E3 2019: It’s true! Watch Dogs: Legion lets you play as any character on London’s streets

How about them leaks? Ubisoft sprung quite a few this year, though it hasn’t quite dampened the buzz around Watch Dogs: Legion. It seems to be yet another wild departure for the series, replacing the apparently outdated idea of a central protagonist with the entire populace of London instead.

Wait, really?

That’s right. In this post-Brexit setting, players can control any character among their legion (hah) of resistance members. They’re the underground response to an authoritarian regime and an oppressed people, and the collective “you” can recruit more to the cause by simply heading to the streets.

Every character has unique traits and a persistent backstory in the open-world game. Lead studio Ubisoft Toronto says that each member will have a class, level, and new abilities and upgrades. The idea behind Legion isn’t to craft some sort of super-hacker but to swap between this growing skills network to find a preferred approach.

It’s about the “heroes that live in each of us,” says creative director Clint Hocking, which is why his team went to the trouble of fully animating and voicing every character in the game.

So, whether it’s hacking drones with a young Londoner, silently gathering info with an intelligence agent, or gunning down foes with a sweet old grandma, Watch Dogs: Legion promises complete freedom.

You won’t have to do it alone, either, as the game supports four-player co-op with shared progression between single-player and online.

It’s an exciting premise that’s for sure, and perhaps an opportunity for Ubisoft to finally stand and own up to a political stance in their games, instead of what happened with The Division 2.

What it’ll also have over that other Tom Clancy game is raytracing support. NVIDIA is improving the publisher’s digitally recreated cities with all those fancy lighting effects and other gaming tech to make London come alive.

And here comes the goods

Alongside the usual spread of editions is an update in the Ubicollectibles line: a 26-cm ‘Resistant of London’ figurine that can swap between two masks and comes with a unique ‘King of Hearts’ mask DLC.

Watch Dogs: Legion releases for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Stadia on March 6, 2020.

Images: Ubisoft