Every year, I dedicate my last video to the most innovative game I played in the last
12 months.
Just one game that I felt did something truly unique and memorable.
In the past, I've featured Her Story, Event[0], Snake Pass, Return of the Obra Dinn,
and Baba is You.
But this year, I'm going for something quite different.
It's not a charming indie game, or a detective simulator.
No: this year it's a big, blockbuster, Triple A title about shooting people.
This time, I'm looking at Watch Dogs: Legion.
♫ Music ♫
Yeah, I'm as surprised as you are that an open world Ubisoft game could be considered
innovative.
But this third instalment in the Watch Dogs series is built around a core feature that
I have to admit is wildly ambitious: a feature called "Play as Anyone".
Instead of having a single, authored main character like Aiden Pierce or Marcus Holloway,
Legion has about 9 million of them - or, in other words, the entire population of London.
You can walk up to anyone on the street, recruit them into the resistance group DedSec, and
then play as them.
You can swap between a gun-toting granny with hiccups, or a podcaster with an uzi, or dozens
of other would-be heroes.
And they're not like Pokemon or XCOM units - they temporarily become the main character,
who talks in cutscenes and everything.
PROTAGONIST: "Oh my days.
How's a girl like you get out of that clash?"
Thematically, the idea is that a revolution doesn't come from a single person - but the
collective action of many.
And so if you're going to take down an authoritarian police state - you're going to need a few
friends.
And mechanically, it's a natural extension of systems found in the first Watch Dogs games
where you could hack into anyone's phone to learn small snippets about that person.
What if that wasn't just flavour text?
What if that person really had a full life of work, hobbies, and relationships?
And so that was the pitch, made in interviews and E3 announcements.
Just the sort of pie-in-the-sky idea that you'd expect from director Clint Hocking - designer
on the fiercely unorthodox Far Cry 2, and a game design nerd who does lofty GDC talks
and coined the phrase ludonarrative dissonance.
But let's put pre-release hype aside.
How does this feature actually work, under the hood?
And, most importantly, what does it bring to the game?
Let's start with technical, because implementing this feature was a staggering logistical challenge
that required clever solutions and workarounds.
I learned this stuff by reading interviews, talking to a few Ubisoft devs, and testing
the game itself.
So first things first, no - Ubisoft obviously didn't hand craft millions of unique characters.
Instead, Legion makes use of random generation to create people on the fly.
Which, in of itself, isn't too revolutionary.
It's not that different to character creators in games which can be used to make an infinite
supply of unique people.
Though, the animations and voices are certainly impressive.
For animation, an old lady needs to move differently to a young man, meaning Ubisoft needed to
make dozens of different animation sets for the main character.
And for voices, the game's script needed to be rewritten and recorded around 20 times
to account for different genders, accents, and dialects, including Irish, cockney, African-Caribbean,
and Eastern European.
Clever modulation tech was used to create different versions of these voices.
But it's actually what these characters do before they enter your team that makes them
really interesting.
Because when they're just citizens of London they seem to perfectly fit their surroundings,
follow regular schedules, have jobs and family members, and so on.
To achieve this, Ubisoft used a pair of very clever solutions.
So for starters, each character has a dozen-or-so different data points like ethnicity, salary,
associates, and workplace.
But it's not the case that each one of these things is independently generated.
Instead, there's something of a cascading effect - where one choice dictates another.
To explain this in full, let's see how this works on a random female NPC - Heidi Khumalo.
The most important thing is her location, because Ubisoft used real census data to ensure
that the game accurately depicts the different boroughs of London.
The people in Brixton should seem very different to the people in Westminster, after all.
I met Heidi in Lambeth which influenced the chances of her having her specific ethnicity,
clothing, and her job as a computer repairer.
Her ethnicity and gender defined her name and voice.
Her job determined where she works, her gameplay perks, and her salary .
That salary then determined which home she'd be randomly assigned to.
These data points, and a little more randomness, allows the game to build a daily schedule
for Heidi: sleeping at home, visiting her grandmother in hospital, committing a bit
of vandalism, and working in the electronics shop - before repeating it the next day.
So this is a clever system where Ubisoft can generate characters who feel reasonably organic
- because data points aren't random, but heavily influenced by each other to create a coherent picture.
The second solution comes down to when this information is decided.
You might think that all of this data was generated in the studio and then put on the disc.
Or that the game generates all this information when you first load the game, like in Minecraft.
But no.
While it would be cool to generate, track, and simulate millions of civilians all at
once, it's just not technically possible.
So here's how it works.
When you first see a character, they are pretty much just like an NPC in any other game.
A random human that spawns into the world around you, and then disappears from memory
when you drive away.
A fleeting handful of bits and bytes.
Some, easily observable factors like gender, clothes, and voice are generated - but they
don't have income, schedule or list of associates.
It's only when you actively engage with someone - when you profile them, add them to your
list of potential recruits, or even injure them - that this information is filled in.
For example, this woman is a glazier who is protesting in Southwark, and will just stand
there, repeating her animation.
All night, if you wait long enough.
But add her to your recruits and her personality will be fleshed out.
She'll get a salary, associates, and metadata - all using the cascading system
described earlier.
Because you recruited her at a protest at 8AM, that will now be part of her schedule
and she'll return here to protest for an hour each day.
But now she'll also go work at an antiques shop, read mystery novels in Southbank, and more.
Characters in Watch Dogs: Legion are, essentially, quantum in nature - their full personality
is only determined when you specifically observe them.
NPC: "Are you DedSec? Thank the lord!
I could use your help."
But it's necessary because it means the game only needs to keep track of a certain number
of people.
At different levels of detail, depending on how important they are.
Which means the game never runs out of memory.
Speaking of memory - one more datapoint is each character's opinion of DedSec - which
can be influenced by events in their life.
If we assault them, or kill one of their associates, their opinion will drop - all the way to "hates
DedSec", which means they'll never join up.
But if we help them out, or beat up a competitor, their opinion will rise - until it tops out
and they join the team.
These events can also change their schedule.
If a family member is killed, instead of hanging out with them they might instead go mourn
at a local graveyard.
All of this put together leads to a game where every person in London has a rich inner life,
a daily routine, family and friends, and a shifting opinion of DedSec.
And you can recruit that character and use their unique skills in missions, giving the
game a literally infinite supply of unique characters.
But the thing is - and this bit is quite important: none of this actually matters.
One of the most critical questions that Ubisoft had to answer with Watch Dogs: Legion was
not "how do you make a game where you can play as anyone" - but instead, "why should
anyone care?"
Well, there's a couple answers on the game's official website.
For one, it says "choose the right operatives to best confront the challenges ahead", suggesting
that you should recruit someone who will offer you an advantage in the mission you're about
to carry out.
That's cool - but this is completely undermined by the fact that the NPCs are all incredibly
similar.
In London, every citizen can hack a computer, drive a car, fire a gun, and do stealth takedowns.
And their unique gameplay perks are often unhelpful or insignificant - outside of a
few outliers like some overpowered recruits and those with uniformed access that let you
get into buildings unseen.
Plus, every mission can be completed in so many different ways - including hacking, shooting,
or stealth.
Which means every character is totally feasible, and ultimately it doesn't matter who you hire
or who you choose for a specific mission.
Why bother following a character's schedule or manipulating their opinion of DedSec, when
there's a million other characters who are equally capable?
Of course, those characters might die - temporarily or permanently, depending on the mode you're
playing.
And that will force you to find more recruits.
But Legion is so easy that it's incredibly rare for characters to be taken out of rotation.
The other answer on the game's site is the idea of making a completely unique crew.
"Want to make a team of classic British spies?
Or maybe a team of football hooligans is more your cup of tea.
Whatever you decide, it's all up to you," it reads.
And in this instance, Legion fares a little better - especially thanks to the goofy characters
like a living statue, characters who can't stop farting, or geriatric pensioners with
bad backs.
You could argue that the game's actually at its best when you try to pick the very worst
characters for each situation.
But that has limitations too - especially with the story.
For one, the game's somewhat serious narrative is weirdly contrasted with your absurdist
comedy hero.
And two, while each character has a unique backstory and personality, none of that matters
when they join DedSec.
The protagonist of Watch Dogs: Legion is just one amorphous blob, with a different face
and slightly different inflection depending on who you are playing as.
Look, I could spend a lot longer exploring the specific ways Watch Dogs: Legion doesn't work.
If you want more, I recommend this great video from Writing on Games.
But that's not really important here.
Because the critical point to take away is that innovation without implementation is
basically… nothing.
The developers of Watch Dogs: Legion spent considerable time and effort making a clever,
complex, and expensive system of data points, relationships, and random generation.
But because it's not supported by the game design in any real way, it's all rendered
largely meaningless.
The structure, story, and moment-to-moment gameplay almost never encourages the player
to explore this system.
In fact, a lot of the time, it actively discourages the player from bothering with it at all - thanks
to repetitive recruitment missions and long loading times to switch character.
Perhaps Ubisoft should have doubled down on the idea of picking the right recruit for
each job, with distinctly different characters and missions.
Or gone all in on giving each player a unique experience, with more crazy characters and
a story to match.
But it doesn't really do either, leaving us with a pretty typical open world game where
you can change the main character for… some… reason.
This annual series is all about celebrating innovation, but Watch Dogs: Legion is a strong
reminder that innovation alone is not worth chasing.
It's only when those clever ideas are actually supported by the rest of the game, and become
a critical part of the structure, that they become legendary bits of design.
Hey!
I had a bunch of other games I considered for this video - so here's my honourable mentions
for most innovative 2020.
Noita is a roguelike where every pixel is simulated, which allows for crazy explosions,
raging fires, and water physics.
Carto is a cute cartography puzzler where you change the map to literally move the world
beneath your feet.
And Carrion is a reverse horror Metroidvania, where you play as a tentacled monster rampaging
through a lab.
And that's me done for the year.
2020 has been an unrelenting nightmare that we just can't seem to wake up from - but,
professionally - this has been a pretty good year.
I hit a million subscribers and 100 million views.
GMTK had the largest ever online-only Game Jam.
I was a game design consultant for a major studio.
I co-wrote an academic paper and saw it published in a journal.
I was a BAFTA judge.
I got my name in the credits for Spelunky 2.
And I even won a game of Fall Guys.
But now, it's time for a much-needed break.
Have a great Christmas or whatever, and I'll see you in 2021.