Hey everyone! I need 3 people to play with so I can get that last online achievement. I use Steam and I have an EST timezone. Thanks!

On my 5th replay, and after all these years i just noticed this big ass camera.

perfect finisher too, totally by chance

I Havent Beat Him Yet But man is He annoying

Difficulty in video games has been a hot conversation in recent years. Dark Souls, rouge-lites, and indie throwbacks have resurrected the idea of asking the player to learn through intense trial and error and to not expect to “get farther” every time. Meanwhile, a more critical conversation about how difficulty relates to accessibility has reached the mainstream. Across the spectrum on this topic though, we still center our framing of difficulty as a continuum of how “hard”, how “controller-smashing” something is — a framing that often relies on the dexterity, timing, or memorization involved.

This framing though shortchanges the dynamic range of what “difficulty” can involve and what it can achieve. Difficulty can instead be framed as a question of what relative weight we place on player agency and “flow” versus respecting the logic of a realized world. Defenders of game difficulty have used this argument, though largely in service of defending games whose difficulty still derives from physical reflexes, memorization of patterns, precise timing, and other skills we associate with physical ableism.

The gaming press has not expanded discussion outside this conception either, instead focusing critique on popular titles where difficulty manifests in these more traditional ways. More interesting experiments in difficulty centered around holistic limitations to the player — or limitations that require the player to relinquish control over traditionally “winnable” outcomes — tend to receive mixed reception, less passionate debate, and themselves are relatively rare outside of the survival genre or more niche titles.

So, imagine my surprise when Ubisoft, increasingly known for its cookie-cutter AAA-approach more than innovation, released a version of Watch Dog: Legion that serves as a case study for how holistic, thoughtful approaches to difficulty can utilize it as a behavioral shaping tool, requiring players to use a wider skillset and develop more respect for the social logic of the worlds they play in.

Difficult Changes

The statement I just made will seem bold to many. Legion received some praise upon its release, but largely disappeared quickly from the public and critic consciousness. There was good reason for this lack of staying power. The launch version of Legion was decidedly milquetoast.

Legion takes place in London, where a series of terrorist bombings pinned on the hacktivist group “Deadsec” has resulted in the creation of a police state run by Albion, a private military contractor. However, despite being in a supposedly fascist London that had restricted people’s freedom of movement, you could careen your way through the streets with as little care as you would in any open-world game. The security forces on the street more closely resemble mall security guards than an occupying force.

The unique selling point of the game was its NPC system, where you recruit members of the public to join your cause as playable operatives in lieu of a central character. It was surprisingly easy though to walk up to any person and begin a light conversation about whether they wanted to join an organization that, as far as the public knew, had just killed thousands. I lost interest in the NPC system before I truly dug into it, as it seemed like an unnecessary progression system that overly restricted you to marginally different abilities.

A new recruit was always just a 15-minute conversation and task away; not that you needed to recruit more than a handful of members, as none of their abilities were necessary to succeed. The main use for recruiting people was to give you more bodies to throw at missions when you failed. If you had “permadeath” off, losing an operative only meant a short stint in the hospital before their gunshot to the head was suddenly healed and your white-collar accountant was ready to start body-checking armored guards again.

Then in August of this year, Ubisoft released a new version of the single-player campaign called Resistance. Unlike other “harder” modes released, it represented a new approach to post-release difficulty options we’ve seen in some other AAA game updates lately, such as Ghost of Tsushima’s “lethal” mode.

Here, the goal was to do something more thoughtful than just throwing more enemies with longer health bars at you. The developers instead took a “holistic view at all the systems in the game”, to see where major changes could be made to “create more of a resistance fantasy”. The changes centered around two pillars: changes to the world design and social logic, and the introduction of severe limitations to player power. Both focused on making the player adapt to the logic of the world.

In the base game, I walked out of the starting safehouse, calmly got in an armored humvee within eyesight of two Albion guards, and safely drove off without a care. I had existed in the world freely for less than 60 seconds and I was already bypassing traffic in a stolen paramilitary vehicle. In Resistance, the moment I climbed into that vehicle, there was a “level-two” security response, with the guards from before now soldiers in flak vests that quickly unloaded a clip through my windshield, killing my agent before I could even put the vehicle in drive. Unlike a traditional AAA open-world game, the world was no longer a playground for me to walk around freely, simply choosing when I wanted to start a conflict or indulge my desire to play with the shiny toys.

All of the above changes to the logic of the world required me not to develop better timing, faster reflexes, or memorize attack patterns. Instead, they required me to stop and think. Patience, planning, knowledge of the social norms and geography of the world, and self-control over my desire for easy fun, all became “skills” I now had to use instead.

A “Rigid” Environment

On their own, these changes to the social logic of the world would not have been enough to change my behavior. A more traditional concept of difficulty still underlaid these changes, giving the game world enough “rigidity” that I couldn’t just ignore the new constraints.

Namely, changes making combat and other traditional systems more difficult to “win” forced me to adapt to the meta of the world and game design in ways I didn’t before. All security forces were now “elite” level or above, their AI significantly more aggressive and willing to use their special skills, and your own health and ammo drastically reduced. Shooting your way through things was now the last resort that it should be in a police state. The minor escalation system built into the AI mattered more now that the stakes were so much higher.

In Legion, if you trigger an AI into an attack state, it is possible to resolve the conflict through a melee tussle. However, if you try to run away, aggravate them too much, or pull any kind of non-melee weapon, they will pull a gun on you. In Resistance, this latter possibility is now a deadly and dangerous one. The fascist police state isn’t going to “jail” you anymore for causing too much trouble.

Since avoiding armed conflict was now more important, recruits with access to melee weapons that could be used without triggering an armed response or that had better health buffs and melee fighting skills were useful in a way they weren’t before. This greater importance of NPC skills extends to the non-combat ones as well. One of the major set of changes in Resistance is that the cost of tech upgrades is greatly increased, hacks take longer, you can’t set proximity-based detonation of environmental traps, and the tech points you collect for upgrades are now sometimes bobby-trapped with an Albion response.

The result is that, without significant time investment, it is no longer possible to quickly and easily turn all your operatives into SMG-wielding, drone-hacking generalists. Recruiting double agents with safer access to areas, drone specialists, hackers with unlimited range, operatives with heavy firepower for when you do need to fight, etc was a necessity now. It gave purpose to the recruitment system and created a feeling of being an organization whose members all had their own reason for being recruited.

A Rigorous Skillset

These changes may all still seem small in isolation, but when combined with each other, create emergent scenarios that make the player respect the game world as a living place. By increasing player agency limitations and narrowing what I could do without risk of death, the game expanded the range of skills and cognition I had to use.

When I first booted up the game and encountered the new checkpoints, I spent an hour simply testing ways to get past the ones around the starting safehouse. I was relying on an instinct honed from years of AAA accommodation that I could just lose the police through fast and precise driving if I triggered a checkpoint. I had assumed the changes in design were simply another test of the same set of “skills” present in the base game, but just “harder”.

However, the newly aggressive pursuit AI proved that wrong. The AI now utilized constant PIT maneuvers, heavy drone coverage, and often could not be outrun through speed or tight driving alone. Even if I did shake them, patrolling drones would spot me and re-trigger the alarm if I was still on the main road. I realized I had to adapt to the new reality. I learned to use the geography of the world, taking alleys and side roads to bypass checkpoints entirely or break pursuers' lines of sight and hide. Sure enough, I stopped and took a close look at the environment around the starting safehouse after failing to shake my third pursuit sequence, realizing I could weave my way through a housing project on foot to bypass the checkpoint entirely.

The debate about difficulty as a necessary tool of influence over the player is muddled in part by the degree to which it is conflated with the need for accessibility. The reality is that if the game world is not “rigid” enough to force the player to adapt to its logic, the world becomes a playground rather than a means of making the player relate to the reality they are exploring.

That in of itself is what drives the ludonarrative dissonance of many AAA games: the path of least resistance is to be a killing machine that can freely blow through the obstacles of that world, instead of having to adapt to them in the way that a real human would. Empathy and reality of course also demand that we recognize the “rigidity” of the game world needed to influence a player’s actions is relative to the context of that player. Accessibility, of either the ableist or palatability variety, should still consider then how to build options that recognize where people are starting from, but it does not have to change the end goal of restraining the player to play the game with a certain mindset.

Legion gives a glimpse of game design where difficulty is closely tied to a holistic goal of making the game world “difficult” enough to force the player to adapt to the context of the narrative. If Legion had released with this as the default setting, I’m sure many would have balked. However, I wish it had existed as an option at least, as it's a testament to how difficulty design is about more than the dexterity of one’s hands and can be used to leave players with more appreciation for the world they are experiencing.

During not a job for Tyron as you hack his house ctos box he keeps falling through the floor and dies fail the mission

Got all WD_1 trophies except the one where you have to be tailed 5 times. Anyone up for helping out?

Also looking for a co-op partner for the DLC.

I usually play in the evening on PS, timezone CEST.

I dunno just something I'd thought about.

does wd 1 and 2 have cloud saves like ac games and ghost recon through ubisoft connect so I can play my steamdeck saves on pc?

I was wondering if the trophy is still achievable without boosting. If not, can anybody help me out? :)

Obviously they're not gonna make any major changes to a six year old game now, but I've been replaying the series and am about to finish Legion, and I can't help but feel like "Prestige Operatives" was a missed opportunity.

Aiden and Wrench were very cool ideas. Being able to play as characters already established in the lore was a golden idea, especially if the series ends with Legion anyway. if anything, I wish we'd gotten significantly more of these: Marcus, Ray, Jordi, Josh, Sitara, even friggin Jimmy Siska... I feel like there really was potential here. Maybe that feels fan servicey, but we already have Jordi, Wrench, Aiden, and kind of Marcus in the game and I think that felt natural enough.

Next, we have the crossover and universe-building characters, with Darcy being the only example I can really think of now. She is so cool! I really wouldn't have minded for another Assassin or two, maybe even a former Templar, Instrument, or Sage too! MD characters like Galina, Sean, Rebecca, Layla, etc would've been cool (though I get the timeline doesn't quite work for all of them). And it would've been cool to have other Ubi titles represented as well- maybe some Ghosts from GR, Hurk from Far Cry, Ash/Sledge/Castle from RB6... You could even throw in some other Watch_Dogs universe-building references like a Defalt-inspired member of the Rodentia academy, New Dawn Cultists, etc...

But most of the "Prestige Operatives" are just more random people. I get it, that's the gist of the game. And some are really cool, like Mina. But man, I'm not paying ten bucks for some random operative when I could easily just recruit one for free by profiling literally anyone in the open world. Maybe it's just me, but I just feel like these operatives could've been made a lot more appealing.

Here’s some more screenshots and pictures side by side comparing the game to how it looks in real life and how Ubisoft may have changed and moved some things around, hopefully you guys are enjoying these (crappy taken) pictures giving insight to the life of the Bay!