Watch Dogs Legion has been out in the world for under a week, and many players are already having a lot of fun exploring an alternate version of London. The Watch Dogs franchise is known for evolving each next installment in its franchise and turning the idea of what it means to be a Watch Dogs game on its head. For Legion, a major selling point of the game is that players can recruit and play as any NPC, whenever they want.
The game is set in a London after Brexit, and revolves around DedSec and their goal on freeing Watch Dogs Legion‘s version of London from being a surveillance state. Although there are ties to real-world politics in-game like the infamous Brexit, the world of Watch Dogs Legion is one step removed from reality. As such, the version of London that the game presents has some key differences from the real world London, and it’s worth delving into those differences and similarities to see what inspired Watch Dogs Legion.
Like many popular sci-fi video games, Watch Dogs Legion is set in the near future, opting to include gadgets and technology that are more likely to be familiar to those in the modern world, rather than space ships and aliens. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything DedSec members use in Watch Dogs Legion exists yet in the real world let alone London, but some of it isn’t so far-fetched.
The AR Shroud ability, for example, is a way to make bodies invisible to bystanders after the player has taken them down. While this technology isn’t accessible to today’s world, London itself participates in augmented and alternate reality technology and games. The city hosts events that can be found through ARGNet, but these alternate reality games don’t affect the real world the same way the AR Shroud or Watch Dogs Legion‘s Spiderbots do. However, various tours and events around London do play into people’s desire to interact with a faux parallel dimension for a while.
The rest of the heavy surveillance tech found in Watch Dogs Legion is probably not something most Londoners will see or interact with, although only the future will tell how closely reality and games will coincide.
The locations on the game’s map divide London into eight-real world locations, referred to as boroughs, that many locals will be familiar with, although they only represent a fraction of London’s 30+ districts.
- Camden
- Islington & Hackney
- City of London
- Tower Hamlets
- City of Westminster
- Southwark
- Lambeth
- Nine Elms
All these boroughs give the player multiple objectives to complete, which are all tied in to the game’s themes of propaganda and Big Brother-like government surveillance. However, carousing any of these boroughs will show off some real locations like the Tower of London, although places like other locations like Trafalgar Square are filled with protests of Watch Dogs Legion‘s dystopian surveillance state.
Many real-life landmarks are available for the player to find, like Barbican Center in the City of London, Big Ben in the City of Westminster, the Shard in Southwark, and the Tate Modern museum in Southwark. Some objectives take players to these landmarks or nearby them, which gives players an opportunity to feel more fully immersed into the world of (dystopian near-future London). Most people can name Big Ben, Shakespeare’s Globe, the London Eye, and a few other locations as being iconic parts of London, but it’s less popular locations like Southbank Centre and its artistic venues, Camden Market, and St. Pancras station that makes the Watch Dogs Legion experience feel so diverse and lived-in.
While it’s understandable that small stores and random trash cans and benches aren’t represented exactly as they are in real life, many players are impressed to be able to see a version of London not so far removed from the real one. To many people, landmarks are what makes a city into what it is. A London resident may be disappointed to see some of their favorite places not accurarely represented, but the open world of Watch Dogs Legion is very impressive to many people.
Distance and crowding have been notably cut down, probably because adding in over 8 million NPCs to represent London’s real-life population would have been a massive strain on anyone’s systems. The game does procedurally generate millions of possible NPCs for the player to inhabit, but many of the locations don’t reflect real-life London crowds and traffic confestion. And of course, the in-game map is much smaller than the real deal. The Watch Dogs Legion map size has been calculated to give players about 9 square kilometers or 3.5 square miles to play on, which is a far cry from the real proportions: over 1,500 square kilometers, or over 600 square miles.
Real-world transit in London is a lot more time-consuming and frankly, less exciting. The average Londoner spends a lot of time in a cab or on the Tube subway system, and standing in a packed subway car for extended periods of time just to get to another borough doesn’t sound like fun gameplay for many people. Thankfully, Watch Dogs Legion’s Fast Travel makes all this a lot easier on players, as it enables players to travel much more quickly to areas they’ve unlocked by visiting. In-game, the narrative is that the player is using the Tube, but as any Londoner knows, riding the trains can take a lot longer than a few seconds.
It’s clear that the designers of Watch Dogs Legion spent a ton of time trying to reflect London as it is, and trying to show London as it could be in a dystopian future. Although this game may not be the ideal way to explore a true-to-life London like some would-be travelers might like, it’s a highly detailed approximate representation of one of the world’s greatest cities. While to many people, the NPC recruitment aspect is what really sells the game, the setting detail is not to be ignored and helps make Watch Dogs Legion as complex and colorful as it is.
Watch Dogs: Legion is available now on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One. PS5 and Xbox Series X versions are coming at launch.
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