Impressions Watch Dogs: Legion Online, the promising multiplayer that already has a date.
We tested for five hours Watch Dogs: Legion Online, the multiplayer mode for Ubisoft’s sandbox hacker, an ambitious and promising proposal that has given us a great time. In addition, we tell you when it will be available. Inside impressions!
Although it relies primarily on the single player, The Watch Dogs saga has always had an important space for online multiplayer. The first installment presented us with the invasions, an ingenious and tremendously fun way that invited us to hack another player without being discovered (or try to find the enemy player, if they were hacked), which became one of the favorites of the fans. So much so that in Watch Dogs 2 it returned along with several new modes, adding PvE and PvP options.
But when Watch Dogs: Legion went on sale for PS4, Xbox One, Google Stadia, and PC on October 29, did it without multiplayer. That does not mean that for Ubisoft online mode is no longer important in the hacker sandbox … Rather, quite the opposite: Watch Dogs: Legion’s online multiplayer aims to take things to a new level, offering game modes as promising as they are ambitious.
But given that the Legion single player is not without ambition (something we delve into in our analysis) and that the pandemic has complicated things quite a bit, the online mode had to be delayed to keep up and will arrive in March of 2021. At Hobby Consolas we have had the opportunity to test it for five hours (PC version) with other members of the Spanish press and we had a really good time.
We tell you how the session was and what you can expect in our Watch Dogs: Legion Online impressions.
Saved by the power of hackmistad
The first and most important thing we have to point out is that Watch Dogs: Legion makes a distinction between single player and online mode; If you have the title, you may have already noticed that from the main menu we can access either of the two options (but it is not possible to click on the online tab, of course). It is a detail that serves to give us an idea of the scale in this way, since in the previous installments the online activities were integrated with the story for a player.
By accessing Watch Dogs: Legion Online, and after completing a brief mission that serves as a tutorial, we can continue playing as we would in the story (that is, we can run, drive, shoot, hack, recruit, etc.), with the difference is that we often come across other players.
We can join them (or form a group inviting other players from our friends list) to do anything we can think of in the open world: enjoy a pleasant walk through the streets of London, ride the London Eye, see the city from above on a cargo drone, collapse traffic with a massive hack, shoot us and see who can last the longest fighting the forces of Albion …
This in itself is already fun, well the elaborate character system in Watch Dogs: Legion makes everything more interesting by allowing us to control any NPC (that we have previously recruited) and use their abilities, which are tremendously varied. Forming a group of expert combat hackers is a lot of fun … Almost as much as a quartet of old men without fear of sudden death.
To make things more entertaining, a good number of optional activities have been added that can be completed in company based on the mini-games of the campaign (we can compete to see who manages to give more touches, play a game of darts or face each other in tournaments of melee combat), as well as daily and weekly challenges. All these activities help us to obtain reputation, a ranking system very similar to that seen in other online games. Every time we level up, we get rewards.
But the real grace of Watch Dogs: Legion Online is in the missions and events designed specifically to be played in company, which are divided into four types: cooperative missions, city events, Spiderbot Arena and Tactical Ops.
The first ones do not require too many explanations: they are missions in which we must fulfill objectives similar to those seen in the campaign, but adapted to cooperative play. For example, in one we had to steal two vehicles and survive a chase, with the added danger that if both cars were too far apart, the mission would fail. Of course there is no shortage of missions in which we must infiltrate a place to download data, and it is very satisfactory to solve them by stealth. As there are several, it is much more complicated to organize, although in these cases it is not essential.
Where it is in the Tactical Ops, which are the Watch Dogs: Legion Online raids. It is an operation made up of several missions, each with different objectives and unique mechanics that require total understanding. For example, in the second mission of the Tactical Op, we had to move through the streets avoiding the gaze of the Bloohound, a type of military drone that cannot be hacked or destroyed by normal methods.
This forced us to act like a true team, keeping an eye on every corner, agreeing to decide where to hide or how to approach a location, and lastly syncing ourselves to load a virus onto the drones that made them vulnerable for a few precious seconds. Needless to say, it took us a great number of tries, but when we finally succeeded, it was tremendously satisfying.
And that’s just one of the five missions that make up the raid. Among the most curious, we also participated in one in which a member of the team had to control a Spider-bot and activate four switches in a specific order, an order that the rest of the team members had to tell him about … While they faced waves of Albion soldiers. Very intense.
Lastly we have the spider-bots arena, which as its name suggests is a combat in which we fight controlling these “adorable” drones. To make things more interesting, in addition to shooting and jumping, on the playing field we find power-ups that change the type and power of ammunition, health recuperators and “hackable” elements, such as barriers.
The idea is good and it is good to play a couple of games, but in this mode we miss a greater number of maps (at the moment there is only one) and modes, since the only one available was all against all.
And up to here our Watch Dogs: Legion Online impressions. As you can see, Ubisoft is taking maximum care of the multiplayer of the open world title so that it is not a simple extra; We can look forward to a content-rich mode with constant updates that will keep us glued to this virtual London. Of course, if you have already finished the story of Watch Dogs; Legion, seems like the ideal reason to put the mask back on.
And now the big question that probably crosses your minds:what is the release date of Watch Dogs: Legion Online? You won’t have to wait long; Next March 9 the multiplayer will be available for everyone. Do you want to start hacking in company?
