Watch Dogs: Legion was no doubt a very ambitious video game in itself. The idea that it sold to all the fans of the franchise was pretty simple yet unique; players could control numerous characters rather than just one protagonist. Thanks to its perma-death mechanic, no character in this game lived forever, and anyone walking the streets as an NPC had the potential to be the next hero.
Yet, the game faced mixed responses from critics as well as longtime fans of this short-lived franchise. Watch Dogs: Legion could not reach the heights of success it set out for. There were a bunch of reasons for this failure. Fans did not care for the feature Ubisoft was selling so hard.
How Watch Dogs: Legion’s most ambitious idea became the reason for its failure
The first Watch Dogs was a decent enough game with some very innovative gameplay ideas. The most prominent of those ideas was the hacking mechanic. A third-person open-world game with parkour as one of its central gameplay mechanics.
A protagonist who could hack traffic lights and even bridges at will. This game opened up so many new ways of making a sandbox game fun. And that’s how this franchise was started. It got a mixed-to-positive reception, its visuals got praise, and it became a decent success.
The sequel was even better; gamers could now control cars. They could make steam pipes inside roads explode using their phones. The best part was that it had a much better story and a character that was not too serious. This game, despite having an 82 Metacritic score, only sold around 10 million copies by 2020, the same year its next installment was launched.
The next title, Watch Dogs: Legion, had everything. It had a bunch of hacking, it had quirky dialogue, and it had no set protagonist. Players could recruit NPCs to fight the cause, and thanks to its permadeath mechanic players could control various kinds of characters over time. The game’s director, Clint Hocking, was very proud of this idea.
“We started asking, well, since we have this full simulation of all these people – why not just make it so that you build your own team? Since they’re already there and they’re simulated and we can interact with them, why don’t we just make them our playable characters? Once we had that idea, it just snowballed.”
No doubt it was a unique idea, but this idea is what became the reason for its failure. Developers should remember one thing: if they are giving players this many characters to play with, they better be fleshed out. That’s what makes it very hard if players are given over 9 million random characters to recruit from.
Yes, they can only have 45 characters on their team at once, but if they die, the new ones keep coming. The problem is that characters who blabber all the time end up being worse than silent protagonists. Some fans even mentioned how bad this game’s voice acting was.
Would Far Cry 7 end up being better than this?
While Ubisoft failed big time with Watch Dogs: Legion, fans wonder if they would do any better with the next Far Cry game. The rumors around that game are pretty wild; some of them talk about its gameplay, and others talk about its game engine. And if these are to be believed, by the time it releases Far Cry 7, it will be one hell of a game.
Rumors say that in Far Cry 7 protagonist’s family would end up being abducted. They have all been held at different locations, and the players have to find a way to save them all before the in-game clock runs out of time. This clock is set for 72 hours.
It sounds a lot like Deathloop, where players have to kill a bunch of people in a limited time. So, they had to find the right sequence to kill them in order to complete the mission on time.
Fans can only hope that Ubisoft’s implementation of this gameplay mechanic is good enough. If they end up missing a mark somehow, Far Cry 7 might end up meeting the same fate as Watch Dogs. It is pretty common knowledge now, that Ubisoft has put the Watch Dogs franchise on ice due to Legion‘s failure.
