Get 20% OFF + Free International Shipping + 2 FREE GIFTS @Manscaped with promo code WHITELIGHT at Manscaped.com! Finally. After 4 years, the Watch Dogs series is finished. Hope it was worth the wait.
Thanks for doing a vidoe on this game. I was a bit hyped when this game was announced because the idea of playing as any NPC was a cool concept ,but they half baked it by taking out all the other systems form the previous games
Not really....I have zero doubt that the sales being down had nothing to do with grafix anything, the only people who cared about that are usually the graphic whores crowd who think everything looks awful unless its 65,000k, with raytracing and runs at 8,000fps.. It was more like the first game was just so meh. The 2nd game wasn't spectacular either, but it was atleast better than the first game. The problem with Legion is that it was just so god damn aggressively meh, its quite a feat when you can be even more meh.
Biggest weakness of Legion is Ubisoft refusing to actually engage with the systems they put in. As you said, this game would be so much better if I could use Operators without actually controlling them. Being as getaway drivers, support snipers, medics etc. there's like a whole undiscovered world in that game. Also, the dumbing down of the hacking system was a letdown.
The setting and writing was terrible too. It was unbelievably tone deaf,as if it was written by ideologues who had no clue what happened in UK. Dedsec is different only by political ideology basically.
Perhaps the worse was that originally there was gonna be way more with each character having a sortof perk tree you could unlock more of as you used them. Giving special benefits and encouraging a wider range of characters to choose for their skills and abilities. But then they gutted it out for the system currently. And then gutted more of the watchdogs stuff out with hacking
Legion in some aspects can be played as a sim as well. I found out and came up with many strategies of how to complete certain missions without even setting foot in the mission area, like tossing a spider bot on top of a car and driving it into a mission area. One of my favorite things to do, which was actually a trick I learned from an early video on the game, was walking up to a guard behind a blocked off gate, using to antagonize emote on the emote wheel to aggravate them, and wait for them to open up the gate to confront me before neutralizing them and getting in without the need of a key.
WD2 has legit some of the best stealth gameplay I've ever played. Parking as just a passerby sitting under a tree while fucking completely dismantling a nearby base with my RC car and drone was so satisfying.
Hopping from camera to camera, blowing up pipes, setting off police APBs and gang hits to disrupt an arena, vehicle hack reversing cars with bombs on them; so much variety of action before you even set foot into an arena. To find it’s all gone is so soooo disappointing.
@@nicholasbrunt2010 god it’s more than disappointing. was Legion made by a Ubisoft B team or something? What on earth compelled them to not even Ctrl C Ctrl V
There was one time where I get caught by a gangster in their base, and the police start engage fight against the gang. *It escalate into a full-on police raid and I just watch outside to wait until things calm down*
The drone and rc car are what killed WD2 for me it trivialized the whole game either Marcus was just a delivery system for the drones or you had to force yourself to not use them
I still go back to Watch Dogs 2 specifically to walk around SF, take photos (yes, like a tourist), and play around with the hacking, creating all kinds of chaos in the process. I usually start off telling myself I'll be good, but always end up causing multiple catastrophies. WD2 is the only open world sandbox where I feel compelled to play around with its mechanics and cause haos. Such a shame that Legion couldn't live up to that.
Lmao not hacking in any of that, it's practically an arcade game, 1st game is the only one with any real hacking, and you didn't need 500 gadgets for it, and you could enjoy the city without having to be in San francisco or having to drive everywhere.
I put about 10 hours into WDL. It was pretty boring. I found one recruit that I had any fun with. One. 1. It was a little old lady named Maggie. Maggie was a former spy. She had a bunch of cool perks and a silenced gun that basically killed in one shot. She did have a major setback though. She had some heart disease that would cause her to die permanently at some point. That's when I gave up. Doing random missions in London for about 5 hours as a little old lady and then she died of a heart attack in the middle of a mission. Then I turned the game off and deleted it. R.I.P. Maggie.
"Watchdogs deserved to be better than to be made by Ubisoft..." Wow that line fucking hit me! Great video and a surprisingly somber ending with a gutpunch to close it off. Bravo
With Legion i realized how much i missed the grayer tones of the first one, Aiden even in a Good Guy run was extremely violent and vindictive, the way he punished was brutal whether lethal or not. I wish we had more of that, with even more cool hacking and tech skills
Funny how I can change the optics on a murderous sociopath on a revenge path when I compare it to the absolute lack of characters in Legion. And people complained Aiden was boring and one sided
Man, that wonderfully written ode to the first two Watch Dogs games that starts at 1:54:40 was such a joy to listen to as someone who decided to play these games-and eventually fell in love with them-because of this retrospective series. Whitelight just has a way of gushing about the things he loves so earnestly and with such precision and style that it's impossible to not vicariously feel at least a little of that love yourself. You know that old saying? "Every time someone mentions Deus Ex, someone will reinstall it"? That's as accurate for Deus Ex as it is for any game covered on this channel.
this. my love for the Farcry series came from watchinf Whitelight retrospectives. never played a single one till i watched his one on 4 and now Farcry 5 is one of my favourite games of all time
Me personally, I found it really ironic. When the game was only fun when the Adian dlc came out. And you were playing as one single character. Defeating the whole purpose as recruiting anyone. But since this character had actual voicelines and acting, it was actually fun. And not being able to recruit anyone didn't really matter to me when the character actually felt real.
Late answer here but yes. He has his own separate storyline that also involves Wrench. Although you can recruit them in the main game as well. @@calluminkster6892
@calluminkster6892 he has a dlc with him and wrench that is its own separate story but you can also play as both characters through the main story as well.
Honestly, I picked up Legion purely for exploring London. I was bored of the story and gameplay loop probably within 1-2 hours, but I did stick around and play more of it purely because of the world. I loves driving through different areas, exploring London and feeling this weird sense of being at home. Everything said in that section of the vid is so dman accurate, it definitely is a well crafted world that for someone from London, it is frightningly accurate and detailed. It's just such a shame the rest of it is so heartless.
i recently started paying it on my ps5 just to explore the world, im mancunian so i just wanted to check it out really but i thought it had a good built world although not sure how accurate
This is the exact reason I bought and play Legion, don’t live in London anymore but it’s amazing to drive and walk around places I know so well and mess around in that space
It still feels really small though and not a lot of detailed streets etc. like in gta5 for example, there's so many little side streets and back alleys, car parks etc to pull into...Legion just has roads with some parks on the road sometimes and a river and that's about it😂
1:32:40 and fun fact, in the French dub of Watch Dogs 1, Aiden was voiced by the same voice actor as for the French dub of John Wick, which adds to the relevance of the comparison, for French players at least!
I loved the AI and random interactions in Watch Dogs 2. That was the only thing that made me come back to the game even after finishing it. So disappointing to see how they nerfed it in Legion.
It’s AI in WD2 felt the most alive I’ve ever seen in a Ubisoft game. The setting and NPC AI were what kept me playing even tho I’ve never completed the game, I just kept messing around in the game world.
A moment that I'll always remember from WD2 was when I hacked this guy, saw he was arguing with his partner on texts, and I think he even threatened violence or something along those lines. I then pressed the "send police" hack thing, and then it said "DOMESTIC ABUSE SUSPECT". That feeling I had like "holy shit, I actually influenced a dynamic event within the world in some way." will always stick with me.
@@tugrul5165 I like to mess around with this system too. Basically, I walk around and imagine myself some policeman from a twisted totalitarian version of USA, who makes the police come after anyone who can slightly be suspected as anti-government. I know how it sounds, but that got me into a couple of funny situations
There was a moment in watchdogs 2 that i'll never forget: I was infiltrating one of the many enemy outposts guarded by security and so I used that SWAT team call in to try and get one of the guards arrested since he was standing guard near a gate leading up onto a catwalk. The Swat guys showed up and the guy resisted arrest with one of the other guards coming over to try and diffuse the situation and vouch for the guy. The SWAT and gate guard then started talking to each other, most likely the gate guard trying to clear his name. (though I couldnt hear anything I was simply watching what was happening) this back and fourth happens for god knows how long, with the SWAT guys I had called in finally realising they had false evidence on him, so they packed up into their armored car and drove off. The ONE sure fire thing I had relied on in the game to help clear out locations had somehow failed me.
WD3 is a monumental achievement - but as a simulated world, not a game. They went all in on the systems and setting, but forgot the fun along the way :(
This right here, pretty much. I have to give Ubisoft credit for attempting to innovate, and actually investing 4 years of development into the concept. Too bad it doesn't make for an interesting game, at least in this first iteration.
Apart from the player character system, I think I'd disagree on the simulated world being an achievement. I loved the previous watch dogs games but I found the world to be incredibly dull. There are only three types of buildings you could enter (from what I can remember), that being places with enemies, hideouts and pubs. Clothing shops were just terminals and there is even less interaction with the vehicle side of things. All shop fronts were closed, many repeat bland business fronts and so on. This game was such an interesting opportunity to expand on the world by going to a new continent with a unique character system but unfortunately, I find the other games, especially watch dogs 2, to have worlds which are more alive. Not even to mention missing multiplayer at launch, unlike watch dogs 2 and then not bringing cross generational play until sometime after the multiplayer component was added, when interest had died down further. Really a shame what happened with this game.
Yup, can’t knock them for their faithful recreation of London, but that’s about it. 💩 gameplay 💩 story 💩 characters 💩 everything. That stupid ass play as anyone mechanic chewed up tons of the budget and created delays. How the hell a team of professionals come up with such stupid ideas is beyond me.
@@Spyrotastic141 I agree, though now that they have the system the next game they make with it should be much higher quality since they can focus on things other than building the system.
@Handlesaretrash thats how I feel but the way I see it is if the movie does good they might make another game cause it would show the demand for a return of Aiden or at least show people are interested in the IP
Finally got around to watching this, been meaning to for ages... It's frustrating how good you are at this 😂 Made me want to return to WD2, a game I originally really didn't like.
1:49:27 even if it kinda reinforce the fact that this part become a generic horror segment I really love the fact that this coridoor is literally the one from P.T.
I felt the same way about my hometown, Chicago, in WD1 as you do with London in 3. It's not only that the cities LOOK accurate, but FEEL accurate as well. It's hard to describe, but impressive that they always pull it off
I’ve never played WD1 but I used to live in Chicago and now I’m tempted. Is the recreation pretty accurate? Like if I want to go hang out in Douglas Park, can I go do that?
Max difficulty and permadeath mode makes the game significantly more enjoyable, and I remember a developer interview where they essentially said they wanted that to be the default experience but were worried it would turn people away. I think the recruitment and NPC system is a good first draft, and I really hope the franchise lives long enough to get a sequel to expand it. Bloodline is one of the best things Ubisoft has put out in years, and a fourth Watch Dogs game with a fixed named protagonist, who can use the legion system to recruit controllable support characters would be fantastic.
The biggest problem is less hacks. It's a hacking game bro, no matter how good other aspects are, the hacking needs to be significantly better than what it was for it to matter.
Do we really need a 4th game? Characters like Aiden Pearce and Wrench were cores of the franchise and their stories ended and on a pretty good note aswell so do we really wanna endanger it by making another game in the franchise? making it something like COD or AC where they should've just put closure to the narrative long time ago yet are constantly trying to milk it even more staining the franchise's name.
I wanted to play on permadeath mode, but then Wrench bugged out and killed himself. So I restarted the game, and then Wrench jumped from his drone to the floor instead of onto a roof and died again, so I continued with Aiden, only for him 2 missions later to bug out and not take cover during a shootout. I gave up and removed permadeath, then just played the entire game with Aiden.
I played the game a few times on resistance mode without liberating any boroughs (or just 1 for the weapon unlocks) and the surveillance state just felt much more present, especially with the checkpoints and SIRS posters. I went back on regular mode after upgrading consoles and remembered how completely different the experience was between standard and resistance. Resistance feels like an insurgency while regular just feels like there aren't consequences for anything, not even stealing Albion vehicles. Also the antagonists being motivated by "dead terrorists" just doesn't land when DedSec isn't committing any acts of terror or losing operatives. The TV says Albion is allowed to kill and the story makes a point about recruits surrendering their old lives but Albion typically only draws guns first on resistance. They don't attack you on sight or stop you at checkpoints in regular; you don't get notoriety from being spotted by a drone. Normal mode just seems neutered in comparison.
Same bro I love WD1 great story, and gameplay, I did tried WD2 and they changed a lot, a lot of tools to play yeah, but the tune was just different for my taste, group of teens trying to get recognize, socialmedia starved, it didnt get my attention, im interesting on WDL because of the return of Aiden✌
I still think Legion's core idea has a lot of potential. I really hope they don't completely abandon it if they do end up doing another WD. But I guess at this point, who knows if that'll even happen.
They are working on a new watch dog it’s gonna be set in the future they don’t know if they wanna go a terminator route or Detroit human route but I know it’s gonna be good if you play the dlc bloodline u can see that that’s the way they was trying go us going against artificial human
I desperately want another studio to pick up this concept and vastly improve on it. If ubisoft had another year or 2 , it could have been so much better.
To be fair ubisoft hasn't shown they have the capability to create games with meaningful depth, their games always feel half assed and poorly executed these days and they get boring fast.
@@stephencroft1612 The idea totally fits Watch Dogs and as a blast to play with. Of Covid wasnt there, they had 2 normal years of production ontop and it would have been not just a worthy WD3 but actually the best lne of the series.
I find it strange that WDL has such forgettable PCs, when games like XCOM 2 get you to have an incredible connection with individual, recruitable characters who can die in any mission, get injured, tired, develop phobias and traumas, etc. Losing an soldier you had from the start of the game is genuinely gut wrenching. Some characters have a story arc that is entirely made up by the player. Each blank face is somehow full of personality.
Full of personality? Let me laugh so it don't go to waste: Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha can'tlaughenough ahahahahaha omghelpIcan'tstop AHAHAHAHAHA *coughs blood*
Watch Dogs 1 with Watch Dogs 2's open world enemy zones and hacking mechanics is my dream. Looking like the Living City mod is the best I'm ever gonna get... also that invasion at the end of the video was magnificent.
@@SaulGoodmanered Watch dogs ended after first one so Idk what you are talking about. Game that doesn't exist can't be better than game that exist. Keep your nonsense trash to yourself, please thank you!
Watch Dogs Legion holds an interesting place for me, because while it is not that mechanically good (and I haven't finished it for years due to that and performance issues), I still remember a few of my characters easily. I remember Lloyd, 69 year old genderfluid diplomat with a green suit and a flatcap. I remember "Keith" (not his real name), who was an MP who looked exactly like Keir Starmer and constantly got kidnapped. I remembered the construction worker lady I play as who was sort of the "fixer", she handled the dirtier work like getting "Keith" back from kidnapping. It's a very good concept buried in Ubisoft's general problems. I really like it, I think, but can't be sure.
I remember this one spy i had who looked so godamn similar to James Bond. I don’t think it was intended but he just looked similar, and had the spy job, so O used him often for any mission I wanted to stealth with. Felt right to have 007 give it a try
@@degeneratemale5386 People who have experience driving prior to getting a license usually have a harder time getting a license than those who start from a clean sheet. Maybe he rode dirtbikes since childhood.
The voice acting is representative of a voice director that thinks that they know what British people, or more specifically Londoners, sound, act and talk like, but have never been to the country before. It comes across as though someone has just "heard" that that's what people are like but have no first-hand experience.
It's definitely far from perfect towards the end, but Bloodline having any semblance of closure for Aiden's character was something I really needed. Also the fact we even got a modern Assassin, while could've been done better, was still pretty cool as well.
I love the first game exactly because Aidan embodies the very same abuse of power that DedSec is supposedly fighting against. He is not there to save the world, he uses DedSec to fight his own revenge war. And the song played at the very end of the game was a perfect dot at the end of the sentence when violent killer who abused power for his own reasons "wins" and you know he will never give this power away, that he got caught in the allure of this power.
They had the makings of something special with WD1. A game experience and look into a deeply flawed vigilante/violent hero figure. They never fully committed to it mechanically with the first game but it was there at times in the storytelling and themes. And there was an incredible second game possible with Aidan and systems they could have built around being a near-future cyberpunk anti-hero vigilante. A Batman-who-may-kill (and very possibly psychopathic) vigilante who fights authoritarian corporations not just street thugs/mafia and who the city may turn against if/when he goes too far. But grounded in reality not in over-the-top spandex-caped flying around superheroics. Then they basically abandoned him and the setup they had created to make a shallow Saturday morning cartoon version.
I remember in Watchdogs 2 stumbling upon the FBI at the Pier, only to later find out it's a Survliance Hotspot in a Mission. I also remember how much I loved the "It's not the Pizza guy" scene from Watch Dogs 1. I think Legion could've been fun if they did what they did the DLCs did from the start.
40:25 I think this is honestly the greatest tragedy of Ubisoft to me. They have some of the best environment artists in the industry, without question. But, those environment artists are forced to work on games that ultimately don't seem to care much about their environments and view them more as background noise than a meaningful space for the player to engage with.
Ubisoft are so infuriatingly good, at building a massive amount of potential for their game franchises, and getting so tantalizingly close to fulfilling that potential only to change/destroy all of that in the proceeding game/s. They bring the franchise to such great heights that you can see the peak of its potential so close, only to throw it all away by delivering something more barebones than the first ever experience in the franchise (Ac:U -> Valhalla, Fc 3/4/5 -> Fc 6, Watchdogs 2 -> Legion, Trials Fusion -> Trials Rising)
@@lilitch123far cry 6 was not BAD... But it did fundamentally leave behind a lot of what made far cry FAR CRY. FC5 was the last one that actually felt like a far cry game.
@@montanadash20I don't even know what you're talking about here. FC6 was FC5 with tanks. That's really the biggest difference in the grand scheme of things.
Im glad you went back to play through the game on Resistance mode, it really is night and day how much different the game plays and feels with the added difficulty modifiers. It really elevates the experience to something truly memorable.
I would love this game so much more if they kept all of the features from the previous 2 games. There were so many features that were absent here it actually made me appreciate the first game. I like that the map of London was pretty accurate. Quite close to the real London.
The random soldiers in XCOM are more interesting and endearing than the Deadsec recruits. For as bare bone the differences could be I at least remember who's who and they build a story.
Xcom had the advantage of each recruit having specialised abilities that mattered. I can remember my soldiers and who they ended up being by the end of the campaign because they were all useful and helped me get through missions. The same cannot be said for legion, where all characters will always play the same because there’s very little variety in useful perks
i like to tell the legend of Slim, the sniper who never missed a single shot. the aliens had to break into the hq and drop a giant robot on top of his head to finally get him.
@@JokerInTheCardDeck1273 That's one of the eternal brilliances of Xcom EU/EW (and especially with LW). You build up such incredible narratives in each campaign on who lives and dies, and how they did so. Not a one of them has any sort of narrative dialogue in the storyline yet they all can become very personal. Some of the Xcom clone games miss this trick and try to make specific characters that rarely (if ever) grab hold of us the way our RNG generated recruits do in EU/EW.
I remember finishing WD2 a few months back and being astonished by the overall game, I really really loved it. So I went to Legion without watching a single gameplay or anything related except for the trailers... Its really messed up how Ubisoft messed up Watch Dogs series. Ended up picking WD2 seasson pass. Thank you for your amazing work as always whitelight
I love the quote at the start where Zero Day says that Londoners have died before and gives the Great Fire of London as an example. Google the death toll of the Great Fire of London and try not to laugh
I think WD2 is the peak of the series but I found my fun in Legion by characterizing the people I populated London's Dedsec chapter with. My three most played characters essentially became Dedsec's evasive leaders. One of them was a hacker and she handled Dedsec's data infrastructure, working closely with the other hackers and members with tech backgrounds. She was Scottish, wanted by Albion, and typically wore a facemask or her hood up when she was outside. The guy I had working behind the scenes was very much like the boxart character, late 40s, always wore a suit. He mostly worked in the shadows, recruiting and finding his way in the ear of powerful people in London, him being a conman allowing him to sneak into places where any bookish white guy in a suit would blend in seamlessly. And my starting character and most played character was a younger woman, an artist who emigrated from China with her sister. She essentially did Dedsec's "PR" and worked on clearing their name and rehabilitating their image following the attacks that occur in the opening. She felt like a character that had something to lose, her sister got arrested and threatened with deportation. The artists, anarchists, and other counter-culture people who gravitated towards Dedsec did so because of her actions. And it bled down to every member of Dedsec until I had something on each member of them that made them fit in like a glove, my first spy was a rogue MI6 agent born in India and she worked feverishly against SIRS and the human trafficking gang and brought other MI6 agents into the fold. My hitman was a former SAS commando who also always wore a suit Dedsec contracted the services of. My heaviest hitter was a Polish carpenter who just liked getting into a good bar fight. My anarchist was a tumblr girl with a shaved head, and my drones expert was a 71 year old woman who was covered in tattoos and had the doomed trait, and to me, she was like this long-standing member of Dedsec who had been around as long as Raymond from the first two games, and she had an ailing heart and knew she was living on borrowed time, and when she did finally die, it felt like an impactful character death.
That's way too much head Canon I might as well just write a fanfic and call it a day. Not bagging on you but I don't think it's fair to expect every player to basically make an entire universe in their head to compensate for how bad the characters and interaction is in this game.
@jand1144 Yes but it in no way makes the game less shit. I can RP or headcanon any game but like the point of this discussion in this video is the quality of the game.
@SkilledKill lmao trust bro I'm with you I don't do all that either Just from gamer perspective I can understand the nostalgia one can make in a game from there imagination 100 percent agree with you though 💯🎮👌
Weird comment. You didn’t miss anything. It was posted the same day you commented. Also, if you subscribe you won’t have to stumble upon his videos, you’ll know when they’re uploaded.
Can’t be bothered to check if someone’s mentioned this already, but I think the whole reason for Bagley’s existence boils down to an attempt to recreate Wheatley from Portal 2. Needless to say, they fell asleep at the wheel and crashed.
It's funny when people say it's hard to get through sections of the game without being "forced" into combat, when I got through these same missions without ever being seen or having to take anyone down 😅. It's still true that the worst thing they did is remove the things that made Watchdogs 2 great.
i became a whitelight fan right around the time legion dropped after watching the first 2 watch dogs vids, been looking forward to this vid for 3 years love your content man keep it up!
The game wasn't supposed to be an MMO but it was very different and it had a lot of the features you mentioned in the video, including stuff like car on demand, calling cops on people etc, even better story with more characters, i don't know why they destroyed all of it... They even planned a map expansion DLC that would take place in British Virgin Islands
Considering how troubled every ubisoft development is, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a huge factor on why the game seems so rushed. Genuinely sucks how many times the actual devs on these games have such good ideas and ambitions and they get it all erased by higher ups who just want to rush the project out the door then when it all blows up in their face they just fire the devs after the fact instead of taking accountability.
@@diabolicalplan1614 They canned a lot of their ideas and put them into Far Cry 6 instead, like for example enemy levels which originally would've given the enemies a bigger variety with different uniforms and weapon loadouts, similarly how some cut WDL weapons made it into FC6 like SRM1216 or KSG, hell they cut 50 weapons in general Apparently the story was also changed because the testers complained it was hard to keep track of which is BS... The original story for this game was that Dedsec London had a corrupt cell which blew up the parliment, and later DS London ended up missing, so you as the player had the goal to restart this branch yourself and find the dedsec traitor behind it, who was known as "Emily" Most of the missions were the same but context was different, like you had help from other dedsec branches such as Cairo, Seoul and Houston, who would often contact you and share information and such, one of them was Sabine Brandt being from Dedsec Berlin, complete with fake german accent through the entire story, Angel Lopez (the guy who dies in main story, and the guy from DLC) was originally the brother of a Dedsec Caracas member that would've been featured in the story At the end it was revealed that Sabine Brandt was actually Emily Reed who was the Dedsec Traitor and you would meet Dalton Wolfe who was looking into the traitor but it was too late for him to warn everybody before the story started, he would've been killed but left you with a hard drive that had information on Emily, though not sure if there ever was any expansion on her motivations to why she did "bad stuff", the context was more in depth though Other notable things feature: -Tube, it was planned to be fully accessible but only the models for the tunnels, stations etc were made and it was never properly implemented into the london map -The map was bigger and there was additional Mayfair district -3D Printer existed and you could buy weapons and equip them on any operative -ctOS Hubs (the boxes that have glowing red screen that you interact in some missions or when recruiting people) originally would've been accessible in freeroam and show collectibles in the area when interacted, kind of like towers in WD1 -There were dogs in the game, worked just like WD2, fully implemented and even voice lines were recorded for petting them (and they said they cut them because they "would need to be recruitable" too which is BS) -Steam pipes were supposed to return -A shooting range minigame was cut -There was some other 2D arcade minigame planned There's also tons of concept art on artstation that reveals a lot of things, like how the devs toyed around with an idea of london having multiple states, like when it's in control of albion it would be gritty, a "riot" version where everything is burning + destroyed and a liberated version that's clean
Something tells me it might have to do with the fact it was originally supposed to be a light RPG. Operatives were going to have levels and recruits had passive bonuses. But that all changed mid-development, likely because Ghost Recon Breakpoint flopped and was criticized because it was an RPG-lite looter shooter. Ubisoft might have seen the response and had the team remove those elements. Since abruptly changing a major component of your game would use up a lot of valuable time, I suspect they had to drop a number of aspects from release due to time constraints. Which is a shame if true.
I also wonder how much of it came down to Clint Hocking's return to Ubisoft. Man led some bangers (Chaos Theory & Far Cry 2) but post-FC2 jumped from company to company and spent a decade failing to put out a single game. WDL was meant to be his big return, and was the reason I was excited at the time...
@@Nevarc He was there since the start of this game I think, there's some interviews with him before the game was out and be explains dedsec international thing that got cut
1:02:10 It happens even right now in certain countires. even without all those bad capitalsts and PMCs. Guess what, when police are given a "plan" to unveil certain amount of crimes by their bosses, it just so happens that it incentives them to find loop holes to inflate the number of crimes they unveil, who might have guessed?
I'll never understand how a game like this could get through development, through all the steps where the developers and producers could've looked at it and went "This doesn't work, we should rethink this". This should've been done for almost every part of this game.
I'm sure plenty of people on the time saw the issues but Triple A game dev schedules can be so tight they likely couldn't have fixed a lot of the issues even if they wanted to
Watch Dogs was the first 3A game I ever played after getting my first decent PC. I didn't watch any trailer, no idea what a good game was, and no idea what to expect. And I loved it. I replayed it years later, it wasn't as good as I remembered, but still it had many interesting gameplay and stories and a unique charm that few games have. It's sad to see it devolve into a featureless mess.
I built my first PC and with the GPU, I got a code for Watch_Dogs. So it ended up being the first game I played on that PC. Lots of multiplayer matches with friends were had, made my friends rage quit because I was a crackshot back then. Parts I remember were: i7-4770k, gtx 780, 16gb DDR3, a way overkill 1000w PSU because I was dumb and had a lot of cash to spend. But man, you got a lot more PC for your money back then and the current GPU prices is the reason why. Prices for everything else are fine, even cheaper at times. It's just the GPUs that have dragged the prices fo high up. Of the original build, only the case and power supply remains. Parts have been gradually replaced over the years, bought 2nd hand to save some money on the upgrades. Most of the old parts are used in a media server now.
This was a London simulator to me, that's the thing I found this game did the best. I played through the same and was bored most of the time, but when I simply wandered around, I had a blast.
I really enjoyed Bloodlines, and WD1. I really like Aiden from WD1, he was a refreshingly dark and morally ambiguous character. I honestly wish they would make a whole new game around Aiden. He's one of the most interesting characters Ubisoft has ever made and he's still totally under-developed and under-utilized. I got WD1 for free when I first played it, coupon code came with some hardware purchase, and I went into it with no real expectations, and I loved it. It's really too bad Ubisoft messed up on the E3 reveal so badly, WD1 is such an underappreciated game. Far from perfect, but the WD series would be so much better today if Ubisoft had just made sequels to WD1 that refined the gameplay rather than trying to change the theme so much with each game. I thought WD2 was a big step down from WD1 in it's overall fun-factor, and as someone who enjoyed the dark setting from WD1, I thought WD2 went way too far in the other direction to the point of feeling like a cartoon. Legion is just bad, except for Bloodlines.
I essentially just wrote a very similar comment - good to see I'm not alone :D I fondly remember me and my friends really enjoying the dark setting of WatchDogs 1. It made everything feel serious and had some "weight" to it. Whereas WD2 just seemed like a overly cheery hipster version of how someone imagines hacking. But good to see that a lot of people liked it. But you're right - I'd love to see something about Aiden again - WD1 is one of the only games where I actually finished the story.
You know what be cool, if they make watch dogs 3 they keep the career for characters maybe three options (criminal,hacker and civilians.) But like Cyberpunk its a single character, maybe different dialogue options or ways to progress the story, maybe a starting mission.
You need to watch more long form essays like this. I've seen Joseph Anderson's 1 hour Subnautica, 2 hour Elden Ring, 3 hour TLOU, 4 hour The Witcher 1, and 5 hour The Witcher 2 videos like 20 times together. Then there's the occasional thing like Action Button's 6 hour video about a game I haven't even heard of-Tokimeki Memorial. Or even the _two completely separate_ 12 hour reviews of Oblivion (that _are_ unlike the above, too long for their own good, but still good videos). And even a 9 and 11 hour two-parter Skyirm review, that I haven't seen yet.
@@hundvd_7ah, another Patriciantv viewer 😂 I also recommend the channel "I finished a video game" he has some good stuff, and while its not a ton of videos, they're in depth and very good.
When I played WD1 I played like John Wick, using slo-mo and sick gunplays with hacks. It was fun and I was surprised to see everyone else play different.
Welcome to the Watch Dogs 1 fan club!...we are few. But we are true
Рік тому+81
There's an expression where I'm from that says: "always missing 5 cents to have a pound" and I think Watch Dogs as a franchise really embodies that. They never reached the potential, there was always something missing. It never was what it could have been.
I feel like that can be said about any ubisoft game. A couple from my personal experience. Assassin's creed? Parkour was always so close to being incredible in a lot of different iterations, but never combined it (there is a video on this chanel that goes more in depth on the topic). Rainbow six siege? With dev teams changing, the new guys kept missing the point and changing the game in the wrong direction. Attacking was always hard, but more incredibly frustrating defender ops were added, and attack got nerfed. At some point the meta changed to "Why bother? Let's just rush and kill everything we can" It's hard to be a fun of a ubisoft game. To see the potential being thrown into an incinerator
Absolutely perfect video. This felt like watching a beautiful documentary on the entirety of Watch_Dogs and what that name means for it's fans. I felt so many different emotions while watching this, especially in the end, with the topic of this being the end of Watch_Dogs. I love this series. Fell in love with the 1st, really enjoyed the 2nd and had fun with Legion. I think I am beginning to make peace with the series's end. Its hard to process yes, but the experiences I had with these games, the characters, the story, the emotions along the way, are all an essential part of myself today. And for that... Watch_Dogs will forever be a part of me.
Bro watch dogs is not gunna end. The dude in the video near the end makes a cool segment about how the dlc was the final goodbye but let's be honest and look at the real world. Ubisoft is a developer known for sequels and not just sequels but almost a copy and paste of their game. I can guarantee this is not the end of watch dogs. They got at least 15 more sequels to go. Jokes aside they won't be ending the series here. Hell look at assassin's creed. They literally killed off the main character Desmond and still kept the series going because that's what Ubisoft does. I mean what games have Ubisoft made in the last decade besides assassin's creed watch dogs and farcry? They're not gunna give up on an IP with a solid fan base
Just a couple of things to add on. One, the human upload thing you referred to when it came to Sky uploading her own mother is further elaborated on with side quests showing that the ctOS car system was ran by the former consciousness of a taxi driver, and a couple of other ones like that. The mission chain unlocked after the credits similarly reveals that Bagley was Skye's brother, Bradley, and after deciphering major events in his life and hearing back his story in fairly poignant audio files, you even get to briefly meet the real guy in a care home, a once happy man debilitated by a disease that shattered his life. It's hard to tell if he really understands what Bagley is when you introduce him to Bradley. Also, damn, you showed the P.T. corridor homage in the Bloodline breakdown but didn't call it out by name? A hell of an easter egg to include in a mandatory story mission as part of what could be the last campaign in the series. Perhaps the developers at Ubisoft felt some kinship with Kojima about their publishers mishandling their work...
the way you describe London, reliving good memories, is exactly how I feel about Watch Dogs 2 - I'm a bay area girl; I grew up in Berkeley and I know San Fran and Oakland and even Marin County very well. So when I played WD2 in winter of 2021, when I had just moved with my mom to Missouri for what was, at the time, not supposed to be forever (but ended up being so), and when I felt more alone and more homesick than I ever had, playing a game that so thoroughly understood what my home was, what it looked like, felt like, sounded like, was... incredibly comforting. And I think that was always what was so special to me about Watch Dogs; it's a trait all three games have in common - sometimes they really do just feel like you're... there. it drive me fucking nuts that this level of talent is shackled to Ubisoft. It deserved so much better than that.
Man there are so many cool things I could imagine with the recruitment system. Recruit a paramedic? Easy kidnapping - cause a car crash with another character, then call in Deadsec's EMT. They show up when the 911 call goes out and load the target up into their ambulance, off to some basement somewhere. Recruit service workers for poisoning or tradesmen for infiltration or... man it's such a cool idea
This video through its entirety made me feel it was going to build up to a reflection of what this series is and my expectations got exceeded. Never seen people put into words what's so important about these games. Great video.
Wow! Man, your videos are not only thought provoking, entertaining and enlightening, but also pure pieces of art, never stop, please. Thanks! Have a nice day everyone!
Enemy NPCs in Legion follow the concept of proportional response. If you get into a fistfight in front of or with Albion, they'll respond with fists and batons because you're not threatening anyone's life and therefore it would be inappropriate to shoot at you. If you shoot at them however, they won't hesitate to return fire. Darcy even has a unique interaction that will delay a lethal response until after a few kills because they don't realize she has a knife thanks to it being well-concealed. Strategically choosing how to attack your enemies is how you make use of doctors and lawyers in permadeath modes. If you go into every situation with a gun drawn they'll be useless to your team, but if you're careful about how much danger you put your most valuable infiltrators and hero characters in, you can ensure they're only injured or arrested, then stack support staff to reduce their downtime
Yeah, it was an interesting System, but sadly it was a significant downgrade from the other 2 games. Watch dogs 2 has arguably one of the best police system I've seen in all games, even rivaling Red dead redemption and they feel ALIVE and you can interact with them and they interact with eachother and npc. In watch dogs 1 there was a reputation System and news would talk about you and people would get help from police if they saw you and you had bad rep. Also there exists an arrest animation, unlike in legion where you ragdoll away and a lame "arrested" sign comes up. I so wished that there existed dialogue if those police arrested one of "them" and I mean when you recruited another police force, but like the video said. It's beautiful to an outsider, but so frustrating when further thought is in.
Just watched the part about the AI mission which brought the memory back. I can come up with 4 unique hooks right now as I watch that reflect British cultural references. 1. You get a tip off that Albion has been altering British television to influence the national consciousness. Heading to the set, it's very clearly a watchdogs eastenders where the actors are preparing for a live special. you begin to help the members of the cast and find that they haven't been allowed to leave to keep. 2. You enter the big brother house and use the live format to and hacking the sets and hidden production staff to wreak havoc on the broadcast and Albion employee who was fixed as the winner. 3. Notting Day carnival has been cancelled by albion but the locals refuse fo comply and intend to go ahead anyway despite the certainty of violence. You aren't sure if that's smart as it will be a blood bath so you work around them to distract and confuse the albion response to the carnival. 4. A world war 1 and 2 memorial is removed to install a surveillance station and you join the rag tag bunch of elderly veterans of various wars and family members (its in the future so few ww2 soldiers remain) to rip it down in one last mission. Its pulled down by an old tank and albion thinks better than to put another station up and a leave a small piece of soil that grows a poppy at the game end.
I am always so impressed with your production skill and your analysis into these games. Your ending love letter to Watch Dogs 2 was probably the best 30 seconds of Watch Dogs 2 content I've seen in the past year, obviously not counting your analysis of course. I'm nearly heartbroken we won't see how DedSec and the crew continues on after WD2, and that the diamond in the series is surrounded by what most will think is merely uninspired mediocrity. Ubisoft could've had a competitor to GTA, I'd argue Watch Dogs 2 is actually better than GTA V. But I guess here we are.
In defense of the assassins creed mission. The death scenes in AC aren’t necessarily caused by the animus. In AC unity it’s directly referenced in the story that Arno can see their memories. The explanation for him is that he had a high concentration of Isu DNA and his own brain could act like an Animus when he assassinates someone. So basically that he can see their genetic memory using his eagle vision. for other characters like Bayek and Basim who’s scenes take place in the duat it’s a lesser version of what Arno can do with it being less of seeing their memories and more of they can interrogate their targets after they’ve died.
You're so right about art direction making a city/setting feel correct. I'm currently playing WD2 for the first time. I grew up in the Bay Area (only a short drive from Silicon Valley) and am absolutely adoring how faithful it feels. Tearing through SF, even setting aside the places that aren't 1:1 recreations of landmarks I was finding places that reminded me of other places that I had been or had fond memories of. Even the music is correct, like you talked about with WD1's music direction of Chicago. I turn on the radio in WD2 and it feels believable. Turn to one station and Sublime comes on? On point. So it's so sad to see that none of that translates to showing you London's identity in Legion. It looks correct, but it feels empty. It's built like it's going to be an immersion simulator but it seems more like a diorama with a "look, don't touch" sign hanging above it.
Man after seeing this I wonder if its possible for someone to make a mod that combines the great elements from WD2 you mention, and then also make the city seem more alive. Its a great location, so itd be a shame if it didn't get a "living city" mod like the first game
I was looking foward to this video for a while. I’ve played and loved all three watchdogs games and just like you said. It’s not all great but the things they do good stand out so much to me.
I remember when I played this I probably didn't drive for the first ten hours since I had fun just walking around and looking at the city. If there's one thing I've always liked in Ubisoft games it has been the environmental design. The first two games were fun to wander around in as well as The Division. Wish they had done more with the NPCs since they could have made things pretty neat. Would have been interesting if the reputation system was more of a thing. Something like hurting someone would upset the majority of their family which would in turn upset all of their friends who hear about it. Having more of a ripple effect could of made how you go about things a bit more interesting.
honestly i kinda just wish watch dogs legion was set in sf...but mostly cuz i live there and loved the "play as anyone" feature for online and live in sf, but felt they did my neighborhood kinda dirty and thought about how with the tech they have now, they should be able to make a nicer, bigger, more accurate sf...instead of reducing my entire district down to factories and a junkyard 💀💀💀
I like how I’m just now learning you can temporarily turn off electronics in WD2 with the stun gun. As someone who plays these games as a staunch pacifist (or as pacifistic as you can be) the stun gun was the only thing I used in WD2, and I’ve finished that game several times now. That said since my usual MO was to drone my way through literally everything while staying outside of the danger zone as much as possible I guess it makes sense I never saw this mechanic.
My first introduction to the Watch Dogs series was Legion. As an outsider, it was pretty fun tbh. In a time where Assassin's Creed has gone down a weird RPG loot grind path, Legion felt like old school Ezio/American AC. But damn, after watching this I need to go back and play Watch Dogs 1 and 2 now.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who couldn't take the line delivery. It was rough for me. But it got me to check out Watch Dogs 1 again and discover that I really like it!
One thing that's also surprising they didn't do because this was alluded to in that kickass gameplay trailer. Why not have operatives also be sad and grief is someone dies maybe one of them deals with the tragedy of loss worse than someone else and will not be able to be selectable during the grieving period, maybe they get debuffs I mean a system like that wouldn't make just oyu care it would make you feel this ragtag team of misfits also care for each other.
One of the issues that you didn't mention is how painfully obvious it becomes that Sabine is Zero-Day. She literally vanishes near the end of the main campaign and nobody questions it, if that doesn't make it obvious enough.
@@LeaveDavidAloneNot to mention, she mysteriously was the only one to have survived the base assault, and the pleas/emotions in the VA voices made it seem there was no knowingly way out. Additionally, she never made an effort to appear in person. Not once. Hell, even Richard Malik went out of his way to meet your operatives in PUBLIC.
Watchdogs is and will always be 1 of my favourite franchises, from the story to the parkour, the clothing physics and animations were on point. I'd spend hours walking around Chicago, Aiden's hands in his pockets whilst the wind blows, Wd2 I'd be enjoying sunny Francisco (my dream city) parkouring or walking around exploring all landmarks. Watchdogs legion was great to although many aspects were letdown, the story was forgettable, the clothing physics are a mess and the parkour was crap but I still love it as equally as I do the 1st 2. I'm from North London so being able to visit London in game and seeing how well and realistic it looked was amazing. Legion has the best online imo but I did miss invasions, they aren't great in Legion.
Personally after playing watchdogs legion, I could hardly remember any of the main missions other than the first one, whereas watchdogs 2 was full of brilliant moments and felt different in each of its missions
Get 20% OFF + Free International Shipping + 2 FREE GIFTS @Manscaped with promo code WHITELIGHT at Manscaped.com! Finally. After 4 years, the Watch Dogs series is finished. Hope it was worth the wait.
My balls thank you
You played Leagion for 100 hrs😮 jokes on you!
the reason they k ll off the white cahracter in the beginning is because they hate wh ite characters and instead you get a woke collection of sjws
but the game itself is very fun
Thanks for doing a vidoe on this game. I was a bit hyped when this game was announced because the idea of playing as any NPC was a cool concept ,but they half baked it by taking out all the other systems form the previous games
“Watch Dogs deserved better than to be made by Ubisoft”
Damn, that quote is powerful, because it's the absolute truth.
Actually the same can be said about a lot of ubisoft IPs ..far cry , assassins creed,the division.. all very creative ideas..
Yeah, I agree.
Considering that I did especially love Watch Dogs 1 (more) & like Watch Dogs 2
yeah...
Not really....I have zero doubt that the sales being down had nothing to do with grafix anything, the only people who cared about that are usually the graphic whores crowd who think everything looks awful unless its 65,000k, with raytracing and runs at 8,000fps.. It was more like the first game was just so meh. The 2nd game wasn't spectacular either, but it was atleast better than the first game. The problem with Legion is that it was just so god damn aggressively meh, its quite a feat when you can be even more meh.
Fr
Biggest weakness of Legion is Ubisoft refusing to actually engage with the systems they put in. As you said, this game would be so much better if I could use Operators without actually controlling them. Being as getaway drivers, support snipers, medics etc. there's like a whole undiscovered world in that game.
Also, the dumbing down of the hacking system was a letdown.
play liberal crime squad
@@jaighter think this is the first time i've seen liberal crime squad mentioned outside of bay12 forums
@@jaighter Man that was a blast from the past. I sucked at that game. Might gotta replay it.
The setting and writing was terrible too. It was unbelievably tone deaf,as if it was written by ideologues who had no clue what happened in UK. Dedsec is different only by political ideology basically.
Perhaps the worse was that originally there was gonna be way more with each character having a sortof perk tree you could unlock more of as you used them. Giving special benefits and encouraging a wider range of characters to choose for their skills and abilities. But then they gutted it out for the system currently. And then gutted more of the watchdogs stuff out with hacking
I still defend Watch Dogs 2 as an immerive sim on its own. It is amazing finding a way to skip a mission basically through tech
Legion in some aspects can be played as a sim as well. I found out and came up with many strategies of how to complete certain missions without even setting foot in the mission area, like tossing a spider bot on top of a car and driving it into a mission area. One of my favorite things to do, which was actually a trick I learned from an early video on the game, was walking up to a guard behind a blocked off gate, using to antagonize emote on the emote wheel to aggravate them, and wait for them to open up the gate to confront me before neutralizing them and getting in without the need of a key.
@@m.a.k.dynasty4504I once used the drone and made a car drive into the box you need to destroy to get in, that felt pretty cool
true but its so cringy lol. still like it alot. one of the best ubisoft games
@@Ant1ev0 yea the outdated 2010 9gag humor really pissed me off at times, but besides all that it was really an amazing game
If only it wasnt cringedawgs then it would be better received. People dislike the characters and the plot, not the gameplay.
WD2 has legit some of the best stealth gameplay I've ever played. Parking as just a passerby sitting under a tree while fucking completely dismantling a nearby base with my RC car and drone was so satisfying.
Hopping from camera to camera, blowing up pipes, setting off police APBs and gang hits to disrupt an arena, vehicle hack reversing cars with bombs on them; so much variety of action before you even set foot into an arena. To find it’s all gone is so soooo disappointing.
@@nicholasbrunt2010 god it’s more than disappointing. was Legion made by a Ubisoft B team or something? What on earth compelled them to not even Ctrl C Ctrl V
There was one time where I get caught by a gangster in their base, and the police start engage fight against the gang.
*It escalate into a full-on police raid and I just watch outside to wait until things calm down*
The drone and rc car are what killed WD2 for me it trivialized the whole game either Marcus was just a delivery system for the drones or you had to force yourself to not use them
@@that_guy_zo7871 Kinda difficult to balance something that allow extra movement lile that, so I can see why it's a turn off for many
I still go back to Watch Dogs 2 specifically to walk around SF, take photos (yes, like a tourist), and play around with the hacking, creating all kinds of chaos in the process. I usually start off telling myself I'll be good, but always end up causing multiple catastrophies. WD2 is the only open world sandbox where I feel compelled to play around with its mechanics and cause haos. Such a shame that Legion couldn't live up to that.
Same
Recently I started putting cheats for unlimited battery and make as much as chaos I can 😂
Lmao not hacking in any of that, it's practically an arcade game, 1st game is the only one with any real hacking, and you didn't need 500 gadgets for it, and you could enjoy the city without having to be in San francisco or having to drive everywhere.
Same!! It’s was a beautiful sequel. But Legions to me looked awful.
@@kerry4811 Yeah Idk what they were thinking with that one
Holy hell… The trilogy review series we never deserved, but the one we needed
Thank you for actually getting the line the correct order. It feels so bizarre to say “this is the one we deserved” as if we’re entitled or some shit.
No one said google en passant
yall actually watch the whole thing?????
@@nibin2259 yes
@@jokerissurprised5482 damn
I put about 10 hours into WDL. It was pretty boring. I found one recruit that I had any fun with. One. 1. It was a little old lady named Maggie. Maggie was a former spy. She had a bunch of cool perks and a silenced gun that basically killed in one shot. She did have a major setback though. She had some heart disease that would cause her to die permanently at some point. That's when I gave up. Doing random missions in London for about 5 hours as a little old lady and then she died of a heart attack in the middle of a mission. Then I turned the game off and deleted it. R.I.P. Maggie.
R.i.p Maggie you will be missed
RIP MAGGIE...So badass only her own body could end her
her body was the only thing in the way of her taking back london 😢R.I.P. maggie 💔
And so that was Maggie's Journey; : The Game
Ngl i kinda like the heart attack bit.
With Whitelight videos you’ve never realised you’ve sat through 2 hours worth of content till it's over. Great video
"i zoned out while watching this video"
great compliment dude
@@remondx8880lmao wtf? He definitely didn't say anything close to that you goof
@@remondx8880 What he meant was that he was too engaged, bruh. NOT that he zoned out.
What about 7 hours
I have rewatched death stranding video 4 times so far
@@LTDLetsPlays Me too! I got too much free time I swear ;)
"Watchdogs deserved to be better than to be made by Ubisoft..."
Wow that line fucking hit me! Great video
and a surprisingly somber ending with a gutpunch to close it off.
Bravo
"I give the contracts. That's all you need to know about me. I'm nobody." Said the Mysterious Contractor in a thick, Sheffield accent.
With Legion i realized how much i missed the grayer tones of the first one, Aiden even in a Good Guy run was extremely violent and vindictive, the way he punished was brutal whether lethal or not.
I wish we had more of that, with even more cool hacking and tech skills
this happens when they removed skills tree from both watchdogs legion and far cry 6
Watch dogs 2 is still my favorite out of the series but 1 got a lot of things rights
@@ArashCommand2313explain please?
Funny how I can change the optics on a murderous sociopath on a revenge path when I compare it to the absolute lack of characters in Legion. And people complained Aiden was boring and one sided
@@MCellation aiden was somewhat onesided - in legion the characters are zero-sided. they dont feel one dimensional, they feel generic
Man, that wonderfully written ode to the first two Watch Dogs games that starts at 1:54:40 was such a joy to listen to as someone who decided to play these games-and eventually fell in love with them-because of this retrospective series. Whitelight just has a way of gushing about the things he loves so earnestly and with such precision and style that it's impossible to not vicariously feel at least a little of that love yourself. You know that old saying? "Every time someone mentions Deus Ex, someone will reinstall it"?
That's as accurate for Deus Ex as it is for any game covered on this channel.
this. my love for the Farcry series came from watchinf Whitelight retrospectives. never played a single one till i watched his one on 4 and now Farcry 5 is one of my favourite games of all time
Great comment!
@@sevanmattar2424if you haven’t try the third one, personally loved that one out of them all.
Watchdogs 1 always got crap but I think it was and is, very underrated.
Very based.
Me personally, I found it really ironic. When the game was only fun when the Adian dlc came out. And you were playing as one single character. Defeating the whole purpose as recruiting anyone. But since this character had actual voicelines and acting, it was actually fun. And not being able to recruit anyone didn't really matter to me when the character actually felt real.
Is the Aiden stuff separate from the main game though or.
Late answer here but yes. He has his own separate storyline that also involves Wrench. Although you can recruit them in the main game as well. @@calluminkster6892
@@calluminkster6892dlc i think
@calluminkster6892 he has a dlc with him and wrench that is its own separate story but you can also play as both characters through the main story as well.
@@calluminkster6892we get to see a grown up jack too so thats cool at least
This game was ahead of its time. It sounds like the dialogue was written by an AI years before it became popular.
Honestly, I picked up Legion purely for exploring London. I was bored of the story and gameplay loop probably within 1-2 hours, but I did stick around and play more of it purely because of the world. I loves driving through different areas, exploring London and feeling this weird sense of being at home. Everything said in that section of the vid is so dman accurate, it definitely is a well crafted world that for someone from London, it is frightningly accurate and detailed. It's just such a shame the rest of it is so heartless.
I know what u mean mate
i recently started paying it on my ps5 just to explore the world, im mancunian so i just wanted to check it out really but i thought it had a good built world although not sure how accurate
This is the exact reason I bought and play Legion, don’t live in London anymore but it’s amazing to drive and walk around places I know so well and mess around in that space
It still feels really small though and not a lot of detailed streets etc. like in gta5 for example, there's so many little side streets and back alleys, car parks etc to pull into...Legion just has roads with some parks on the road sometimes and a river and that's about it😂
1:32:40 and fun fact, in the French dub of Watch Dogs 1, Aiden was voiced by the same voice actor as for the French dub of John Wick, which adds to the relevance of the comparison, for French players at least!
thats amazing
I loved the AI and random interactions in Watch Dogs 2. That was the only thing that made me come back to the game even after finishing it. So disappointing to see how they nerfed it in Legion.
350+ hours in WD2, not a second regretted. That AI and SF being the best digital city I've ever experienced always keep me comin back.
It’s AI in WD2 felt the most alive I’ve ever seen in a Ubisoft game. The setting and NPC AI were what kept me playing even tho I’ve never completed the game, I just kept messing around in the game world.
A moment that I'll always remember from WD2 was when I hacked this guy, saw he was arguing with his partner on texts, and I think he even threatened violence or something along those lines. I then pressed the "send police" hack thing, and then it said "DOMESTIC ABUSE SUSPECT". That feeling I had like "holy shit, I actually influenced a dynamic event within the world in some way." will always stick with me.
@@tugrul5165 I like to mess around with this system too. Basically, I walk around and imagine myself some policeman from a twisted totalitarian version of USA, who makes the police come after anyone who can slightly be suspected as anti-government. I know how it sounds, but that got me into a couple of funny situations
There was a moment in watchdogs 2 that i'll never forget: I was infiltrating one of the many enemy outposts guarded by security and so I used that SWAT team call in to try and get one of the guards arrested since he was standing guard near a gate leading up onto a catwalk. The Swat guys showed up and the guy resisted arrest with one of the other guards coming over to try and diffuse the situation and vouch for the guy. The SWAT and gate guard then started talking to each other, most likely the gate guard trying to clear his name. (though I couldnt hear anything I was simply watching what was happening) this back and fourth happens for god knows how long, with the SWAT guys I had called in finally realising they had false evidence on him, so they packed up into their armored car and drove off. The ONE sure fire thing I had relied on in the game to help clear out locations had somehow failed me.
WD3 is a monumental achievement - but as a simulated world, not a game. They went all in on the systems and setting, but forgot the fun along the way :(
This right here, pretty much. I have to give Ubisoft credit for attempting to innovate, and actually investing 4 years of development into the concept. Too bad it doesn't make for an interesting game, at least in this first iteration.
Agreed. I hope this system receives use in a more interesting game because that part was great
Apart from the player character system, I think I'd disagree on the simulated world being an achievement. I loved the previous watch dogs games but I found the world to be incredibly dull. There are only three types of buildings you could enter (from what I can remember), that being places with enemies, hideouts and pubs. Clothing shops were just terminals and there is even less interaction with the vehicle side of things. All shop fronts were closed, many repeat bland business fronts and so on. This game was such an interesting opportunity to expand on the world by going to a new continent with a unique character system but unfortunately, I find the other games, especially watch dogs 2, to have worlds which are more alive. Not even to mention missing multiplayer at launch, unlike watch dogs 2 and then not bringing cross generational play until sometime after the multiplayer component was added, when interest had died down further. Really a shame what happened with this game.
Yup, can’t knock them for their faithful recreation of London, but that’s about it. 💩 gameplay 💩 story 💩 characters 💩 everything. That stupid ass play as anyone mechanic chewed up tons of the budget and created delays. How the hell a team of professionals come up with such stupid ideas is beyond me.
@@Spyrotastic141
I agree, though now that they have the system the next game they make with it should be much higher quality since they can focus on things other than building the system.
“How Watch Dogs died” No, no don’t say that, there’s still hope (I’m coping)
There is still hope there's a watch dogs movie in development
@@bubliverman8007 A… Movie? I’m tired of Video Game movies, just make another game
@Handlesaretrash thats how I feel but the way I see it is if the movie does good they might make another game cause it would show the demand for a return of Aiden or at least show people are interested in the IP
Finally got around to watching this, been meaning to for ages... It's frustrating how good you are at this 😂 Made me want to return to WD2, a game I originally really didn't like.
1:49:27 even if it kinda reinforce the fact that this part become a generic horror segment I really love the fact that this coridoor is literally the one from P.T.
lmao it totally is
I actually came here to say this exactly and then I saw your comment! I’m so stoked somebody else noticed!
Pretty sure it has to be a reference
I felt the same way about my hometown, Chicago, in WD1 as you do with London in 3. It's not only that the cities LOOK accurate, but FEEL accurate as well. It's hard to describe, but impressive that they always pull it off
I wish more open world games took place in Chicago
I’ve never played WD1 but I used to live in Chicago and now I’m tempted. Is the recreation pretty accurate? Like if I want to go hang out in Douglas Park, can I go do that?
Yes, you can.@@evantiesman4165
@@evantiesman4165the first watch dogs will prob blow your mind
I wanna go to all 3 cities but sadly they are all cesspools now 😢.
Max difficulty and permadeath mode makes the game significantly more enjoyable, and I remember a developer interview where they essentially said they wanted that to be the default experience but were worried it would turn people away. I think the recruitment and NPC system is a good first draft, and I really hope the franchise lives long enough to get a sequel to expand it. Bloodline is one of the best things Ubisoft has put out in years, and a fourth Watch Dogs game with a fixed named protagonist, who can use the legion system to recruit controllable support characters would be fantastic.
The biggest problem is less hacks.
It's a hacking game bro, no matter how good other aspects are, the hacking needs to be significantly better than what it was for it to matter.
Do we really need a 4th game? Characters like Aiden Pearce and Wrench were cores of the franchise and their stories ended and on a pretty good note aswell so do we really wanna endanger it by making another game in the franchise? making it something like COD or AC where they should've just put closure to the narrative long time ago yet are constantly trying to milk it even more staining the franchise's name.
I do remember cutting it off immediately when I could.
I wanted to play on permadeath mode, but then Wrench bugged out and killed himself. So I restarted the game, and then Wrench jumped from his drone to the floor instead of onto a roof and died again, so I continued with Aiden, only for him 2 missions later to bug out and not take cover during a shootout. I gave up and removed permadeath, then just played the entire game with Aiden.
I played the game a few times on resistance mode without liberating any boroughs (or just 1 for the weapon unlocks) and the surveillance state just felt much more present, especially with the checkpoints and SIRS posters.
I went back on regular mode after upgrading consoles and remembered how completely different the experience was between standard and resistance. Resistance feels like an insurgency while regular just feels like there aren't consequences for anything, not even stealing Albion vehicles. Also the antagonists being motivated by "dead terrorists" just doesn't land when DedSec isn't committing any acts of terror or losing operatives. The TV says Albion is allowed to kill and the story makes a point about recruits surrendering their old lives but Albion typically only draws guns first on resistance. They don't attack you on sight or stop you at checkpoints in regular; you don't get notoriety from being spotted by a drone.
Normal mode just seems neutered in comparison.
Your video is so right, Watch Dogs 1 had sooo good atmosphere, i love the dark atmosphere so much, i felt like Batman
Chicago as a real Gotham City and Aiden as batman yeah is so cool and Is my favorite game of WD
@@Mr_Jokes-hh6qr soo watch dogs 2 was Teen Titans ?
@@SIGNALacquired you can see it like that
Same bro I love WD1 great story, and gameplay, I did tried WD2 and they changed a lot, a lot of tools to play yeah, but the tune was just different for my taste, group of teens trying to get recognize, socialmedia starved, it didnt get my attention, im interesting on WDL because of the return of Aiden✌
I still think Legion's core idea has a lot of potential. I really hope they don't completely abandon it if they do end up doing another WD. But I guess at this point, who knows if that'll even happen.
They are working on a new watch dog it’s gonna be set in the future they don’t know if they wanna go a terminator route or Detroit human route but I know it’s gonna be good if you play the dlc bloodline u can see that that’s the way they was trying go us going against artificial human
I desperately want another studio to pick up this concept and vastly improve on it.
If ubisoft had another year or 2 , it could have been so much better.
To be fair ubisoft hasn't shown they have the capability to create games with meaningful depth, their games always feel half assed and poorly executed these days and they get boring fast.
Covid basically f'ed it up.
it wouldn’t , WDL started off with a horrible idea from the start. It would be better just in a few parts but probably still suck.
@@stephencroft1612
The idea totally fits Watch Dogs and as a blast to play with.
Of Covid wasnt there, they had 2 normal years of production ontop and it would have been not just a worthy WD3 but actually the best lne of the series.
I doubt that in 1 or 2 years is enough. I think WDL issues are deep and they would only be solved (if possible) by a complete redesign
I find it strange that WDL has such forgettable PCs, when games like XCOM 2 get you to have an incredible connection with individual, recruitable characters who can die in any mission, get injured, tired, develop phobias and traumas, etc. Losing an soldier you had from the start of the game is genuinely gut wrenching. Some characters have a story arc that is entirely made up by the player. Each blank face is somehow full of personality.
Why do you find it strange that one thing is bad while another thing is less bad
@@Szanth Xcom 2 came out in 2016, having multiple characters wasn't the main selling point of the game, etc.
@@kolkonut But they weren't made by the same team or anything. What does that game have to do with this one.
Full of personality? Let me laugh so it don't go to waste:
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha can'tlaughenough ahahahahaha omghelpIcan'tstop AHAHAHAHAHA *coughs blood*
@@Szanththe point is one game did it better than a newer one
Watch Dogs 1 with Watch Dogs 2's open world enemy zones and hacking mechanics is my dream. Looking like the Living City mod is the best I'm ever gonna get... also that invasion at the end of the video was magnificent.
I don't know about wd2. There's no wd2 or legion, that was just a dream, hallucination. Wd is shelved after first wd. It didn't become a series.
@@IskenderCaglarM41B441wd2 is actually better than wd1, like way better. Wd1 is better in only like protagonist and virtual trips lol
@@IskenderCaglarM41B441I'm surprised you're still here after all the WD2 praise in the video
@@rudolfambrozenvtuber What you mean?
@@SaulGoodmanered Watch dogs ended after first one so Idk what you are talking about. Game that doesn't exist can't be better than game that exist. Keep your nonsense trash to yourself, please thank you!
Watch Dogs Legion holds an interesting place for me, because while it is not that mechanically good (and I haven't finished it for years due to that and performance issues), I still remember a few of my characters easily. I remember Lloyd, 69 year old genderfluid diplomat with a green suit and a flatcap. I remember "Keith" (not his real name), who was an MP who looked exactly like Keir Starmer and constantly got kidnapped. I remembered the construction worker lady I play as who was sort of the "fixer", she handled the dirtier work like getting "Keith" back from kidnapping. It's a very good concept buried in Ubisoft's general problems. I really like it, I think, but can't be sure.
I remember this one spy i had who looked so godamn similar to James Bond. I don’t think it was intended but he just looked similar, and had the spy job, so O used him often for any mission I wanted to stealth with. Felt right to have 007 give it a try
My first character was a guy who had failed his motorcycle test. His personal vehicle was a motorcycle.
@@degeneratemale5386 People who have experience driving prior to getting a license usually have a harder time getting a license than those who start from a clean sheet. Maybe he rode dirtbikes since childhood.
The voice acting is representative of a voice director that thinks that they know what British people, or more specifically Londoners, sound, act and talk like, but have never been to the country before. It comes across as though someone has just "heard" that that's what people are like but have no first-hand experience.
the bad voice acting was probably a direct result of sacrificing quality for quantity to make every operator feel different
@@ryuined which is ironic af since it ended up making every operator feel exactly the same.
But that's how they sound
It's definitely far from perfect towards the end, but Bloodline having any semblance of closure for Aiden's character was something I really needed. Also the fact we even got a modern Assassin, while could've been done better, was still pretty cool as well.
I love the first game exactly because Aidan embodies the very same abuse of power that DedSec is supposedly fighting against. He is not there to save the world, he uses DedSec to fight his own revenge war. And the song played at the very end of the game was a perfect dot at the end of the sentence when violent killer who abused power for his own reasons "wins" and you know he will never give this power away, that he got caught in the allure of this power.
They had the makings of something special with WD1. A game experience and look into a deeply flawed vigilante/violent hero figure. They never fully committed to it mechanically with the first game but it was there at times in the storytelling and themes. And there was an incredible second game possible with Aidan and systems they could have built around being a near-future cyberpunk anti-hero vigilante. A Batman-who-may-kill (and very possibly psychopathic) vigilante who fights authoritarian corporations not just street thugs/mafia and who the city may turn against if/when he goes too far. But grounded in reality not in over-the-top spandex-caped flying around superheroics.
Then they basically abandoned him and the setup they had created to make a shallow Saturday morning cartoon version.
I remember in Watchdogs 2 stumbling upon the FBI at the Pier, only to later find out it's a Survliance Hotspot in a Mission. I also remember how much I loved the "It's not the Pizza guy" scene from Watch Dogs 1. I think Legion could've been fun if they did what they did the DLCs did from the start.
40:25 I think this is honestly the greatest tragedy of Ubisoft to me. They have some of the best environment artists in the industry, without question. But, those environment artists are forced to work on games that ultimately don't seem to care much about their environments and view them more as background noise than a meaningful space for the player to engage with.
I always appreciate when a critique can point out successes and very small but meaningful failures. Great video.
a whitelight and a raycevick video on the same day? Absolutely marvelous
I swear it happens so many times they need to be twins or brothers 😅
Glad to see another homie of culture on the same journey as me
The trio of video game essays:
Raycevick
Whitelight
Jacob Geller
Thats what I'm sayin!!!
thanks for introducing me to Jacob Geller!@@ARZZiO
Ubisoft are so infuriatingly good, at building a massive amount of potential for their game franchises, and getting so tantalizingly close to fulfilling that potential only to change/destroy all of that in the proceeding game/s. They bring the franchise to such great heights that you can see the peak of its potential so close, only to throw it all away by delivering something more barebones than the first ever experience in the franchise (Ac:U -> Valhalla, Fc 3/4/5 -> Fc 6, Watchdogs 2 -> Legion, Trials Fusion -> Trials Rising)
Far Cry 6 was actually amazing. Story wise it's always FC 3 -> 5 -> 6 -> 4 but gameplay wise it's FC 6 -> 5 -> 4 -> 3.
I can feel the pain and suffering of being a lifetime ubisoft fan in this comment 😂 lol. Me too bruh... Me too lol
@@lilitch123far cry 6 was not BAD... But it did fundamentally leave behind a lot of what made far cry FAR CRY. FC5 was the last one that actually felt like a far cry game.
Far cry 5 was horrible
@@montanadash20I don't even know what you're talking about here. FC6 was FC5 with tanks. That's really the biggest difference in the grand scheme of things.
Im glad you went back to play through the game on Resistance mode, it really is night and day how much different the game plays and feels with the added difficulty modifiers. It really elevates the experience to something truly memorable.
I would love this game so much more if they kept all of the features from the previous 2 games. There were so many features that were absent here it actually made me appreciate the first game. I like that the map of London was pretty accurate. Quite close to the real London.
Starting gang wars in Oakland and just sitting back and watching was my favorite part of the game.
Agreed
Big fan of your uploads, and was rewatching them when I noticed your prototype 3 story plotline video was gone? I really enjoyed listening to it.
The random soldiers in XCOM are more interesting and endearing than the Deadsec recruits. For as bare bone the differences could be I at least remember who's who and they build a story.
Xcom had the advantage of each recruit having specialised abilities that mattered. I can remember my soldiers and who they ended up being by the end of the campaign because they were all useful and helped me get through missions. The same cannot be said for legion, where all characters will always play the same because there’s very little variety in useful perks
i like to tell the legend of Slim, the sniper who never missed a single shot. the aliens had to break into the hq and drop a giant robot on top of his head to finally get him.
@@lastboss4268I had a assault named Anna sokolova. Managed to be the only one of the original group that lived the final mission
@@JokerInTheCardDeck1273Girl became a DnD Sole Survivor.
@@JokerInTheCardDeck1273 That's one of the eternal brilliances of Xcom EU/EW (and especially with LW). You build up such incredible narratives in each campaign on who lives and dies, and how they did so. Not a one of them has any sort of narrative dialogue in the storyline yet they all can become very personal. Some of the Xcom clone games miss this trick and try to make specific characters that rarely (if ever) grab hold of us the way our RNG generated recruits do in EU/EW.
I loved the BrocaTech/Bagley story, as it showed what WDL could have been. More black mirror, with a mix of disturbing but fascinating story.
I remember finishing WD2 a few months back and being astonished by the overall game, I really really loved it. So I went to Legion without watching a single gameplay or anything related except for the trailers... Its really messed up how Ubisoft messed up Watch Dogs series. Ended up picking WD2 seasson pass. Thank you for your amazing work as always whitelight
I love the quote at the start where Zero Day says that Londoners have died before and gives the Great Fire of London as an example. Google the death toll of the Great Fire of London and try not to laugh
2 hours of content... Best believe I watched the entire thing, cheers mate. Keep them coming
A new Whitelight video is more therapeutic than therapy
I think WD2 is the peak of the series but I found my fun in Legion by characterizing the people I populated London's Dedsec chapter with. My three most played characters essentially became Dedsec's evasive leaders. One of them was a hacker and she handled Dedsec's data infrastructure, working closely with the other hackers and members with tech backgrounds. She was Scottish, wanted by Albion, and typically wore a facemask or her hood up when she was outside.
The guy I had working behind the scenes was very much like the boxart character, late 40s, always wore a suit. He mostly worked in the shadows, recruiting and finding his way in the ear of powerful people in London, him being a conman allowing him to sneak into places where any bookish white guy in a suit would blend in seamlessly.
And my starting character and most played character was a younger woman, an artist who emigrated from China with her sister. She essentially did Dedsec's "PR" and worked on clearing their name and rehabilitating their image following the attacks that occur in the opening. She felt like a character that had something to lose, her sister got arrested and threatened with deportation. The artists, anarchists, and other counter-culture people who gravitated towards Dedsec did so because of her actions.
And it bled down to every member of Dedsec until I had something on each member of them that made them fit in like a glove, my first spy was a rogue MI6 agent born in India and she worked feverishly against SIRS and the human trafficking gang and brought other MI6 agents into the fold. My hitman was a former SAS commando who also always wore a suit Dedsec contracted the services of. My heaviest hitter was a Polish carpenter who just liked getting into a good bar fight. My anarchist was a tumblr girl with a shaved head, and my drones expert was a 71 year old woman who was covered in tattoos and had the doomed trait, and to me, she was like this long-standing member of Dedsec who had been around as long as Raymond from the first two games, and she had an ailing heart and knew she was living on borrowed time, and when she did finally die, it felt like an impactful character death.
That's way too much head Canon I might as well just write a fanfic and call it a day. Not bagging on you but I don't think it's fair to expect every player to basically make an entire universe in their head to compensate for how bad the characters and interaction is in this game.
You can't knock em they made a great narrative with there own campaign
@jand1144 Yes but it in no way makes the game less shit. I can RP or headcanon any game but like the point of this discussion in this video is the quality of the game.
@SkilledKill lmao trust bro I'm with you I don't do all that either
Just from gamer perspective I can understand the nostalgia one can make in a game from there imagination
100 percent agree with you though 💯🎮👌
Hof yap
Suddenly spotting a 2 hour long Whitelight video in my recommended is like finding a gift you didn't realise you missed on Christmas morning
Weird comment. You didn’t miss anything. It was posted the same day you commented. Also, if you subscribe you won’t have to stumble upon his videos, you’ll know when they’re uploaded.
Whitelight vid. yes!
Watch Dogs Legion. YES!
2 hours. NOOOOOOOOO! oh well, i'll just watch 2 times in a row.
Can’t be bothered to check if someone’s mentioned this already, but I think the whole reason for Bagley’s existence boils down to an attempt to recreate Wheatley from Portal 2. Needless to say, they fell asleep at the wheel and crashed.
I play legions over and over. I guess I'm easy to please. I really love the map. London is beautiful in this game.
It's funny when people say it's hard to get through sections of the game without being "forced" into combat, when I got through these same missions without ever being seen or having to take anyone down 😅. It's still true that the worst thing they did is remove the things that made Watchdogs 2 great.
Hence them saying "hard" and not "impossible".
i became a whitelight fan right around the time legion dropped after watching the first 2 watch dogs vids, been looking forward to this vid for 3 years love your content man keep it up!
Literally that's how I was
The game wasn't supposed to be an MMO but it was very different and it had a lot of the features you mentioned in the video, including stuff like car on demand, calling cops on people etc, even better story with more characters, i don't know why they destroyed all of it... They even planned a map expansion DLC that would take place in British Virgin Islands
Considering how troubled every ubisoft development is, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a huge factor on why the game seems so rushed. Genuinely sucks how many times the actual devs on these games have such good ideas and ambitions and they get it all erased by higher ups who just want to rush the project out the door then when it all blows up in their face they just fire the devs after the fact instead of taking accountability.
@@diabolicalplan1614 They canned a lot of their ideas and put them into Far Cry 6 instead, like for example enemy levels which originally would've given the enemies a bigger variety with different uniforms and weapon loadouts, similarly how some cut WDL weapons made it into FC6 like SRM1216 or KSG, hell they cut 50 weapons in general
Apparently the story was also changed because the testers complained it was hard to keep track of which is BS...
The original story for this game was that Dedsec London had a corrupt cell which blew up the parliment, and later DS London ended up missing, so you as the player had the goal to restart this branch yourself and find the dedsec traitor behind it, who was known as "Emily"
Most of the missions were the same but context was different, like you had help from other dedsec branches such as Cairo, Seoul and Houston, who would often contact you and share information and such, one of them was Sabine Brandt being from Dedsec Berlin, complete with fake german accent through the entire story, Angel Lopez (the guy who dies in main story, and the guy from DLC) was originally the brother of a Dedsec Caracas member that would've been featured in the story
At the end it was revealed that Sabine Brandt was actually Emily Reed who was the Dedsec Traitor and you would meet Dalton Wolfe who was looking into the traitor but it was too late for him to warn everybody before the story started, he would've been killed but left you with a hard drive that had information on Emily, though not sure if there ever was any expansion on her motivations to why she did "bad stuff", the context was more in depth though
Other notable things feature:
-Tube, it was planned to be fully accessible but only the models for the tunnels, stations etc were made and it was never properly implemented into the london map
-The map was bigger and there was additional Mayfair district
-3D Printer existed and you could buy weapons and equip them on any operative
-ctOS Hubs (the boxes that have glowing red screen that you interact in some missions or when recruiting people) originally would've been accessible in freeroam and show collectibles in the area when interacted, kind of like towers in WD1
-There were dogs in the game, worked just like WD2, fully implemented and even voice lines were recorded for petting them (and they said they cut them because they "would need to be recruitable" too which is BS)
-Steam pipes were supposed to return
-A shooting range minigame was cut
-There was some other 2D arcade minigame planned
There's also tons of concept art on artstation that reveals a lot of things, like how the devs toyed around with an idea of london having multiple states, like when it's in control of albion it would be gritty, a "riot" version where everything is burning + destroyed and a liberated version that's clean
Something tells me it might have to do with the fact it was originally supposed to be a light RPG. Operatives were going to have levels and recruits had passive bonuses. But that all changed mid-development, likely because Ghost Recon Breakpoint flopped and was criticized because it was an RPG-lite looter shooter. Ubisoft might have seen the response and had the team remove those elements.
Since abruptly changing a major component of your game would use up a lot of valuable time, I suspect they had to drop a number of aspects from release due to time constraints. Which is a shame if true.
I also wonder how much of it came down to Clint Hocking's return to Ubisoft. Man led some bangers (Chaos Theory & Far Cry 2) but post-FC2 jumped from company to company and spent a decade failing to put out a single game. WDL was meant to be his big return, and was the reason I was excited at the time...
@@Nevarc He was there since the start of this game I think, there's some interviews with him before the game was out and be explains dedsec international thing that got cut
1:02:10 It happens even right now in certain countires. even without all those bad capitalsts and PMCs. Guess what, when police are given a "plan" to unveil certain amount of crimes by their bosses, it just so happens that it incentives them to find loop holes to inflate the number of crimes they unveil, who might have guessed?
The moment you start monitering things through numerical means and seting numerical goals. Those measures cease to be useful measures.
I'll never understand how a game like this could get through development, through all the steps where the developers and producers could've looked at it and went "This doesn't work, we should rethink this". This should've been done for almost every part of this game.
When you rely on the success of your previous games in the franchise
I'm sure plenty of people on the time saw the issues but Triple A game dev schedules can be so tight they likely couldn't have fixed a lot of the issues even if they wanted to
Watch Dogs was the first 3A game I ever played after getting my first decent PC. I didn't watch any trailer, no idea what a good game was, and no idea what to expect. And I loved it.
I replayed it years later, it wasn't as good as I remembered, but still it had many interesting gameplay and stories and a unique charm that few games have.
It's sad to see it devolve into a featureless mess.
I built my first PC and with the GPU, I got a code for Watch_Dogs. So it ended up being the first game I played on that PC. Lots of multiplayer matches with friends were had, made my friends rage quit because I was a crackshot back then.
Parts I remember were: i7-4770k, gtx 780, 16gb DDR3, a way overkill 1000w PSU because I was dumb and had a lot of cash to spend. But man, you got a lot more PC for your money back then and the current GPU prices is the reason why. Prices for everything else are fine, even cheaper at times. It's just the GPUs that have dragged the prices fo high up.
Of the original build, only the case and power supply remains. Parts have been gradually replaced over the years, bought 2nd hand to save some money on the upgrades. Most of the old parts are used in a media server now.
This was a London simulator to me, that's the thing I found this game did the best. I played through the same and was bored most of the time, but when I simply wandered around, I had a blast.
I really enjoyed Bloodlines, and WD1. I really like Aiden from WD1, he was a refreshingly dark and morally ambiguous character. I honestly wish they would make a whole new game around Aiden. He's one of the most interesting characters Ubisoft has ever made and he's still totally under-developed and under-utilized. I got WD1 for free when I first played it, coupon code came with some hardware purchase, and I went into it with no real expectations, and I loved it. It's really too bad Ubisoft messed up on the E3 reveal so badly, WD1 is such an underappreciated game. Far from perfect, but the WD series would be so much better today if Ubisoft had just made sequels to WD1 that refined the gameplay rather than trying to change the theme so much with each game. I thought WD2 was a big step down from WD1 in it's overall fun-factor, and as someone who enjoyed the dark setting from WD1, I thought WD2 went way too far in the other direction to the point of feeling like a cartoon. Legion is just bad, except for Bloodlines.
I essentially just wrote a very similar comment - good to see I'm not alone :D I fondly remember me and my friends really enjoying the dark setting of WatchDogs 1. It made everything feel serious and had some "weight" to it. Whereas WD2 just seemed like a overly cheery hipster version of how someone imagines hacking.
But good to see that a lot of people liked it. But you're right - I'd love to see something about Aiden again - WD1 is one of the only games where I actually finished the story.
Yeah, WD2 had better gameplay but the characters and the whole vibe of the game was a massive downgrade.
Exactly how I feel
As soon as I found out your character could use a cloaking device in legion I decided to not even play it.
my exact feelings
You know what be cool, if they make watch dogs 3 they keep the career for characters maybe three options (criminal,hacker and civilians.) But like Cyberpunk its a single character, maybe different dialogue options or ways to progress the story, maybe a starting mission.
Can't believe i watched 2 hours all in one go, you really captured my attention with this video. Nice one, made me download WD2 again ahah
What the hell? It's already been 3 years since this game came out? Damn time definitely passes by-
Only WhiteLight can make me sit through a 2 hour video
He made me sit through 7 hours of talking of a videogame about deliveries. 2 hours is just another day
We love Whitelight 👏
You need to watch more long form essays like this.
I've seen Joseph Anderson's 1 hour Subnautica, 2 hour Elden Ring, 3 hour TLOU, 4 hour The Witcher 1, and 5 hour The Witcher 2 videos like 20 times together.
Then there's the occasional thing like Action Button's 6 hour video about a game I haven't even heard of-Tokimeki Memorial.
Or even the _two completely separate_ 12 hour reviews of Oblivion (that _are_ unlike the above, too long for their own good, but still good videos).
And even a 9 and 11 hour two-parter Skyirm review, that I haven't seen yet.
@@hundvd_7ah, another Patriciantv viewer 😂
I also recommend the channel
"I finished a video game" he has some good stuff, and while its not a ton of videos, they're in depth and very good.
... and then feel 'That's it? Where's the rest of it?'
definitely the best Manscaped integration I've seen so far, good one
You're the true GOAT for using Catalyst music in your videos.
When I played WD1 I played like John Wick, using slo-mo and sick gunplays with hacks. It was fun and I was surprised to see everyone else play different.
Welcome to the Watch Dogs 1 fan club!...we are few. But we are true
There's an expression where I'm from that says: "always missing 5 cents to have a pound" and I think Watch Dogs as a franchise really embodies that. They never reached the potential, there was always something missing. It never was what it could have been.
I feel like that can be said about any ubisoft game. A couple from my personal experience. Assassin's creed? Parkour was always so close to being incredible in a lot of different iterations, but never combined it (there is a video on this chanel that goes more in depth on the topic). Rainbow six siege? With dev teams changing, the new guys kept missing the point and changing the game in the wrong direction. Attacking was always hard, but more incredibly frustrating defender ops were added, and attack got nerfed. At some point the meta changed to "Why bother? Let's just rush and kill everything we can"
It's hard to be a fun of a ubisoft game. To see the potential being thrown into an incinerator
Absolutely perfect video. This felt like watching a beautiful documentary on the entirety of Watch_Dogs and what that name means for it's fans. I felt so many different emotions while watching this, especially in the end, with the topic of this being the end of Watch_Dogs. I love this series. Fell in love with the 1st, really enjoyed the 2nd and had fun with Legion. I think I am beginning to make peace with the series's end. Its hard to process yes, but the experiences I had with these games, the characters, the story, the emotions along the way, are all an essential part of myself today.
And for that... Watch_Dogs will forever be a part of me.
Bro watch dogs is not gunna end. The dude in the video near the end makes a cool segment about how the dlc was the final goodbye but let's be honest and look at the real world. Ubisoft is a developer known for sequels and not just sequels but almost a copy and paste of their game. I can guarantee this is not the end of watch dogs. They got at least 15 more sequels to go. Jokes aside they won't be ending the series here. Hell look at assassin's creed. They literally killed off the main character Desmond and still kept the series going because that's what Ubisoft does. I mean what games have Ubisoft made in the last decade besides assassin's creed watch dogs and farcry? They're not gunna give up on an IP with a solid fan base
Just a couple of things to add on. One, the human upload thing you referred to when it came to Sky uploading her own mother is further elaborated on with side quests showing that the ctOS car system was ran by the former consciousness of a taxi driver, and a couple of other ones like that.
The mission chain unlocked after the credits similarly reveals that Bagley was Skye's brother, Bradley, and after deciphering major events in his life and hearing back his story in fairly poignant audio files, you even get to briefly meet the real guy in a care home, a once happy man debilitated by a disease that shattered his life. It's hard to tell if he really understands what Bagley is when you introduce him to Bradley.
Also, damn, you showed the P.T. corridor homage in the Bloodline breakdown but didn't call it out by name? A hell of an easter egg to include in a mandatory story mission as part of what could be the last campaign in the series. Perhaps the developers at Ubisoft felt some kinship with Kojima about their publishers mishandling their work...
Kojima and Ubisoft did tend to reference each other, even going as far as including an Altair outfit in MGS4
@@superdrinkingpepsi and in turn, Raiden was a skin for Ezio in AC Brotherhood.
your review essays are so satisfying to listen to!
the way you describe London, reliving good memories, is exactly how I feel about Watch Dogs 2 - I'm a bay area girl; I grew up in Berkeley and I know San Fran and Oakland and even Marin County very well. So when I played WD2 in winter of 2021, when I had just moved with my mom to Missouri for what was, at the time, not supposed to be forever (but ended up being so), and when I felt more alone and more homesick than I ever had, playing a game that so thoroughly understood what my home was, what it looked like, felt like, sounded like, was... incredibly comforting. And I think that was always what was so special to me about Watch Dogs; it's a trait all three games have in common - sometimes they really do just feel like you're... there. it drive me fucking nuts that this level of talent is shackled to Ubisoft. It deserved so much better than that.
A new video from Whitelight AND Raycevick, on the same day? Feels like it is Christmas!
Man there are so many cool things I could imagine with the recruitment system. Recruit a paramedic? Easy kidnapping - cause a car crash with another character, then call in Deadsec's EMT. They show up when the 911 call goes out and load the target up into their ambulance, off to some basement somewhere. Recruit service workers for poisoning or tradesmen for infiltration or... man it's such a cool idea
I really wanted the NPC system to have some Nemesis elements from Shadow of Mordor, like grudge hackers and recruited moles
Shame that the nemesis system is exclusive from wb games, they hold The patent
45:19 Nothing could have PREPARED ME for this LMAOOOOO
My favorite Britbong raps are 'Issa Chewsdy Innit' and 'Ya Gotta Loysens Fer Dat'.
This video through its entirety made me feel it was going to build up to a reflection of what this series is and my expectations got exceeded. Never seen people put into words what's so important about these games. Great video.
Wow! Man, your videos are not only thought provoking, entertaining and enlightening, but also pure pieces of art, never stop, please.
Thanks! Have a nice day everyone!
Enemy NPCs in Legion follow the concept of proportional response. If you get into a fistfight in front of or with Albion, they'll respond with fists and batons because you're not threatening anyone's life and therefore it would be inappropriate to shoot at you. If you shoot at them however, they won't hesitate to return fire. Darcy even has a unique interaction that will delay a lethal response until after a few kills because they don't realize she has a knife thanks to it being well-concealed. Strategically choosing how to attack your enemies is how you make use of doctors and lawyers in permadeath modes. If you go into every situation with a gun drawn they'll be useless to your team, but if you're careful about how much danger you put your most valuable infiltrators and hero characters in, you can ensure they're only injured or arrested, then stack support staff to reduce their downtime
Yeah, it was an interesting System, but sadly it was a significant downgrade from the other 2 games. Watch dogs 2 has arguably one of the best police system I've seen in all games, even rivaling Red dead redemption and they feel ALIVE and you can interact with them and they interact with eachother and npc. In watch dogs 1 there was a reputation System and news would talk about you and people would get help from police if they saw you and you had bad rep. Also there exists an arrest animation, unlike in legion where you ragdoll away and a lame "arrested" sign comes up.
I so wished that there existed dialogue if those police arrested one of "them" and I mean when you recruited another police force, but like the video said. It's beautiful to an outsider, but so frustrating when further thought is in.
Just watched the part about the AI mission which brought the memory back. I can come up with 4 unique hooks right now as I watch that reflect British cultural references.
1. You get a tip off that Albion has been altering British television to influence the national consciousness. Heading to the set, it's very clearly a watchdogs eastenders where the actors are preparing for a live special. you begin to help the members of the cast and find that they haven't been allowed to leave to keep.
2. You enter the big brother house and use the live format to and hacking the sets and hidden production staff to wreak havoc on the broadcast and Albion employee who was fixed as the winner.
3. Notting Day carnival has been cancelled by albion but the locals refuse fo comply and intend to go ahead anyway despite the certainty of violence. You aren't sure if that's smart as it will be a blood bath so you work around them to distract and confuse the albion response to the carnival.
4. A world war 1 and 2 memorial is removed to install a surveillance station and you join the rag tag bunch of elderly veterans of various wars and family members (its in the future so few ww2 soldiers remain) to rip it down in one last mission. Its pulled down by an old tank and albion thinks better than to put another station up and a leave a small piece of soil that grows a poppy at the game end.
Once I unlocked the Assassin character the game became MUCH more fun for me. Still very much imperfect, but at least I'm not dying of boredom anymore!
I am always so impressed with your production skill and your analysis into these games. Your ending love letter to Watch Dogs 2 was probably the best 30 seconds of Watch Dogs 2 content I've seen in the past year, obviously not counting your analysis of course. I'm nearly heartbroken we won't see how DedSec and the crew continues on after WD2, and that the diamond in the series is surrounded by what most will think is merely uninspired mediocrity. Ubisoft could've had a competitor to GTA, I'd argue Watch Dogs 2 is actually better than GTA V. But I guess here we are.
ubisoft should make it mandatory for every employee to watch all your ubisoft game reviews.
4 years to finish the series.... worth it
In defense of the assassins creed mission. The death scenes in AC aren’t necessarily caused by the animus. In AC unity it’s directly referenced in the story that Arno can see their memories. The explanation for him is that he had a high concentration of Isu DNA and his own brain could act like an Animus when he assassinates someone. So basically that he can see their genetic memory using his eagle vision. for other characters like Bayek and Basim who’s scenes take place in the duat it’s a lesser version of what Arno can do with it being less of seeing their memories and more of they can interrogate their targets after they’ve died.
You're so right about art direction making a city/setting feel correct. I'm currently playing WD2 for the first time. I grew up in the Bay Area (only a short drive from Silicon Valley) and am absolutely adoring how faithful it feels. Tearing through SF, even setting aside the places that aren't 1:1 recreations of landmarks I was finding places that reminded me of other places that I had been or had fond memories of. Even the music is correct, like you talked about with WD1's music direction of Chicago. I turn on the radio in WD2 and it feels believable. Turn to one station and Sublime comes on? On point.
So it's so sad to see that none of that translates to showing you London's identity in Legion. It looks correct, but it feels empty. It's built like it's going to be an immersion simulator but it seems more like a diorama with a "look, don't touch" sign hanging above it.
Man after seeing this I wonder if its possible for someone to make a mod that combines the great elements from WD2 you mention, and then also make the city seem more alive. Its a great location, so itd be a shame if it didn't get a "living city" mod like the first game
I was looking foward to this video for a while. I’ve played and loved all three watchdogs games and just like you said. It’s not all great but the things they do good stand out so much to me.
I remember when I played this I probably didn't drive for the first ten hours since I had fun just walking around and looking at the city. If there's one thing I've always liked in Ubisoft games it has been the environmental design. The first two games were fun to wander around in as well as The Division.
Wish they had done more with the NPCs since they could have made things pretty neat. Would have been interesting if the reputation system was more of a thing. Something like hurting someone would upset the majority of their family which would in turn upset all of their friends who hear about it. Having more of a ripple effect could of made how you go about things a bit more interesting.
i feel like ubi had made this really cool london map but had nothing to use it on so they threw together a watch dogs game in about 2 years
honestly i kinda just wish watch dogs legion was set in sf...but mostly cuz i live there and loved the "play as anyone" feature for online and live in sf, but felt they did my neighborhood kinda dirty and thought about how with the tech they have now, they should be able to make a nicer, bigger, more accurate sf...instead of reducing my entire district down to factories and a junkyard 💀💀💀
I like how I’m just now learning you can temporarily turn off electronics in WD2 with the stun gun. As someone who plays these games as a staunch pacifist (or as pacifistic as you can be) the stun gun was the only thing I used in WD2, and I’ve finished that game several times now. That said since my usual MO was to drone my way through literally everything while staying outside of the danger zone as much as possible I guess it makes sense I never saw this mechanic.
My first introduction to the Watch Dogs series was Legion. As an outsider, it was pretty fun tbh. In a time where Assassin's Creed has gone down a weird RPG loot grind path, Legion felt like old school Ezio/American AC. But damn, after watching this I need to go back and play Watch Dogs 1 and 2 now.
Especially wd2 that game was great in my opinion
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who couldn't take the line delivery. It was rough for me. But it got me to check out Watch Dogs 1 again and discover that I really like it!
I think if they give you an option to upgrade your characters, so you'll get more attached to them would have helped a lot.
No police and no hacking = no fun
One thing that's also surprising they didn't do because this was alluded to in that kickass gameplay trailer. Why not have operatives also be sad and grief is someone dies maybe one of them deals with the tragedy of loss worse than someone else and will not be able to be selectable during the grieving period, maybe they get debuffs I mean a system like that wouldn't make just oyu care it would make you feel this ragtag team of misfits also care for each other.
I hope they still continue WD series, I hope they do something better and don’t mess up
One of the issues that you didn't mention is how painfully obvious it becomes that Sabine is Zero-Day. She literally vanishes near the end of the main campaign and nobody questions it, if that doesn't make it obvious enough.
She is also pretty much the only named non-auto generated character left in the story that hasn’t been excluded when the “twist” happens.
@@LeaveDavidAloneNot to mention, she mysteriously was the only one to have survived the base assault, and the pleas/emotions in the VA voices made it seem there was no knowingly way out.
Additionally, she never made an effort to appear in person. Not once. Hell, even Richard Malik went out of his way to meet your operatives in PUBLIC.
Even though I actually enjoyed a lot of watch dogs legion this is a great video. I enjoyed all of the games in the series.
Watchdogs is and will always be 1 of my favourite franchises, from the story to the parkour, the clothing physics and animations were on point. I'd spend hours walking around Chicago, Aiden's hands in his pockets whilst the wind blows, Wd2 I'd be enjoying sunny Francisco (my dream city) parkouring or walking around exploring all landmarks. Watchdogs legion was great to although many aspects were letdown, the story was forgettable, the clothing physics are a mess and the parkour was crap but I still love it as equally as I do the 1st 2. I'm from North London so being able to visit London in game and seeing how well and realistic it looked was amazing. Legion has the best online imo but I did miss invasions, they aren't great in Legion.
Personally after playing watchdogs legion, I could hardly remember any of the main missions other than the first one, whereas watchdogs 2 was full of brilliant moments and felt different in each of its missions