Watch Dogs Legion - My Botched Profiler Experiments

 

Many NPCs have unusual abilities. Some are useful and some seem to be for entertainment. I tried panhandling with this fellow. He made a little money but it wasn’t that much fun. He did have one of the busiest schedules I have seen. He also had some insights into illicit drugs which I suppose will happen if you hang around docks begging for work all day.

My experiments were as haphazard as usual. They amounted to me just playing the game, trying things out and learning the rules as I went. I tried to convince several NPCs to stop hating DedSec but never succeeded. I also set out to make as many social connections as possible by helping citizens. I disabled harassing drones, got them priority medical treatment and rescued them from Albion security. My operatives got very good at escaping. I tried to find interesting operatives by recruiting NPCs’ every associate and rival. That didn’t necessarily lead to any great operatives but caused some interesting conflicts. I tried to annoy a hit man by killing off his targets but he just auto joined. Lazy hit man I guess.

It wasn’t long before I was seeing tagged NPCs all over London. The tags were a little confusing but green seems to indicate an operative or potential recruit, white indicates a neutral or positive connection to potential operatives and recruits and red indicates a rival. Red doesn’t necessarily mean the NPC dislikes DedSec but most often it does. It’s also not unusual to see the same tagged NPC repeatedly in different locations. I kept bumping into one recruit’s sex therapist which was weird. Another operative’s sister got rescued from Albion twice. The worst was witnessing an Albion guard gunning down a former agent. I got there too late and he was gone. This is definitely the Watch Dogs game that made me look. The more I recruited (and dismissed), the more I investigated schedules and profiles. Londoners all seem to have secret lives and often engage in activities wildly at odds with their occupations. The profiler seems to track every interaction operatives have with NPCs although not all of it gets displayed. I used the gesture menu to greet two potential recruits having lunch together and that got noted on their profiles in green.

I was almost ready to give up until I ran into this guy beating down an Albion guard and set about recruiting him and his entire network. The networks I had developed so far dead ended at some point with associates eventually pointing at each other. This one got out hand quickly. It was late at night and I really didn't feel like making notes. So I paused recruitment until the following morning and tried to finally complete borough mission Driven to Distraction instead but failed repeatedly. Next session I learned that Adrian was quite unhappy with me. Not only had I failed to help him with a rival but I had unknowingly killed one of his colleagues with my terrible driving. Oops. My only recourse was to deal with his rival which caused both the rival and his wife to hate DedSec. Adrian got recruited and his rivals continued to hate DedSec no matter who I recruited. I have finished all the main missions and I am done for the moment. I guess I shouldn’t say my experiments were botched so much as they didn’t quite go the way I wanted.

Legion has many engaging elements but I just feel like it doesn’t play to it’s strengths. It is presented with a typical mission structure and map fog and directs players to many of the best operatives either through rewards or marked locations. I’m not surprised some folks found the game lacking if they drove everywhere, just did the main missions and stuck with those operatives. I’m not sure it was a good idea to make every NPC recruit-able because that limited all their schedules and activities. The world is well populated but NPCs aren’t that interesting outside of recruitment. It might have been cool if some NPCs were recruit-able and some NPCs just had connections to them. That way the player could also find recruits by interacting with NPC profiles and those NPCs would be free to do more random weird or entertaining stuff.

The story definitely could have been better. I really liked the side missions with the characters I could interact with. I didn’t mind the disembodied Bagley as a companion but writers could have forgotten the standard tropes in the script and added a leader present at the safe house with whom the player could engage with. I would have been more invested. Bagley still could have played a role and interacted with operatives in his humorous way.

Legion’s best feature is it’s open world. Sometimes I enjoyed just roaming around aimlessly. I did like the expanded hacking tools and abilities and the many large interior locations but the hacking targets did get repetitive over time.