[Gamescom 2019] Watch Dogs: Legion Alpha First Look

The wait for Watch Dogs: Legion has never felt so long. We got a taster for the third game of the Watch Dog series on the floor at Gamescom 2019!

You’ll be playing as DedSec, an organization trying to overthrow the military in London. The ripple effect will be in play, so your choices will have consequences reflected in the game. Help more, and DedSec gains more respect. Kill randomly, and you could be attacked on sight.

You’ll be able to recruit literally anyone into DedSec, from the random man on the street to the military personnel you’re supposed to go against. Really taking that Legion into account.

Scan someone, and you’ll get their dossier: contact, profile, affinity bar (friendship) and their background to check. You’ll need to know these to solve their problems or make their life easier if you want to recruit them. They won’t be airing their woes like regular quests either. It’ll be on you to do the legwork to help them with their relatives, their job, and so forth, to increase the affinity bar. On filling affinity, only then a Quest will trigger to complete the recruitment process.

Once recruited, you’ll have to assign a class to the character. Three are available:

• Enforcer – has sticky mine, good with guns and damage
• Hacker – has remote control, spiderbots
• Infiltrator – AR cloak for temporary invisibility, good with melee attacks

Drones will be available for use, five in total. Utilize a regular camera drone, or use one equipped with guns.

The game will generate a semi-random background for a character when they are scanned. Once generated, the background will be fixed. There’ll be 8 Boroughs in the game, breaking London down into smaller parts. Westminster characters are more likely to be business-involved, civil servants or demonstrators. Camden residents would lean towards punks, homeless or even prostitutes.

You’re not just one character in this game, you are legion. You can complete the game with just one character as recruitment is not necessary. You don’t have to kill either to complete the game. Missions have multiple possible solutions. You can even recruit the elderly to your legion, but as you might expect, they’re slow at running and can’t exactly scale walls. Not optimal agents, for sure. There will be a five mission story arc, with involvement from the IRS, a counter terrorist organization.

You can get caught by the police, and you can decide whether to surrender or not. Surrendering puts you in jail for a long in-game time. If you don’t, escape is possible, at the price of being Wanted. Get caught again, and you’ll be executed. Recruited agents are also able to be killed, and you will lose them permanently.

Cinematics will change according to your player character. This includes voice lines, accents, even animations. Replayability is already sounding very promising.

Watch Dogs: Legion is set for 6 March 2020. Everyone can change the world together, so let’s start with London.

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On Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, PS4 & Steam

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