According to the freshly released trailer, the latest Watch Dogs game, Watch Dogs: Legion is coming to put the term ‘NPC’ to the test in a world that imagines England’s government turning on its citizens.
“Ah, London had a good run there for a while,” the voiceover in the above trailer says. “Now it’s all riots, bombings and people thrown in cages like animals.”
Unlike the first Watch Dogs, wherein a single hacker caused chaos in a futuristic Chicago, the Legion trailer demonstrates the vast array of options available to players as the term NPC (Non Playable Character) becomes obsolete. Legion is a world where everyone can be activated and pulled into the cause of trying to undermine a brutal government that has deployed murderous drones that fly all over the place. And we mean everyone. The trailer encourages gamers to seek possibilities on the streets of London with street performers, people on park benches and, yes, spy-like characters atop Tower Bridge all serving as examples of the limitless options available as you recruit and build a team to carry out tasks, quickly flipping between characters as you would in a football video game. All those moving pieces would then, in theory, open up numerous opportunities in an already open-ended world. It’s a unique wrinkle to a franchise that typically allows players to cause so much chaos with a single agent.
London was teased as the next step in the Watch Dogs story at the end of Watch Dogs 2, and it’s fitting that the game expands in scope in a really fascinating way here. Learning to recruit the right person to complete objectives opens up a world of possibilities. And according to the trailer, we’ll learn a whole lot more about what’s going on with the good people of London on March 6, 2020, when the game officially drops.