The virtual London of Watch Dogs Legion, the forthcoming sci-fi open world adventure by Ubisoft Montreal, is sometimes uncanny in its accuracy.
For instance, while evading the police, and the private military forces working alongside them in the game’s dystopian future, I was able to use my knowledge of the layout of the real world’s Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC, to duck down a side street and avoid a drone that had been dogging me since Trafalgar Square.
With a free-roaming world running from Westminster to Tower Hamlets, and Camden to Nine Elms, Watch Dogs is one of the largest re-creations of the British capital in any game to date. And while some of it is painted in broad strokes, other parts of the city are virtually true to life. Standing in Parliament Square, with Westminster Abbey to your right and a gaggle of protesters to your left, it’s hard to believe the game was mostly made in Canada.
There are differences. The underground, used as a fast travel network in-game, is askew: Trafalgar Square station reappears despite being renamed in 1979, and the Tube map has been given a neon-on-black redesign that, one hopes, the real TfL would never OK. Other changes are in service of the dystopian future the game depicts – a world in which the tech trends of today have combined to destabilise the old order, and cast millions into a precarious existence.
This London is post-Brexit, post-Scottish independence – and post-democracy. The pound has been routed, the citizenry has switched to cryptocurrencies and the government has been bankrupted by the resulting fall in tax revenues. A wave of inward migration has sparked another political crisis, leading to more people than ever before being rounded up, placed in multiplying deportation centres and removed from the country.
Into this steps DedSec, the amorphous, Anonymous-style anarchic hacker collective of the Watch Dogs series. In earlier games, the player has been cast as a member of DedSec, but in Legion they are DedSec: there is no main character, but a network of citizens from all over the city. Those citizens can be essentially any human in the game, from the bouncer outside the pub, the granny in the park, or the local bobby patrolling a residential neighbourhood – and you can play as any one of them.
Every single cut-scene, line of dialogue and animation has been written, recorded and captured multiple times. The very same story mission won’t just sound different if you play it with an east London gangster to a City lawyer – the characters will move differently, say different lines and fight in different ways.
A Britain torn apart by technological unemployment and a migration crisis, ruled by authoritarian populists and opposed by a grassroots collective – it all sounds rather political, doesn’t it? This has been tricky territory for publisher Ubisoft in the past. The company has a recent history of releasing games that flirt with contemporary political discourse while refusing to admit that it’s doing so.
Take Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, sold with imagery of a crumbling White House and a downed Air Force One . Yet the game’s creative director Terry Spier said last year that it was “not a political statement”, and the game was simply “here to explore a new city”. Then there’s Far Cry 5, set in a distinctly Trumpian Montana that has been taken over by extremist, cultist militia. Despite ample opportunities to use its setting to say something worthwhile, the game bottled it, and the politically charged imagery and themes became nothing more than set-dressing.
So it is refreshing to hear Clint Hocking, Watch Dogs Legion’s creative director, discuss the origins of the iconography in the latest game. “We’d spent a year working on London before the Brexit vote happened, so we inherited Brexit along with the rest of the world,” he says.
“But that’s not to say it isn’t an important part of our world fiction, and our backstory. In our game, Brexit definitely happened but we’re not trying to say it is the cause of the problems in our world … the things that caused Brexit are the causes of the problems in our dystopia.”
The contemporary political trend that feels most reflected in the vision of Watch Dogs is not membership of the European Union – it’s the surveillance state. The real London already has more CCTV cameras than almost any other city in the world, and in 2002 Transport for London created posters proclaiming the capital “Secure beneath the watchful eyes” of cops and cameras. So the in-game propaganda of Watch Dogs encouraging citizens to “report suspicious activity” with the hashtag #Securelondon feels, if anything, rather tame.
Hocking emphasises that the team was sensitive to British mores. Designers used a mailing list to submit questions for their British colleagues on the project to answer about London life. And one major difference between the UK and the American settings of the previous games is guns. While players can be armed, attributed in-game to the prevalence of 3D printers, if you don’t take out your guns, the enemy won’t take out theirs. “We didn’t want to give the Metropolitan police guns, and in fact, some of the police characters might be sympathetic to your cause,” says Hocking. “The motivation of DedSec is to bring people together.
“Division is the root of the problems of the world of Watch Dogs, and they’re trying to get the people of London to put aside their differences and fight the real threats.”
