YMMV / Watch Dogs: Legion

• Accidental Aesop: The gun mechanics of the game give merit towards both sides of the gun control debate; you will usually only be met with lethal force if you initiate it by visibly carrying a firearm, but in certain missions enemies resort to lethal force by default and survival may depend on what weaponry you have on you. Both of these points together give the message, "Carrying a gun for the few genuine threats is a good idea, but ignoring other options in favor of firearms and brandishing it needlessly is less so."
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The vast violent organized crime network of Clan Kelley seems like a strange thing in a Police State like Albion's UK but this is actually common for many totalitarian regimes. Corruption runs rampant in such groups and very rarely do criminals challenge the status quo. Indeed, in many countries, the professionals criminals are employed by the government.
• Angst? What Angst?: Not far into her recruitment mission, Darcy's brother is killed after prolonged torture from Graham and wants to kill the bastard. She strangely gets over his death very quick afterwards.
• Awesome Music: "Light Up the Sky" by The Prodigy. Which is a case of Left the Background Music On as it plays during The Face of the Enemy where you have to escape the bunker.
• Best Level Ever: The investigation of Skye Larson's home has almost no gameplay in it, but is such an atmospheric tour de force that it is one of the most memorable in all of the franchise. It also helps that it delves into the psychology of a truly fascinating villain as well as the implications of her Brain Upload technology.
• Complete Monster:
  • "Bloody" Mary Kelley is the head of Clan Kelley, a massive crime syndicate involved in Human Trafficking, organ harvesting, gun-running, and drug trafficking. Inheriting the Clan after the death of her father, Mary has her rivals, family, and friends killed to ensure her control. Mary would go on to make her money through kidnapping illegal immigrants to either harvest their organs or sell them into slave labor, keeping some around as regularly abused servants. Supplying Albion and Zero Day with explosives in return for becoming The Queenpin of London's criminal empire, unmoved by the thousands of deaths the two cause with her bombs, Mary would have several gangs killed by Albion to retain her power, using prisoners in Nigel Cass' prison camps for their organs. Mary later kills several renegade servants once an uprising occurs, hoping to get a light sentencing from Inspector Kaitlin Lau for all the crimes she's committed.
  • Skye Larsen, the "Queen of A.I." and billionaire CEO of Broca Tech, first discovers the ability to convert one's mind into an A.I. after experimenting on her epileptic brother Bradley. Seemingly helping Wrench revive Aiden Pearce in Bloodlines, Skye reveals her plans to have Aiden be her first test subject for an experimental trial, having Aiden's nephew, Jackson, use the BrocaBridge to enter Aiden's mind, indifferent whether Aiden and Jackson should die in the process. Skye would also transplant her mother's subconscious into an A.I., turning her into a fully aware yet submissive slave, while also transplanting her dog's mind into a Spiderbot. She performed similar experiments on several people, driving them into murderous insanity. Aware that she's dying, Skye plans to use her new operating system, Daybreak, to upload her mind and all of London's citizens into it to become immortal, uncaring that she'll be torturing thousands in the process.
• Contested Sequel: The overall reception for Legion is mixed, and many see it as inferior to Watch Dogs 2 for removing some of the mechanics from that game, as well as for having some performance issues and a disjointed storyline. Still, some do enjoy the "play-as-anyone" aspect and the missions themselves.
• Creepy Awesome: As terrifying and utterly evil Skye Larsen is, you can't deny that her plot line is absolutely fascinating.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Albion Elite Rushers, introduced around the mid-game. While they don't deal any more damage than regular Rushers with their shotguns, the Elites have a little hitch: they can go invisible. If you don't keep on your toes during an engagement with Albion forces, you may well not even spot them until they deactivate their cloaks right on top of you, ready to tear you apart.
  • The Rempart MK1 Security Drones in Bloodline are fairly common, especially in main campaign missions, and are an absolute nightmare to fight. For starters, they're heavily armed with a light machine gun and an "Ultrasonic Blast" that can penetrate any cover, constantly keeping the player on their toes. But by far the worst thing about them is their ridiculous durability. To take one down, you first have to fill their 'overheat' bar, which goes up (slowly) when they attack or take damage, and can be half-filled by a hack (which requires completing a side mission to unlock). Once the bar is filled the robot shuts down and exposes a weak point on their back, which you must shoot at to destroy the robot. The problem is, though, that this weak point is tough enough to shrug off entire clips of ammo, and if you fail to destroy it in time or other enemies get in the way, the robot gets back up and you have to overheat the damned thing all over again. They're especially frustrating if you prefer a stealthy playstyle, as they more or less necessitate the use of heavy weapons to take out, with the Explosive Barrels that are usually the quickest and stealthiest way to take out enemies only doing Scratch Damage to the overheat bar. Their only weakness is their speed.
• Designated Hero: Wrench's actions in the Bloodline DLC leave a lot to be desired. While one could justify leaving Aiden to be captured by Rempart due to them being in conflict at the time, the rest of his actions throughout the DLC don't portray him in the most positive light:
  • He attacks a facility by hacking the robot sentries' friend-foe system and making them shoot indiscriminately, meaning civilians could be caught in the crossfire. Aiden actually comments on this with noticeable disapproval.
  • He steals the Brocabridge project, and instead of simply destroying it to ensure Rempart goes to prison he chooses instead to ruin the latter's business model. His plan for this is to upload the Brocabridge plans for it all over the net so everyone has access to it, showing a lack of care on the consequences of what would happen when anyone can access Killer Robot blueprints.
  • He gives a fake Brocabridge to Aiden that's actually an explosive meant for Rempart despite knowing Aiden is in the room and would likely be hurt or killed in retaliation. While he justifies it by saying Aidan is a badass this is still an extremely dickish thing to do.
  • His actions indirectly lead to Aiden falling into a coma, first from his stun grenade accidentally lodging shrapnel into his chest and later the strain of the escape from Rempart causing Aidan to collapse. While he does help Jackson stabilize Aidan, he's content to leave the two in favor of continuing his revenge on Rempart immediately afterwards. Jackson has to give him a What the Hell, Hero? speech before he's guilted into helping.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The game obviously wants you to play a non lethal route with how it only supplies stun guns. However most of the best recruits in the game have access to real firearms. Also, as both Albion and Clan Kelley are bonafide dicks, it can be less of a headache to just kill everyone in your way once you recruit their best operatives.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: A sharp divide among the fandom exists for those who can't get into the "recruit anyone" rules that was brought back by Bloodline. These individuals just want to play one single character consistently, usually one of the DLC ones, and ignore the recruitment missions completely.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Helen, the old lady used as the player character in the gameplay reveal trailer, quickly became a fan favourite. To the point you will be able to find tons of comments stating how they are looking forward to making an entirely elderly DedSec.
    • Ubisoft actually recognized how much of an EDH that she had become that they went and made her a Prestige Operative included in a June 1, 2021 update.
  • Ian from the same trailer to a lesser extent, thanks to his accent and for dying fairly quickly to showcase the character swapping mechanic.
  • The hitman from the Ubisoft Forward presentation on account of his similarities to John Wick.^note As if to highlight said similarities, the segment focusing on the Hitman even plays the club music when John goes after Iosef.
  • Darcy, a Season Pass exclusive character and member of the Assassins, quickly became popular upon her full reveal in the Assassin's Creed Crossover Trailer. Fans especially like her design for being a futuristic version of the traditional assassin's attire. It also helps that her arsenal actively encourages players to stealth their way through missions whenever possible rather than go in guns blazing.
• Fanfic Fuel: What are the histories and personalities of the randomly generated PCs you can recruit?
  • What will happen now that DedSec has discovered the existence of the Assassins and Templars?
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Construction Worker. Their nailgun functions as a silenced pistol, and they can call a large flying platform drone outdoors.
  • The Hypnotist can essentially hack human minds. Add that with the ability to make drones Betray, and you have an agent that can sit outside a danger zone, have one human and a drone attack everyone in the zone and not draw any suspicion. Additionally, they can do it over and over as the cooldown are basically the same.
  • The ability to take control of enemy Counterterrorism Drones. These are essentially miniaturised attack helicopters equipped with armour plating, a machine gun and guided missiles, making them more than capable of mowing down entire squads of hapless Albion/Clan Kelley goons while your Operative watches the chaos unfold from a safe distance. And to top it off, these flying killing machines can be easily found patrolling the streets or summoned at will from the landing pads dotted around London.
  • DLC character Mina Sidhu is essentially the Hypnotist on steroids, allowing the player to directly control enemies instead of just sending them on their way. Though she comes with a much longer cooldown^note Which can reset almost immediately if she successfully performs a takedown., it's well worth the leg up her abilities give you.
  • Owners of Bloodline DLC will be able to make Aiden and Wrench join the Dedsec London roster, in which both are Prestige Operatives, and both obviously come with useful abilities.
  • Darcy, a fellow Prestige Operative from the Season Pass, comes with the AR Disguise, which not only functions like the AR Cloak, but also allows players to infiltrated restricted areas. She also has access to the Hidden Blade, which turns any counter into an instant kill.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Dalton's Implied Love Interest relationship with Sabine becomes a massive case of this after she turns out to be Zero Day. What's worse, it seems he had no idea of her true nature and that she kills him.
• Magnificent Bastard: Sabine Brandt is DedSec's Mission Control who is actually Zero Day, a cyber terrorist who plots the destruction of England. Previously a well-mannered DedSec operative, after realizing that peace in England can never be achieved, Sabine decides to give her beloved country a hard reset and rebuild it from the ground up to make it a better place. Working with Nigel Cass in order to ensure him power over London's police force, Sabine tricks her boyfriend Dalton Wolfe into activating a series of bombs across London, killing him and her DedSec allies to pin the destruction on them. After getting double-crossed by Cass once he's in power, Sabine begins recruiting the citizens of London to form a new DedSec to stop Cass, manipulating everybody into taking down those who stand in her way. Once Cass is taken out, Sabine reveals herself to her allies and hijacks Bagley to detonate every device connected to ctOS, causing widespread mayhem in an attempt to create the peaceful utopia she so desires.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The reveal at E3 was meant to show off plot, mechanics, graphics, and the hard work of the Ubisoft team. The main selling point to viewers online? Being able to play as Helen the elderly badass.
  • Legion is more Assassin's Creed than Assassin's Creed.^Explanation Following Assassin's Creed Origins, the AC games gradually began to shift from stealth-focused gameplay to RPG-style gameplay (although it should be noted that Valhalla's "Siege of Paris" DLC has a greater emphasis on stealth). With the recent Assassin's Creed Crossover Trailer, many players started to joke that Legion is more similar to earlier AC games than the more recent ones.
• Moral Event Horizon: A good sign of just how monstrous Nigel Cass is in Albion's takeover of London is the fact that when the city police commissioner wants a humane element to their control and tries to talk to the government's defense minister about it, Nigel gives him the go-ahead to call before shooting him in the head once he turned around and then immediately writes it off to the present board meeting as a terrorist assassination with the fresh corpse still lying there. All to avoid any bureaucratic obstruction whatsoever.
  • By the time the events of the game roll around, Skye Larsen hasn't so much as crossed this line as much as she has flown by it and left it in the dust. She not only neural mapped and uploaded the brains of many innocent dead people without their consent, she digitally lobotomized them by deleting the "useless" parts of their minds and sold them as commercial A.I.'s in a cyberpunk take on a slave trade, all of whom are still conscious to some degree of their condition and prior selves. She also first did this to her own mother as a sort of beta test, then did it to her brother suffering early onset dementia, selling digitized copies of him for widespread distribution using a nickname he despised as the A.I.'s product name. Naturally, she sees no problem with this and even attempts to justify it as an important step to making humankind immortal. Starting with herself, of course.
• Narm Charm: The storyline is harder to take seriously if your character(s) are grannies, street performers, hooligans, etc.... but try not to smile at the idea of recruiting these random people off the street, then going straight into Refuge in Audacity by turning them into Albion/Clan Kelley-murder machines and/or making them commit random acts of mass violence throughout London.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This game boasts the ability to play as any NPC, which is technically something [PROTOTYPE] did first (though, with the player characters having shapeshifting abilities).
  • The rather obscure Real-Time Tactics game Satellite Reign also did this, although it has its own spin by brainwashing the NPC with mental template of your skilled agents as a replacement if your agents died.
  • While not all NPC, State of Decay can also potentially make most background characters both recruitable and playable.
  • Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (and its expansion, Portable Ops Plus), Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid V all revolve around building an army from the ground up, mostly through kidnapping soldiers. Portable Ops and Portable Ops Plus even had their fair share of Lethal Joke Characters like Legion's Helen, such as balding middle-aged scientists and loudly-colored MGS1 Genome Soldiers who've watched way too many Toku shows.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game is widely praised for its character recruitment system, which unlocks countless different ways to play the game. However, many reviewers also agree that the game's story is at best So Okay, It's Average, mainly because it's difficult to write an engaging plot when there's no single player character to focus on.
• Questionable Casting:
  • A common pre-release criticism of the game is often targeted towards the voice acting (and by extent, the dialogue), with reactions ranging from, "It's okay, but not perfect," to "No British person has ever spoken or sounded like that."
  • Since most of the characters are randomly generated, you can often end up with some of the more serious character archetypes (IE, Hitman) assigned to a character who is voiced by a VA who's clearly recorded lines for a much more comical character. Especially noticeable when the voice of a middle aged to elderly actor comes out of a much younger-looking character.
  • A patch removed two in-game podcasts voiced by Helen Lewis, a British journalist, after Ubisoft discovered past comments Lewis made on self ID that were seen as transphobic.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Aiden Pearce was a Base-Breaking Character in Watch_Dogs but has been well-received from players of Bloodline. More emphasis has been presented on his hypocrisy, the toll his actions took on his family, and his guilt for his actions. This has made him a much more rounded character and many believe he's much cooler as a 50 year old hacker past his prime.
• Salvaged Story:
  • The fact that DedSec only supplies non-lethal weaponry seems to be the answer for how in Watch Dogs 2, despite DedSec's clearly good intentions and almost none of the single player story missions forces a lethal approach, one of the first objectives you had to do is to print a lethal handgun.
  • The option to play Aiden and Wrench in the main game via Bloodline for those who want a more traditional developed protagonist. Many complaints were made about the weak voice acting by the randomly generated player characters while both have individualized reactions to all of the game's events as well as their original voice actors. It's possible to complete most of the game as just these two (although in some instances you will need to recruit other Operatives to complete certain missions).
• The Scrappy: Richard Malik is widely considered to be the weakest of all the villains in the game due to his Obviously Evil Smug Snake nature. Most players twigged to his untrustworthy and duplicitous nature from the beginning of his involvement in the plot. The fact the player characters are forced to act like he's an ally even when the player characters are insulting him makes his arc the least favorite of the game for many.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The controls are refined (apart from the car controls, which became worse compared to Watch Dogs 2, and even worse as the streets of London are narrower), you can have access to drones that can lift a person or function as disposable attack helicopters, pursuing enemies are far easier to evade than in either of the previous games, and now all enemies have HP bars, and are pretty vulnerable to headshots even from the silenced handgun.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Who would have guessed that the playable character of the next Watch Dogs game would be every NPC character in the game!
  • The reveal that Aiden Pearce, the protagonist of Watch_Dogs, would be returning as a playable character with his own set of quests.
  • Not only that, but the crossover DLC with Assassin's Creed, with an original character working in the Assassin's Order helping DedSec.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The best Syndicate game we never got. It helps that the music that plays when you made a borough deviant is suspiciously similar to the music when you complete a mission in Syndicate.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Well, technically more of a "Surprisingly Improved Prequel". Many players reported to find the Bloodline DLC to have a more intriguing and well-told storyline than the basegame, simply by virtue of it being a constructed experience with an actual main character, which the "play as anyone" system couldn't pull off for obvious reasons. Many also felt that Aiden Pearce's characterization was much better realized in Bloodline than in the first Watch_Dogs, adding dimensions to his character that were either underdeveloped, severely underplayed, or simply weren't there in the original game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Some fans have suggested that the game would have benefited more from being tied directly to Brexit and the rise of a government based authoritarian regime, rather than a False Flag Operation that led to One Nation Under Copyright.
  • There's a small portion of fans who are disappointed with Mina Sidhu, or to be more specific, her lack of content involving her. Her trailer shows she's on the run from Cacani Medical, giving players the implication missions involving her would have her go after the people in charge of Project OMNI. Instead, she's little more than a free Operative with useful abilities for players to recruit as soon as they start the game.
  • Not plot in this case, but rather the potential of the plot. Among the four Season Pass characters announced was Darcy, a new character mentioned as being part of the the Order of Assassins. This led fans to believe Ubisoft was setting up a shared universe between Watch_Dogs and AC if they hadn't already^note In the first Watch_Dogs game, Aiden kills Oliver Garneau, Chief Creative Officer of Abstergo, which is canon as Layla Hassan has information of his death stored on her computer. Unfortunately, Thilianathan stated that Darcy's presence is not canon to AC and is mostly "fan service".
  • The City of London ctOS Hub, heavily implies that Defalt is alive and well, which isn't that hard to believe given that he has a history of faking his own death, and is actively working against Albion for whatever reason. He leaves behind an encrypted hard drive with a list of names Albion is interested in (as well as his typical childish taunts), and if you can figure out how to enter his abandoned Hacker Cave, a playable version of his iconic Rat Head mask. The idea that a popular former villain is alive and fighting the Big Bad of the game would have made for an excellent DLC a la the DLC that made Aiden and Wrench playable, giving DedSec a proper Token Evil Teammate. Instead, barely any mention is made of who Defalt even was. Even completing the ctOS Hub hack or entering his Hacker Cave with Aiden doesn't even get a passing mention from him, this despite the fact that Aiden went up against him personally in the first game.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Ironically enough, the Build Your Team mechanic. Many praise the innovation of the fact you can recruit anyone, but at the same time it feels like its potential is quite underused since all you do with it is switch between playable characters (which resets the checkpoint if you switch between characters during a mission, making "teamwork" pointless). Some have suggested being able to use multiple characters while taking on a hideout and switch between them as you would switch between cameras, others have suggested using them similar to how the Assassin Apprentices were used in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood where you can send them to do missions off-screen.
  • As of the August update, it would appear that Ubisoft has taken this criticism to heart with the new Resistance Mode difficulty, which, among other difficulty spikes, disables fast travel in favor of switching to your operatives in predetermined areas around the city, living their lives between missions. This allows the player to lean more into the Teamwork side of things, as well as forcing them to more carefully weigh recruitment, abilities, and so on.
  • Despite the sizable number of different fighting styles and melee weapons among operatives, most just slightly change your stats when they aren't purely cosmetic; whether you're playing as an old lady or a trained assassin, hand-to-hand combat is always "attack, dodge, counter, guard break".
  • The amount of unique dialogue for different types of operatives is very limited; politicians, police, Albion soldiers and Clan Kelley enforcers all have very little to say about going up against their supposed allies, diminishing replay value and chances to get invested in the characters and world.
  • Despite revolution and army building being central to the game's premise, there is no counterpart to the nation-power & battle mechanic of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. Turning districts "defiant" just means completing some basic objectives and then getting a unique operative, with next to no impact on the sandbox.
  • These games are clearly capable of creating large crowds and handling NPC wars, but the option of SWAT-ing or calling in hits on people from the previous game is gone, and there are no large battles or riots to participate in.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Has its own page now.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • It's fair to say that the game's showing at E3 2019 and its NPC mechanic drew a lot of interest.
  • Several have commented they were planning on skipping this entry until it was revealed Aiden Pearce, the Player Character of the first game as well as Wrench, both Fan Favorite characters, would be returning and will be recruitable along with additional story gameplay for them.

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