The first one immediately splits the team into two groups, as two hacks must be activated simultaneously on opposite sides of the city. These are a chain of increasingly challenging missions that effectively work as Legion’s answer to raids or heists. Those more interesting puzzles are most prominent in Tactical Operations. We felt it was far more interesting to split players up in certain intervals and to push them out.” “It gave our design team much more interesting puzzles and challenges to build, instead of always building one space for four plays constantly. “Having groups of players go apart gives them a more interesting, smaller co-op challenge within a co-op experience,” explained Lathieeshe Thillainathan, Live Producer on Watch Dogs Legion. Splitting players up generates a new layer of tension and demands a higher level of coordination, which is a welcome wrinkle in the mode’s otherwise straightforward mission design. There are no ‘formal’ jobs or classes, but objectives will require players to split from the group to perform a task while the remainders complete a different job. More interesting is each mission’s approach to how players are assigned roles. It’s all a bit silly, which lends well to playing with a group of friends. The quest chains are not particularly ambitious, but they do fulfil the Dedsec anarchy fantasy one saw our team break into a compound, steal two bomb-rigged hatchbacks, and then race against the clock to dump them into the Thames river. Even if it is a whistle stop tour, I appreciate the craft that has gone into each of Legion’s online missions. As such, the overall experience could be quite short-lived for many.
It’s a barebones mode, though, and feels more like a pleasant distraction than the core of Legion’s online. There is a PvP spider bot arena for up to four players, which is essentially Robot Wars does Quake, and is thus more immediately replayable. However, the campaign-like design will likely mean the missions are a one-and-done exercise for all but Legion’s most hardcore fans. Watch Dogs Legions’ multiple methods of approach also meant each attempt played out slightly differently, demonstrating the potential for replays. Achieving a perfect stealth run, especially in a team, takes a few tries, but it was fun to master this multi-layered construction site puzzle. YES NOOf course, it didn’t go that smoothly on the first attempt. But with up to three extra players in tow, you can more effectively exploit Legion’s many overlapping systems. Your targets, objectives, and methods remain akin to what you tackled in Legion’s story, and so you’ll be breaking into corporations, hacking their terminals, and running away with all their precious data. The co-op missions remind me a lot of Assassin’s Creed Unity’s approach to friendly multiplayer, in that they are effectively identical to the fare you find in the main campaign, just redesigned with more participants in mind. These are designed for four players, making Legion’s online a relatively small scale affair. Forget chaotic lobbies and opulent penthouses with 10-car garages, Watch Dogs Legion’s online is a focused co-op campaign for four friends.ĭuring a hands-on session of the multiplayer modes that will be made available on March 9, I was able to play a handful of co-op missions and sample the raid-like Tactical Operations.
But while it does share some minor common ground with Rockstar’s playground, Ubisoft’s approach to an online urban sprawl is markedly different. It’s easy to look at Watch Dogs Legion and assume that its upcoming multiplayer mode will be a London-flavoured GTA Online.