Storytelling

In Watch Dogs: Legion, near future London is facing its downfall… unless you do something about it. Build a resistance and fight the opportunists who have seized power. But sit down and have a cup of tea first. After all, you’re not a bloody monster.

London’s fallen into an oppressive nightmare, but there’s still a chance to trigger a wake up call. Rally the resistance to use the city’s tech and firepower against those pulling the strings.

Where will you find your recruits? How about everywhere? Every Londoner has a reason to fight back. Play as literally any character — a bartender, an ex-spy, a fallen boxer, a well-connected lawyer, a stark raving mad grandma, anyone.

Paris Studio’s missions on the development of Watch Dogs Legion

On the Watch Dogs Legion project, our teams worked with the Toronto studio, which is the leader of the project. 3 mandates were given to the Paris studio: a worldbuilding mandate, a level design and missions mandate and a dynamic gameplay mandate.

Worldbuilding

On the worldbuilding part, it was a question of creating one of the districts of the final map. The area to be built was a very diversified zone, mixing tourist areas, working-class districts, offices… This left a lot of place for the imagination of our developers, who were able to explore different themes, while integrating elements of the scenario into the scenery. For example, as the city is immersed in a totalitarian regime, it was important to find the mark of this domination everywhere in the architecture of this imagined London. Similarly, the futuristic world of the game pushes to create a world where technology is omnipresent. These are all elements that developers had to think about at every stage of their work.

Level design and missions

Concerning the mandate level design and missions, it is about the development of the “play as anyone” part, very important in Watch Dogs Legion. The idea is to create key locations that can accommodate several missions without knowing what those missions are going to be. It is necessary to develop scenes that will support the narration and that will adapt to a maximum of situations. To do this, the teams have set up families of entities (the family of objects on a table, the family of vehicles, etc.).

Mission design focuses more on the personal motivations of the characters by establishing a system of branching. This involves adapting the story and situations according to the decisions made by the player. The game keeps track of the elements and if the main character has an interaction – positive or negative – with another character, his or her feelings will be recorded on the character sheet.

Dynamic Gameplay

The idea is to dissociate the entities of the world of missions by creating a pipe of situations that can be reused infinitely in different contexts so that the player does not perceive that it is the same type of situation (creation of a panel of contrasts for each situation). Finally, the world itself has gameplay possibilities and the systems know how to adapt to the environment.