I Played Both Valhalla and Legion. This Fall, I'm Betting on Watch Dogs

I am a player who most often chooses mainstream productions. I love the Mass Effect series, last year I was delighted with Control and Red Dead Redemption 2, I completed almost every installment of Assassin's Creed and I'm among those who liked Watch Dogs (the first one more than the sequel). So this year Ubisoft puts me in a pretty difficult position, as it releases Watch Dogs Legion on October 29, only to give players Assassin's Creed Valhalla just three weeks later. And don't forget Cyberpunk 2077, which is due to premiere exactly two days after Valhalla. It's not going to be an easy Autumn, especially if you like to spend a little more time on one game. But if I was forced to choose between Legion and Valhalla, my decision is clear at this point – Assassin's Creed will wait for better times because I'm going on an autumn trip to London. The more contemporary one. Dammit, will both of Ubi's Autumn titles really allow us to visit London...?

Why just now?

Ubisoft revealed the latest installment of Watch Dogs at last year's E3, and it was expected to be released in early 2020. However, the failure of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint caused the French publisher to move some of its games, giving them more time to spread their wings in the production process. I must admit that in the case of Legion this decision slightly surprised me, because what I had the opportunity to play a little over a year ago seemed to be quite representative and different experience, which was not copy-paste compared to what was alleged at least Breakpoint. First of all, there is no single main character in this game, and the idea of playing as any Londoner sounded like a very intriguing and novel solution. A year has passed, Ubisoft has revealed its cards, and it turns out that while some changes in production have taken place, there aren't that many of them... but that's not necessarily bad news. Why fix something that's not broken?

But let's start from the beginning because we were finally able to see what we were really going to face in the new Watch Dogs. London, in Ubisoft's vision, was still a peaceful and developing city, but at some point, a bomb attack occurs - we will witness it in the prologue. The attack was designed to frame DedSec, a hacking organization that fans of the series are already familiar with. Zero-Day is behind everything, but we won't quickly get any information on whether it is a person, an organization, or an extraterrestrial that has decided to interfere in our lives.

The result of this attack is the introduction into London of a military organization called Albion, led by the Extremely Evil Mr. No. 1 (Nigel Cass). Albion gets more and more power over time and, under the cloak of collaboration with the British government, imposes new restrictions on people, completely policing the lives of citizens with the help of ctOS. There are also those who try to make a living from the plight of the citizens, and they include the Extremely Evil Mrs. No. 2 (Mary Kelley), who leads one of the syndicates involved in the illegal organ trade, among other things. Forgive the over-exaggeration when describing the antagonists, but Ubisoft is known for making the enemy characters evil to the bone, which sometimes seems rather cartoonish. For now, I have exactly the same impression when it comes to Legion.

The player's goal, then, is to clear the reputation of DedSec, unravel the mystery of Zero-Day, and bring London to a more habitable state, where once again the public will be asked whether Brexit was actually the right thing to do. Not much more is needed to determine that the game will upkeep the level of narrative typical for Ubisoft – it will be fine, but we will not find anything revolutionary here.

So what's it like to play as any NPC?

Legion has been advertised from the very beginning as a game with a very bold move – we will not play as a single main character in the game. In return, we will be able to recruit any resident of London into the ranks of our organization. Whether it's a fit man, a rather frail hipster with soy milk on his mustache, or an elderly lady (who might turn out to be a retired contract killer, who knows!), each of them can join the group of DedSec operators that we will control. However, we must first convince such people by performing individual tasks for them, which will increase support for the activities of our organization.

As far as I could see, the attitude towards the "classes" of citizens has changed a bit. Previously, the game divided the citizens into enforcers, hackers, and infiltrators, who, depending on their role, were more proficient in specific fields. I haven't seen these labels here, and instead, there are just more archetypes of characters that the Londoners we recruit can fit into. On my team, I managed to have a hacker, a police sergeant, a construction worker, and a professional assassin who, despite his age, was surprisingly fierce in hand-to-hand combat. Over time, I also recruited a barrister and an Albion employee, which gave me access to some interesting opportunities.

Let's talk about specifics. While we know what to expect from a hacker or a police officer, having an Albion employee in our ranks means that we can use him to infiltrate the organization's facility in a much easier way because we have Albion uniform and it will be harder to identify us. Same with a police officer and access to police stations or a construction worker and access to... well, construction sites. The latter, however, has another unique skill, which allows him to summon a transport drone at any time, which we can hop on, take control of, and fly over the Thames into the sunset.

Each of the recruited NPCs will have unique statistics that will affect the operation of this unit alone, or the operation of our entire organization – for example, recruiting a lawyer means a reduction in jail time if someone from the team is caught in action. Some archetypes have access to special weapons, and so construction workers can hit someone with a huge wrench or shoot them with a nail gun. We will modify our agents to some extent, choosing which gadgets they can use or changing the clothes they move in on a daily basis.

And how exactly does the system work for everyone? Surprisingly good! Although I do not know the details of the technical implementation of this project (but I am very happy to ask about them in an interview), each character is generated by the game, a voice from a pool of many recordings prepared by many voice actors is matched to it, and it is all nicely covered with complete animations. No matter who we take to the task, during any cutscene the character will be an integral part of the conversation. Unfortunately, there are simplifications resulting from this approach, because our protagonists' dialogue lines are quite generic and sometimes appear noticeably weaker against the background of full-fledged NPCs, where the voice actors were supposed to play only this character. But that doesn't prevent you from experiencing the story present in Legion - this game is not just a sandbox.

However, when speaking about the sandbox, I would like to emphasize the way Watch Dogs expands such a formula. In this installment, more than in the previous ones, I felt I could play exactly the way I wanted to play and do things that would only come into my head. Example: I had to access a server located in an area patrolled by enemies, but physical contact with the device was required. You could use a spider drone to do this, but there was a problem with getting it to this place, so... I called a transport drone, jumped as the spider on this drone, flew the drone to the footbridge where the interaction server was located, took control of the spider-bot again, hacked the server, and then transported the robot back to my character using the drone. It gave me more satisfaction than I would have expected at first. And you could go in and shoot everyone, or sneak in or fly a transport drone on your own. The possibilities are limitless and a number of operators with their unique abilities will allow for a greater range of playstyles.

Is Legion actually better than Valhalla?

The answer to this question is, of course, subjective, because everyone is looking for something different in a game. I followed the Assassin's Creed series from the beginning, through the good and bad hits. I loved the new formula offered by Origins, but with Odyssey I was already unhappy, despite completing the base game and two episodes of one of the expansions (the Uplay shows me 78 hours on the counter today). The game was too big, too empty and didn't offer much novelty. After playing Valhalla, I'm not going to say that the Viking edition is a reskin of Odyssey, but I'm also not sure that it's new enough to make me want to play the title for the premiere. In the case of Legion, I felt much more excitement from the start. We have atmospheric London, we have an expansion of the gameplay formula in comparison with the previous installment, we have a completely novel approach to the characters with which we go through the whole story and we have more sandbox gameplay than before. And you know what? I don't even like the gameplay sandbox, I don't take full advantage of its capabilities, but in the new Watch Dogs, you want to experiment with what the game has to offer.

Valhalla slightly disappointed me with the rather stiff cutscenes we also know from Odyssey, while Legion does it better, though far from the level represented by Naughty Dog. Sure, Assassin's Creed will be more glamorous, the fight will definitely be meatier and will probably sell a lot better than this year's dogs. Still, I have a sense of stagnation with the series about assassins, and in Watch Dogs I see an attempt to do something new, which at the moment, after about three hours spent with the game, I rate a very good performance. In fact, at the moment I'm in a very comfortable position for the fall – I'll be able to finish Legion, skip Valhalla, and then play Cyberpunk, which is due to premiere two days after Assassin's Creed. It's one of the few situations where I'm happy that the game (in this case, Valhalla) doesn't live up to my expectations.