I’m certain that it’s awesome to have one’s hometown modelled in a computer game - I know I’d be a heck of a lot more interested if it was mine as well :-)
I think something about having ‘enclosed’ roads and few vistas makes cities harder to mentally map, compared to open country settings. If I think of the map of any on-foot RPG, like Skyrim or Gothic 3, I know how all the key locations are laid out. HZD, too. But I couldn’t find anything in any Watch Dog without GPS. Maybe the nature of the beast but it makes for a different experience. If I were a driver in real life I might feel differently :)
I got Legion via the subscription, so I thankfully did not actually pay sixty clams for it. Everything Tom wrote is on point, though I admit I sometimes find tooling around London enjoyable, and I have a very high tolerance for gameplay repetition in any event.
Valhalla is clearly a better game by an order of magnitude. I agree Kass was better than Eivor, but a lot of that has to do in my mind with the voice acting. The voice acting in Valhalla ranges from good to not so good, but in general it’s fine. The sound and voice mixing, as I’ve complained about before, leaves something to be desired, and often Eivor (female version at least) sounds like someone rubbed sandpaper over her vocal cords. Maybe left over from the wolf chomping on her neck, dunno. Still, Eivor is not at all a bad character. Her story is not as compelling as Kassandra’s; it’s a bog-standard revenge type tale with no mystery to it initially. Eivar’s relationship with Sigurd, though, does add some very solid narrative beats along the way, and is I think more believable than Kass’ interactions with Deimos in Odyssey.
But what really separates these two games (Valhalla and Legion) is what Tom points out–there is virtually nothing to care about in Legion. In Valhalla, even if the loony Animus stuff doesn’t float your boat, and Eivor isn’t your jam, the meaty combat, great visuals, solid progression systems, and overall sense of discovery carries a lot of weight. In Legion, I can’t be bothered. Even the Albion baddies are mostly working stiffs about as inherently evil as your average bus driver.
It’s already being discounted.
https://store.ubi.com/us/black-friday/
Buy Legion and any other game in the Ubi store, and you get Legion for $35.99.
Just wrapped up the epilogue. 46 hours of cloaking, spidering and pipelining. Lots of fun.
I wonder if we’ll see Title Updates adding gameplay modes as with Breakpoint, which also left a bunch of people cold on launch. I wonder if a limit on the number of recruits would flow through to be an improvement overall. Not sure, but an easy tweak to make.
The later mission where you have two operatives and switch between them was more what I felt would have a fitted multi-character story. Maybe in WD5…
Another desperate plea to look cool by trashing mainstream games. The game is fun and if you hated watchdogs Legion I can’t imagine what you would say about 2. A review like this was doomed from the start because of your hate for Ubisoft. Keep raging the rest of us enjoy their games.
Another “Thomas Chick Satisfied Customer” [tm]
That it’s the best Watchdogs game, which is damning it with faint praise?
-Tom
&#@%! Chick the Ubi hater, that made my day!
Here is a problem most of the recent stealth games have: all of them are actually stealth action games, because stealth alone is not enough to make a profit. Therefore they need more enemies on the screen to support action phase. More enemies are harder to track, so here is vision through walls and other tracking mechanics. More enemies are harder to avoid, here is basically a cheat to kill multiple enemies as fast as possible when they just spot you, so they couldn’t raise the alert.
Splinter Cellls have Mark & Execute mechanic, Hitmans have Instinct mode. The first Watch Dogs had Focus ability with silenced pistol. Even Kojima himself couldn’t find a solution to this fundamental problem, that’s why MGSV had awful Reflex Mode, which forces you to shoot at enemies who suddenly noticed you.
Those games are mostly checkpoint based, so this is how I played them: I’m KO the first enemy, KO the next one, KO the third one, oh shit, someone noticed me. and here I am, running in the middle of the action, so they could kill me ASAP to autoreload from the last checkpoint.
But that’s not how I played Legion. In Legion enemies don’t shoot first.
So when you make a mistake and get detected you just retreat, separate a guy who noticed you from others, beat him in H2H combat, stun him, neutralize him and keep playing stealth. This works even if two guys noticed you. If there are three someone could lost his temper and pull a gun, but you can still hack the gun. This feature alone makes Legion the most satisfying stealth action game I’ve ever played.
But there’s more, because of ‘play as anyone’ mechanic and the way the game simulates NPCs relationships and schedules now a typical goon #1 in a guarded area might be a guy you want to hire, or a relative of your DedSec operative, or even your former operative. A typical pedestrian #2 might be one of your team who goes about his business in the open world. And the game tracks when you does something bad towards them.
So this is how I played Legion: I’m KO the first enemy, KO the next one, avoid the third one, I like his skills, his appearance. his bio kinda neat, I’ll hire him later. Oh shit, someone noticed me, it’s my former colleague, I don’t want him hurt, run, hide.
Most of the operatives have non-lethal weapons, almost all your tools are non-lethal. Even traffic cars are self-driving, so if you want to steal one you don’t have to throw someone out of the car. You won’t run over a pedestrian while driving from A to B on autopilot. And even if you run over a pedestrian, you can scan him using deep profiler, get to the nearest hospital, hack the server to prioritize his treatment, and now he likes DedSec again.
What I’m trying to say is that Legion is easily the best Watch Dogs game, because people on the streets are actually matter, and there is a lot going on behind a snippet of text you see when you scan them like in previous games. And it’s one of the best open world games for a pacifist stealthy player.
I’m baffled that so many people just focused on ‘play as anyone’ mechanic and the lack of difference between your operatives (with all due respect, I disagree) ignoring everything else the game did. Like we all played completely different games.
P.S: Finished WD2 after Legion and wasn’t impressed. Your DedSec members stand still inside the Hackerspace during the entire game until the game writer decides that you need one of them in the next mission. Marcus can’t die, NPCs don’t matter, there are no stakes, there’s no tension, the game is less systemic, and enemies are trigger happy. There are way too much violence for young hackers who care only about followers and subscribers. There are lots of tiny issues Legion fixed, the lack of crouch button is just one of them. Although I wish Legion was as hard as WD2 on the highest difficulty level, but they obviously balanced it keeping permadeath mode in mind.
do you recommend permadeath mode? This is my first WD game and I just have started on normal.
Yes. It adds a little weight IMO.
Well, when I wrote that I forgot they recently announced brand new Resistance difficulty mode. It’s like permadeath, but a lot harder.
They’ve added it to the game a few days back in update 5.5 along with zombie mode and Assassin’s Creed crossover missions. It’s punishingly hard, operatives die like flies, so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who haven’t finished the game yet.
Just tried the update and one interesting tweak is that operatives are shown on the map now. So now, when you get a mission it’s natural to choose the operative nearest, which teleports you to them. Makes your network of hackers more useful and also pushes you to play a bigger selection of them.
I don’t know why I decided to address the main point of this review. Character progression is a horrible, horrible idea, and here’s why:
Right now Legion comes down to finding cool NPC, let’s say, a drone expert with 4 perks somewhere on the streets of London, making a couple of missions to recruit him (which is not a trivial task on Resistance difficulty) and have fun with his abilities.
If Legion had character progression you would find the same drone expert, but with single perk only, so you have to spend hours to unlock other three perks. It would add unnecessary grind, force players to stick to one character, and make permadeath runs more annoying.
Not only that, character progression when you have ‘play as anyone’ mechanic would mean enemies have levels too. Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Syndicate and the latest AC games are great examples showing how enemies’ levels could ruin your gameplay, especially its stealth part. There’s nothing more annoying than a hidden blade or a berserk dart isn’t working anymore, just because an enemy have a higher level than you have.
The last point is levels will make NPCs on the streets significantly less valuable. Until you form your DedSec team (especially on Resistance) you’re constantly thinking about NPCs, you’re constantly scanning them.
Like I would even drive very carefully, because the next guy walking across the street might have a rare combination of perks I need right now. Levels would homogenize people on the streets, they would become samey boring blank sheets for further leveling.
Now here is the catch, Legion’s E3 build already had levels and classes as well. Obviously It didn’t work out. Probably because of reasons I described above. In any case, I’m so glad it didn’t. The lack of character progression saved Legion.
Resistance mode was a later addition I think?
In the original version you didn’t need to build your team with much (or any) care as anyone could take down pretty much any bastion of London bad guys. Only the main mission parts that were combat heavy gave value to, say, tough characters with big guns from what I remember. It was another Ubigame where you kind of had to make your own fun by not using the tools readily at hand, but mixing things up yourself. I loved it :)
There was an article on this topic and skill trees were ditched because they wanted people to recruit widely, as you say. Unfortunately they didn’t balance the game so it was all that necessary IMO.
Yeah, it was.
One of the most important things it did, it made AI hear your footsteps. Оn all other difficulties (online included) crouch is enough to move silently. On Resistance you need to move extra slow behind enemies’ back, which makes its stealth kinda slow paced and more challenging, closer to Splinter Cells.
It adds lots of cool stuff besides that, making the overall game more stealth focused. Because almost all abilities’ cooldowns are longer now, and AIs react faster, pull out guns earlier, and some of them attack you on sight even outside red areas. So you have to avoid shooting at all costs, you need to be more careful, more methodical, and use every chance the game gives you. Like Berserker, Physically fit, Albion/Kelley vendetta, Melee recharger and other skills like that become way more important.
For example, most of the tech points you can find in the open world are trapped now, and they raised the costs of upgrades, so this time to get all upgrades you need absolutely all of the points. So the best way to get tech points is hover on a cargo drone and pick them up using spider bot. Doing it this way will spawn a bunch of chase drones nearby. Chase drones use shock bolts, that’s why a bee keeper becomes absolutely essential, because his/her suit has shock immunity.