It really feels like a Watch Dogs side experiment. The recruiting and playing as anyone stuff could’ve worked, but you still need a compelling reason to be in this world. The narrative isn’t doing it, and the mission areas are so very blah and samey, and the big bag of tools they give you is made completely redundant by the default spiderbot and cargo drone that you can just swipe out of the air all the time.
There’s almost no reason to enter most restricted areas and get into conflict thanks to how easy it is to stand outside and destroy everyone with your bot and zap them with their own traps and drones. (Which is why so many story areas require you to enter an elevator and get transported to a discrete combat encounter or puzzle level.) It’s a bunch of systems that don’t mesh with each other.
Also, the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach of including a “non-lethal” SMG, shotgun, and grenade launcher is eye-rolling.
This is the correct take - you really can’t kill anyone, even someone that looks like you snapped their neck in a silent takedown when you scan them is “injured and awaiting being taken to the nearest hospital” or something. Yet the weapons are like shotguns and such, though they are all non-lethal. It’s… kind of wild. Not bad, but not really a good system. They could have at least created new weapons that were actually non-lethal, like instead of an SMG we could have had a taser or a tranq gun, sort of Deus Ex style.
In your gadget pool there are four weapons that are supposedly non-lethal shock guns. These can be used by anyone.
A pistol - You start with this unlocked, and it can be upgraded with a bigger clip and a “silencer”
An SMG - Upgrades include bigger clip and faster reloads
A shotgun - Upgrades include bigger clip and faster reloads
A grenade launcher - Upgrades include bigger clip and faster reloads
These act like normal weapons. If you shoot someone with them, they are out for that encounter, so to the player, there’s no difference other than the lore of you not “killing” them. In WD2, the default taser gun shocked an enemy unconscious, but there was a timer to how long they’d stay out.
Certain operatives can come with normal lethal weapons like AK’s, heavy machineguns, or a silenced spy pistol. You can share these weapons, but if the operative that brought the weapon leaves or gets killed, the weapon is no longer available in your pool. Oh and some cops can come with a taser, but why bother?
It’s a fun diversion, especially as part of the subscription thing. The best part for me is standing outside of the “red zone” and using my magic phone to make cars and trucks do tricks inside the enemy compound. Like running people over, running into explosive barrels, all sorts of fun. It’s especially grand when, for reasons known only to the AI, this sort of thing prompts the Albion twits to start shooting randomly at civilians and each other. I think I must have caused more harm to innocent Londoners than any of the purported bad guys in the game.
That’s really what it comes down to for me–the lack of consequences for, well, anything. Driving horribly, ramming people’s vehicles, running them over, randomly beating the crap out of them–mostly, no big deal. Ok, once, I accidentally punched someone because I hit the wrong key, and later they kidnapped one of our operatives, and I had to rescue her. That was cool. But mostly, it’s like, no one really cares. It’s like everyone is on Prozac.
I recorded a gameplay of how the game runs on my PC on absolute lowest settings at lowest resolution. That is on Ryzen 2700X (16 threads, 3.9ghz), RTX 2080Ti, 16GB 3200mhz, installed on SSD.
How can the framerate be so low - even dropping below 60 - when GPU is utilized from on average 38% and CPU from some 60%? Why is the game not using the available resources? Especially when it is running DX12.
Digital Foundry analysis - On Xbox Series X, the game drops resolution when outside to near 1440p, while using lower than low settings. When directly comparing XSX settings applied to PC version, the RTX 2060S actually provides higher performance than Xbox X.
Unfortunately this analysis did not go into how to achieve 60fps on PC or why the game does not use the available resources, but still, interesting.
Great video again. Alex is fast becoming my favorite Digital Foundry member for the details he looks at and the way he explains things. I was just thinking “The Xbox One X version without ray tracing looks just fine”, when he said the same thing and then showed how it looks much worse in motion.
Anyway, not doing ray tracing on rough surfaces at all seems like the biggest compromise to me on the console version versus the PC medium ray tracing settings. But it does seem like a reasonable compromise. Reflections on dull surfaces are very subtle and hard to pick up with the eye, and yet are really expensive to implement.
The multiplayer patch has been pushed back to 2021.
As part of our commitment to fixing the game’s issues, we’ve decided to delay the Online mode of Watch Dogs: Legion to early 2021. This will allow us to focus on fixing issues with single player, and it will give us more time to test the Online experience to help ensure a smooth launch of the mode.
All good now :) I wondered if any of the gameplay systems were being massaged but it seems not.
One of the various undercooked areas was the borough uprising system, which didn’t yield anything beyond ‘special’ characters. I didn’t notice any other changes to the environment - I wonder if the checkpoints along the roads do or should behave differently on liberation, say. There should also be some kind of victory condition when the last one is done surely.
Maybe this could also somehow soak up all those characters you recruit that you aren’t playing somehow.
