Watch Dogs: well done, the Legion! – Ubisoft – News

Watch Dogs Legion was released a few days ago and it’s time to take stock of what’s being said about Ubisoft’s ambitious game. Let’s start with the tests. Overall, leading journalists agree that the Legion system works well. You can recruit any NPC and create a colorful army of hackers. We can finally make an army of old people. On the other hand, we will ignore the fact that the slightest person can turn into a mass murderer in a few minutes in the hands of a slightly psycho player.

But the whole is weighed down by an ultra-repetitive structure with missions which too often consist in going somewhere, stealing something and then getting out of the way. At the level of the universe, London is faithfully transcribed and the situation described seems furiously realistic, namely a nationalist and ultra-secure England which has entrusted the keys of the kingdom to a private security company, Albion. To reinforce everything, you can listen in the game to fake podcasts narrated by real journalists. But as too often with Ubi games, the story does not follow and only touches on sensitive topics. We’re closer to a Snatch than a Children Of Men.

On a technical level, the game had some problems when it was launched but they are mostly fixed except for the RTX effects. Sometimes they don’t activate and when they do, NVIDIA’s ray-tracing is super demanding. DLSS saves the day but the game is still very hungry in video memory. The game also requires a strong CPU both in number of cores (more than 4 is recommended) and in power per core. Watch Dogs Legion will be part of the launch games for next-gen consoles. On both PS5 and XSeX, it will run at 4K @ 30FPS with ray-tracing enabled. The result is quite impressive.

Finally, a few weeks ago a group of hackers attacked Ubisoft and threatened the studio to release all of Ubisoft’s source code on pain of releasing all of the game’s source code. It seems they have put their threat to execution since 560 GB have just fallen on the net containing both the code and the assets. This may complicate modding as it will be hard to tell if the mods created were done using stolen code (and therefore are illegal) or via reverse engineering. Ubisoft risks pulling in the heap and they will probably be right.

Besides, it’s very sad that Ubisoft is anti-modding. We understand that this would ruin micro-transactions and WDL understands tons of them, but a good SDK would ensure long-term sales. And it’s not just Ubisoft: all AAA publishers are against it. Only Bethesda encouraged the practice but they gave up with Fallout 76. How about you? That he took ? What do you think ?