By Matt Purslow

Watch Dogs Legion, Ubisoft’s third game in its hacktivist open-word series, asks a lot of questions. Just how far are we willing to let authoritarianism and corporate greed dictate the course of society? What are the consequences of under-funded public services? What happens when ordinary people make a stand? Its most fascinating question, though, is what if every non-playable character was playable?

I recently visited Ubisoft Toronto to meet with the Watch Dogs Legion team and watch the game being played for 45 minutes. At first glance, Legion is what you would expect from the third game in the Watch Dogs series; there’s an open-world where you can drive cars, hack CCTV cameras, and play havoc with people’s lives and smartphones. But there’s much, much more to Watch Dogs Legion. Underpinning the entire game is an interconnected network of systems that allow for an astonishing set of possibilities.

These systems fit together to create what Ubisoft calls the ‘Play as Anyone’ feature, which effectively acts as a hyper-advanced version of Driver: San Francisco’s be-any-car Shift mechanic. There is no cast of traditional heroes in Watch Dogs Legion. There’s no Marcus, Sitara, or Wrench. There are no defined protagonists with specific personalities. Instead, literally any person you encounter on the street in Legion’s world can be your playable character. You could be a prim and proper banker, ready to cause chaos dressed in a custom-cut suit. Or perhaps a renegade punk with swagger in every step is more your style? Or, to take the idea to its extreme conclusion, you could be an 80-year-old arthritic pensioner who can barely climb a waist-high wall.

There are countless types of people that you can become thanks to Watch Dogs Legion’s setting: near future London. Britain’s capital city is one of the most multicultural communities in the world, and developer Ubisoft Toronto has done an admirable job in replicating that variety. From the alternative youth of Camden to the stiff-upper-lip of Westminster and everything in between, it seems like the many shades of The Big Smoke have been recreated. As such, if you found Watch Dogs 2’s bunch of hipster hackers’ l33t chat was enough to make you vomit, then you can remedy that in Legion by modeling yourself after Kingsman’s suave master spies. Or the elderly Women’s Institute, if that’s your thing.

Every single person in this digital metropolis is procedurally generated. The system adheres to a variety of logical rules to create millions of convincing humans. Each one has a backstory, relationships, and traits. None of this is purely for show; it is via study of these generated personalities that you’ll select which of London’s citizens you wish to recruit into your Dedsec hacking gang. Yes, gang: as the game’s title suggests, you don’t just choose one person to play as. Rather, you choose many.

The next question, then, is why does London require a team of hackers? Well, in the wake of Brexit, the city is facing its downfall. Rising automation has devastated the economy, eliminating blue and white-collar jobs alike and causing social strife. The government has become an ineffective husk, and corporations have stepped in to fill the power vacuum. Authoritarianism has swollen to the point that private military contractors run the city like an Owellian nightmare; citizens are rounded up into deportation centres and forced out of the country. It’s a real-life far-right endgame that many people currently fear, but amplified with a sci-fi overlay: between the peaks of The Shard and The Gherkin fly surveillance and combat drones that enforce the will of London’s new overlords. The fear and uncertainty of modern times has proven nutritious fuel for Ubisoft’s imagination, which we explore in our feature on Watch Dogs Legion’s approach to politics.

Naturally, someone needs to stand up to this injustice, and that someone is Dedsec, by way of you. By recruiting numerous people to your cause, you can create a team with the variety of skills and approaches required to bring this terrifying regime to its knees.

As an example, you may decide that your team could use a doctor in order to enhance the group’s healing stats. Every character in the world has a routine, and so someone with medical skills will be working at a hospital at some point during their daily schedule. As such, your recruitment operation is best started at one of the city’s medical buildings.

As in previous games, you can profile characters by using your phone, allowing you to identify a doctor that you’d like to recruit. But unlike Metal Gear Solid 5, recruitment isn’t as easy as knocking someone out and fulton-lifting them back to Mother Base. Instead you’ll need to convince your potential new hacker through a variety of dynamically-generated quests.

In this situation, it may be that your ideal doctor is actually being blackmailed by one of London’s many organised crime syndicates. Helping them out of this situation could be the trick to convincing them to join Dedsec. The most straightforward way of solving this problem is by tracking down the blackmailer and putting a bullet between their eyes. Job done. You’ve now got a doctor.

Or maybe you don’t. Every character has a meter that measures their support for Dedsec. Some are just a final straw away from being ready to put on a mask and get involved in the resistance, while others require a little more persuasion. If that’s the case, then the game creates more missions to help you raise their support meter. So, perhaps after killing their blackmailer, your prospective doctor is now being questioned by the authorities about their relationship to the now-missing criminal. It may be that erasing their records from authority databases so the questioning ceases is just the ticket to getting them to finally commit to your cause.

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Recruiting causes a ripple in the fabric of London, though. If you kill the blackmailer, you impact more relationships than just your new medical specialist’s. How does the grieving partner of the blackmailer now feel about Dedsec? It’s definitely not positive, that’s for sure. And as a result, they’ll be more difficult to recruit. And if you really angered them, they may even kidnap your team members off the streets, or join Dedsec’s enemies to get their revenge.

With a new member recruited, you’re able to assign them one of three classes: Enforcer, Infiltrator, or Hacker. Each comes with a distinct skill tree to progress and a unique role to fulfill. For example, Enforcers are your foot soldiers and are the ideal candidates for deadly shootouts. They can learn flashy gunplay techniques and fire explosive rounds, as well as make use of the game’s heaviest artillery.

But, to continue Watch Dogs 2’s legacy, there’s always the option to take a non-lethal approach to situations, and that’s where your Infiltrators come in handy. Infiltrators are all about stealth and melee, and are the embodiment of completely refreshed systems in both departments. Melee combat now has blocks, dodges, and counters, making it a more fully-featured option. It is also tied to a new escalation system; if you fire a gun, every enemy in the area will seek you out and respond with lethal force. Pick a melee fight, though, and it’s not only easier to avoid attention, but also enemies won’t pull a gun out on you. This allows you to more easily return to stealth after having beaten the seven bells out of the guard in your way.

Infiltrators can also turn invisible. Well, kind of. In this nightmare future London, it’s now mandatory for every citizen to have their eyeballs wired up to Augmented Reality software. Infiltrators can hack this software and ‘delete’ their image, rendering them invisible to everyone around them (think of the block function from the ‘The Entire History of You’ episode of Black Mirror and you’re on the right track). You can even project the effect onto bodies to hide them from patrolling guards. It’s all a bit Splinter Cell, which is no surprise considering Clint Hocking, the director behind Chaos Theory, is the creative lead on Watch Dogs Legion.

Finally there are the Hackers, who are the embodiment of the classic Watch Dogs fantasy. Like Marcus, these guys can operate RC vehicles to infiltrate buildings and complete objectives without even setting foot in the mission area. They’re also the only class who can hack the looming Blade Runner-style drones that dominate the skyline, which can then be used to drop cargo on the heads of enemies, or even ridden like hoverboards.

The game’s commitment to choice means you can create a team that favours one of these classes, or assemble a multi-talented team that allows you to choose your approach for any given mission. Like in Grand Theft Auto 5, you can swap on the fly to any of your recruited characters (they even have those fun little cutscenes when you swap that gives you a snapshot of what they’re doing with their lives), which means should you suddenly require to crank up the violence mid-mission, you can simply open your map and switch perspective to one of your Enforcers in the local area.

You’ll want to make sure the violence doesn’t get too hot, though, since Watch Dogs Legion features permadeath. If any of your team are killed, they’re never coming back, and so every mission features the very real tension that it could be the last for your star player. There’s something distinctly XCOM about this, and it’s a minor stroke of genius to bring that strategy game stress across to an open-world action game. Thanks to underpinning systems like this and the constantly altering relationships of London’s population, Watch Dogs Legion appears to be a game dedicated to cause and effect. Like Shadow of Mordor and its Nemesis system, Dedsec’s world is powered by ever-moving components that ensure consequences are explored in a way that isn’t simply narrative moral quandaries.

With all of this said, it’s easy to worry that Watch Dogs Legion is an entirely systems driven game, lacking the cinematic flair and bright personality of its predecessor. After all, if the game designers themselves have no idea who your characters will be, how can they create a compelling story?

I was only able to see a single campaign mission and its associated cutscene during my hands-off demo at Ubisoft Toronto, but what played out before me seemed like a cinematic from Watch Dogs 2, albeit trading in the quirk for the hallmarks of a Guy Ritchie film. In short: it was not obvious that the character involved – a bald Idris Elba doppleganger with a voice to match – wasn’t a pre-designed protagonist. But while that seems simple on the surface, it’s the result of a daunting amount of work: there are multiple versions of the story that plays out depending on your Dedsec roster.

As with the previous games, there is still a core narrative with multiple storylines and dozens of scripted missions, but the cutscenes for these change depending on who you have recruited. Ubisoft emphasises that it’s not merely a case of different actors reading the same script, but that each cinematic has been written numerous times over in order to cater to the variety of playable character archetypes. So if your team is made up of gangster rappers, they’ll have a different approach – both in words and animation – to a cutscene’s story than if you’re playing as ex-MI5 agents. Some characters are sarcastic, others are professional, and the script variants – numbering in double figures – address this.

It is a crazy ambition, but an ambition that could mean Watch Dogs Legion’s characters feel a bit soulless. For all the work the systems do putting together realistic behaviors and backstories, I am a little nervous that it will be in the narrative sections where the cracks will show. I fell in love with Watch Dogs 2’s eccentric cast, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that Legion can’t possibly do the same when the characters have, to some degree, been produced by a piece of software. And yet everything I’ve seen so far about Watch Dogs Legion has been so outlandishly ambitious and apparently successful that I’m also willing to give the team the benefit of the doubt. It will take playing the whole game to confirm this, of course, but for now I’m choosing to live in a state of optimism.

Watch Dogs Legion’s creative director, Clint Hocking, is known for being uncompromising, and in turn for making uncompromising games. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is still lauded to this day as one of the best stealth games ever made, and Far Cry 2 remains the most systemically interesting of the series. But despite these successes, Hocking hasn’t shipped a game since 2008. Instead, he’s spent short tenures at a variety of other developers – Valve among them – almost as if he were finding it impossible to land the project that would hold his attention.

Watch Dogs Legion is the first time Hocking has stuck with a studio long enough to see a project through to completion. For me, this says something about what he and the team have put together: a complex, ambitious beast that has kept a firm grip on his imagination. Everything that I’ve seen and learned of it demonstrates why this would be the case, too. And while I won’t jump the gun just yet – systems of this scale simply have to be proven over hours of play, not a 45 minute demonstration, so I’ll have to wait until Watch Dogs Legions March 6 release date to make final judgement – what I can safely say is that this is the Watch Dogs sequel no one saw coming, and a sequel that no one is going to forget.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. His house in London has not been recreated in Watch Dogs Legion, but his favourite bizarre Camden Market shop has. He looks forward to dropping a drone bomb on it.