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Watch Dogs Legion Is Designed To Be Replayed Over 20 Times

Watch Dogs Legion has sounded ambitious from the word go, and the more we hear about it, the crazier and crazier it sounds. As you may already know, the game lets you play as loads of different characters, all of them randomly generated to some degree. Each and every character comes with their own strengths, weaknesses, name, and appearance. The system was shown off quite well during the title’s E3 2019 gameplay demo.

That’s a lot of choice in Watch Dogs Legion. By the sounds of it you’d have to play the game over 20 times to get the same cutscene or dialogue between two characters, meaning that we could very well be playing Watch Dogs for years just like other mammoth games such as The Witcher 3 or Skyrim. As Hocking put it, “whether you choose some suave, sophisticated secret agent dude, or some 80-year-old lady that you saw feeding pigeons in the park, your story is going to be uniquely yours.” Sign me the hell up.

According to Watch Dogs Legion creative director Clint Hocking, there’s even more variation to come with the game. During an interview with Edge magazine, Hocking was prompted to answer a question regarding the ways in which the proposed variations of the story play out functionally. Hocking responded with a mind-blowing revelation: Ubisoft has commissioned 20 different versions of the Watch Dogs Legion script. Here’s more from Hocking:

“There’s no dude on the box who’s there to start all the cinematics and the people you recruit are just the supporting cast. There are 20 different versions of Legion’s script and I don’t just mean people saying the same lines. We’re talking different characters, different personas, different voices, different acting. We’re using technology to alter all the voices…we used photogrammetry to capture dozens of different faces, which have been combined using innovative animation techniques to produce literally thousands of unique heads.“

What Watch Dogs Legion is attempting to do completely goes against many of the practical lessons we’ve learned from the games industry, eschewing a marketable main character to plaster over every advertisement and embracing the fluidity of chaos instead.

Will it pay off? It’s tough to say – there are a lot of things that can go wrong with a game attempting to be as open-ended as Watch Dogs Legion. Narratives can get watered down and lack emotional impact, for instance, or characters can never feel like they got off the ground in terms of development. That hasn’t changed people from being extremely excited about Watch Dogs Legion, however, which could mean big things for the franchise’s sales even if the finished product is less re-playable than it currently sounds.

Watch Dogs Legion will be available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC when it launches next year on March 6.