Watch Dogs: Legion tried something no game had done before, giving us an open world where we could recruit anyone we see around us. Joining our team, the once NPCs suddenly turn into protagonists, and with these new DedSec members we are trying to give humans back control of dystopian London.
These characters, whose everything from their appearance to their speech and life details were created with the procedural generation, your blood warms up as you complete missions and you form bonds, these characters are not immortal. If you play the game with the permadeath feature, it's easy for each of your characters to be fatally injured during missions. The permadeath feature, which we can translate into Turkish as "permanent death", has turned into a very important element that psychologically distinguishes Watch Dogs: Legion from other games.
I couldn't help but write an article about this feature, which I hated because it killed characters I both liked and loved. Should you unlock permadeath in Watch Dogs: Legion? Or would it be better if you closed it? Read on…
May the souls of our Killed in Actions rest in peace
First of all, I want to tell you the story of a screenshot:
Take a good look at this photo, dear reader.
This photo is a screenshot of sadness for me.
All three characters you see in this photo are no longer alive. London's gangs, private security; They fell victim to the tools of dystopia.
The character we see from the point of view is a slightly “preppy” girl named Bronwyn. Before she joined She dedsec, she was a beggar lying on the streets with a scanned rifle of unknown origin. The woman in the hand-to-hand couple is Morrigan. He joined DedSec when he was an MI:6 agent and has played an important role in many major assignments since then. If the man is Richard; As you can see, it says "Potential Recruit" on it, because at the time I took this image, I hadn't included Richard in our case yet, I was just "stalking" him. You ask why?
As I was wandering around Piccadilly with Bronwyn, Richard came across me, and it said "Lover of DedSec operative Morrigan". I was quite excited to realize that Morrigan has a private life that I don't know about apart from his crazy DedSec spree and that the game simulates this private life, and I took a glance at Richard's daily schedule. Suddenly what do I see; Richard was going to the theater with his girlfriend Morrigan at the British Theater at noon on the same day! So I went to the British Theater saying this is an opportunity and started to wait for our couple. I found them hand in hand like this and immediately exploded the screenshot you see above.
Days after that, I was on a mission with Morrigan in the Bank of England, and I just didn't see the enemy with a shotgun approaching me with the invisibility module turned on. Morrigan was shot dead from scratch with a shotgun…forever wiped from my game. Hearing this, Richard raided the Bank of England to finish the mission that Morrigan could not complete, but it was clear that Richard's main goal was not to finish the mission, he just wanted to avenge his lover… Richard, who killed every enemy he saw in cold blood, even a creature living in a whole bank. He completed the mission without letting go, and thus, the Suicidal Vengeance Angel Richard was born.
Richard, who bought himself a black suit, leather jacket and gloves as soon as he left the bank, acted in the next missions with the same madness and bloodthirst. Richard's goal now was to find his death somewhere, rather than helping DedSec.
He found it before it was too late… In another mission, Richard became KIA, that is, “killed in action” and achieved his goal… Now, Richard had reached Valhalla and was with his beloved Morrigan.
What about Bronwyn? He too lost his life on a mission a short time after all these events, and it made me sad looking at this picture above. This trio, struggling to regain London, was involved in the dark pages of my save file. I would never see them again.
Going crazy trying to play a game
Watch Dogs: Legion offers the player a very interesting choice with the permadeath option. Are we ready to lose forever the characters whose lives we are intimately involved with and warm up by running from task to task? Since we can recruit all the NPCs in the game to our team, or in other words, since none of the main characters we play are actually the main characters, it shouldn't be so devastating for the player to actually lose these characters, right?
But interestingly, the goose's foot is not like that, dear reader. These losses can be so devastating that I realized that I didn't even want to close the game and go back for a while.
So, let's come to the question this article is trying to answer: Should we play Watch Dogs: Legion with permadeath?
For me, the answer to this question is ABSOLUTELY YES. In fact, without the permadeath, I would argue that Watch Dogs: Legion would have offered a much drier and flatter gameplay experience.
The fact that your characters are face to face with death at any moment requires you to approach what you do in the game more carefully. Running around like crazy can be considered equivalent to the death of a character you love, because in this game, characters can die really easily. When Permadeath is always in the back of your mind, “I wonder if I don't endanger the agent I love so much on this mission, but use an employee I love less?” You start to think. But here's the fun part: If you take that other employee and start doing the tasks with him, this time you start to warm up to this character and let's see you go back to the beginning. What do you do now? Should you add someone new to the team? Or will you continue to use the character you love at the cost of jeopardizing it?
Another nice aspect of this business is that creating your own stories in the game gets richer and easier with permadeath. The mini-story I told above is ultimately a mini-story that Ubisoft didn't think of when designing this game, and it's a clipping that makes the world of Legion more colorful for me, causing me to immerse myself in the "illusion of reality" of this world. When Morrigan died, I could have gone to the Bank of England with another agent of mine rather than with her lover Richard, but it seemed more "realistic" and more cinematic to me that Richard freaked out when he heard of his lover's death and took a vengeance on the spot. These stories, which do not cross the mind of the game, are riveted with permadeath and your commitment to your characters increases even more.
What happened, are we dead now?
Watch Dogs: Legion offers us a system that no game has tried before, bitter and sweet. This system has pros as well as cons; especially considering the game's near-disgraceful PC performance. However, as always, Ubisoft has given us an interesting open world, carefully crafted, and filled it with characters that have the potential to be interesting. What's left for us is to include these characters in our case and to write stories that add more enjoyment to the game as we examine their lives.
Just be careful: because you can lose all these characters!
And these losses can be gateways to new stories.