Gaming

Video-game London in Watch Dogs Legion shows us the darkest timeline


Armed militia stroll around London, picking fights where they please and shutting down small gatherings of masked protesters demanding their freedoms on street corners. Drones buzz above, monitoring citizens’ movements and following anyone suspicious. In Watch Dogs Legion’s future dystopian British capital, Brexit happened years ago, Scotland has seceded from the union, and the country has been overtaken by private, corporate interests who’ve wrested control from the government and framed a collective of hacker protesters, DeadSec, for a series of terrorist attacks. People are pissed off, and ready to rise up. You, the player, are the catalyst that makes that happen.

Like Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs conjures a huge living city out of code, filled with thousands of individual characters who go about their lives, going to work, visiting their sister, driving around in the rain. But unlike Grand Theft Auto, your weapon here isn’t a gun: it’s a smartphone. You can hijack drones and security cameras, hack into laptops and terminals, and view a precis of someone’s recent internet search history and talents by looking at them and pressing a button. If they seem useful, you can recruit them to your cause.

“Once we landed on the concept of playing as anyone in the city and how we might achieve that in the game, our shortlist got narrowed very quickly down to cities that were very diverse,” says Clint Hocking, Watch Dogs’ creative director, who is best known for 2008’s subversive shooter Far Cry 2. “London shot to the top of that list very rapidly when we got into the themes of the game, like economic and social turmoil. We wanted to lean into London’s history as a locus and a metaphor for big historical pivots, like the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.”

In many open-world games such as this, after a while it starts to feel like you really could be in any large city. But this London, though futuristic, is unmistakable: the patchwork of accents, the hodgepodge of old and new buildings, the intermittent rain. Instead of reducing London to symbols, to tube signs and red buses, Watch Dogs Legion attempts to capture the character of the place and its people. When you’re playing, the game often veers towards the ridiculous and chaotic – riding drones, zapping armed guards with spiderbots, sending taxis zooming on to the pavement to create a distraction – but there are also some real-world themes here: particularly, how populism can easily become authoritarianism, and how issues such as immigration can be weaponised to divide a populace.

Of course, in the five years since work began on the game, a lot has changed in the real world. To an extent the development team has been able to pivot to include, for example, Brexit as part of the game’s backstory. (In the game, incidentally, it actually happened on its originally scheduled date.) But Legion was always going in this direction from the off, claims Hocking. “A lot of the backstory became just history, instead of something we invented,” he laughs. “From the beginning we were looking critically at some of the things that were happening in the world, and making London the focus of those things.”

In early 2016, the team came to the city to do some on-the-ground research, talking to political activists, people running housing collectives, artists, musicians and others to inform their take on some of the social and economic challenges that were going on in London. At that time, says Hocking, Brexit wasn’t particularly on people’s minds – “it wasn’t gonna happen” – but you’ll spot pig masks in the game inspired by protests against David Cameron’s austerity.

Watch Dogs Legion screenshot
‘A lot of the backstory became just history, instead of something we invented’ … a screenshot from Watch Dogs Legion. Photograph: Ubisoft

Watch Dogs Legion features some famous faces, notably Stormzy, whose music video for Rainfall was made inside the game. But most of the people you meet in London are generated by the game, each one a unique amalgam of character traits, talents, voice and appearance. “I wanted to bring a higher level of systemic fidelity to Watch Dogs, and that’s really focused on the people in the population,” says Hocking. “Instead of just characters that spawn on the street corner and disappear when you go around the corner, characters that are essentially decorations, any time you pay attention to a person [in Legion] they are going to have a life and a job, friends and family … maybe you can find them meeting with their parole office or shopping with their mother. Everything has to fit together to make characters that are credible, so that it doesn’t feel like the game has just rolled 25 dice and given you a person.”

In a few hours with Watch Dogs Legion I play a Jamaican barrister, a Polish groundsman, a plummy-voiced anime nerd and a skinhead hacker. Collecting people is weirdly compelling: I’m looking for repetition in their voices, their looks or their dialogue, but at least in the first few hours, I don’t find it. Ubisoft is known for its virtual tourism, taking Assassin’s Creed players to ancient Egypt and Greece and renaissance Italy, and Far Cry players to the Himalayas, but no game has ever tried to simulate a population as well as a place before.

It was that population – multilingual, multicultural, known for a noncomformist spirit – that drew the creative team to the city in the first place. “London is one of the most diverse cities in the world,” says Hocking. “I don’t think there’s another place in the world where we could have gotten that richness.”



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