Crowd Control

Ubisoft’s boldest blockbuster in years takes the N out of NPC

- Chris Schilling

No city is anything without its people. Yet they’re often the last thing we think about when it comes to urban open-world games. We marvel at the number of square miles of real estate we’ve been given to explore; we gaze longingly at the toys and tools we’ll eventually accumulate to help make the place our own; we stare at map screens pocked with icons, spoilt for choice about what to do and where to go next. Meanwhile, the people are often little more than hapless victims. They’re there either to sell us an illusion, the ideal of the so-called living, breathing world, or they’re targets – for violence, comedy, or perhaps both at once. Watch Dogs Legion at last gives them the opportunity to take centre stage, as you play the role of starmaker, picking one out from the crowd to recruit – and then, soon after, to become. You can be rich or poor, old or young, a middle-class espionage expert or a street-smart council-estate kid – not forgetting the women of Bletchley Park, who were hacking decades before DedSec. ‘Play as anyone’ is Legion’s exciting and wildly ambitious pitch: “The three most challenging words of my career,” creative director Clint Hocking tells us.

It is, you have to say, a very Clint Hocking kind of idea. After all, he’s well accustomed to confounding expectations.