cannibalised its own market for open world action games by releasing the preposterously huge Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and refreshingly throwback Immortals Fenyx Rising at around the same time. Seven years on from its release, protagonist Aiden Pearce returns to centre stage in a story expansion for Watch Dogs: Legion. No matter how earnest Ubisoft’s intensions may have been, not even consoles still more than a year away from release at the time could come close to delivering on what our first look at that virtual Chicago looked like. Ubisoft’s initial unveiling of the original game is an infamous example of how shaky the ground can be when attempting to showcase a new title fairly early in development, with the scope and fidelity promised by that stunning E3 2012 debut clearly not representative of the final product. Watch Dogs has long seemed like a franchise afraid of its own shadow.