I Survived London Thanks To Watch Dogs Legion

I’m not a city person. I’m barely even a town person. Having grown up and spent all my life in a small rural village, cities are big, sense-overwhelming walls of concrete and pushy people that I need a few weeks to recover from. Before this past weekend I’d not been to London in nearly 15 years and didn’t feel like I was missing out.

And yet, walking down the South Bank and navigating the streets of Southwark for a Magic: The Gathering event, London felt bizarrely familiar to me. A place I’d not been to in almost half of my life felt like second nature, and it took me a few hours to work out why: I’d been here just a few months ago in Watch Dogs Legion.

Having replayed it during the Christmas break last year, Legion is the worst game in the Watch Dogs series by quite a large margin. It throws out the character-driven storytelling that made the second game so great, and instead let procedurally generated Londoners take centre stage. Its lack of character and repetitive missions were a letdown, but its depiction of a London taken over by the tyrannical Albion corporation was stellar. It was also far more accurate than I thought it was.

The first time I thought about Watch Dogs on my trip up to the capital was when I was looking at photos of the Sky Garden at the top of 20 Fenchurch Street, also known as the Walkie-Talkie. It looked oddly familiar, until I realised I’d driven drones and spiderbots around the cocktail bars and underwhelming indoor garden already. Legion’s Walkie-Talkie is an almost perfect recreation of it.

It’s a weird feeling knowing you’ve been somewhere in a game, only to see it for real. Your initial reaction is that you’ve been there before, and then the odd sense of shame of having been there in a video game of all things creeps in. I’ve never been to the Walkie-Talkie (the waiting list for tickets was too long), but I also kind of have, and, also, I spent far too much of my life playing Legion. That disappointment and familiarity all rolled into one dissociating experience as my newly forming memories of London merged with the times I trawled the streets while lying on my bed in my underwear.

Legion came in handy later on, too. The next day, I was walking down the bank by Tower Bridge. It was a Friday in August so it was absolutely chock-a-block, and the stairs up onto the bridge from The Queen’s Walk was a crushing throng of filthy tourists.

But I’d practiced this. I’ve hacked so many cars and driven them down this walk in my fight against Albion! I knew there was a quicker way up onto the bridge by just heading south and looping back around. A quick walk later, down alleys I knew for a fact I’d seen before, and I was stood on Tower Bridge, having beaten the crowd like a true Londoner.

We then headed up past the Tower of London, which serves as Albion’s headquarters in Legion. I didn’t go in because the tickets were expensive, but just looking through the entrance it looked identical to the layout of Legion’s rendition.

I recognised the surprisingly steep slopes inside, the different layers and the dense buildings all nestled within the Tower’s walls, and I remember tasering every guard to find out more about an evil mind-control plot. I don’t think I missed much by not going in, other than maybe meeting a Beefeater.

Watching Dogs, Then Watching Ducks

I even based where I went on Watch Dogs. Having finally arrived in Westminster and checked out Downing Street and Trafalgar Square, I found myself in St. James’ park, which runs between Horseguards and Buckingham Palace. It could’ve just been a quick sit in the park, but then I remembered a cottage.

More specifically, I remember crashing my driverless car into the lake of St. James’ Park, right next to a cottage. Small and pretty, it’s a start difference to the sprawling skyscrapers and ad-laden billboards of London. And, as Watch Dogs promised, it’s a real place: the Duck Keeper’s Cottage of St. James’ Park.

Originally where the bird caretaker of the park lived, it’s now the office and water pump station for the lake. It maintains its cute exterior, though, with a gorgeous cottage garden looking like something out of a Victorian Period drama. It was one of the highlights of my trip, and I’d have never bothered to make the trek to it had I not already known it was there thanks to Watch Dogs.

I’m a hermit who doesn’t like crowds and would much rather stay at home, thank you very much. But my trip to London was really nice and shockingly stress-free because I’d already fought across it in a mediocre Ubisoft game from 2020. It’s bizarre the things you learn from the most milquetoast of places.

Give me a few years and another Watch Dogs game and I could probably pass the Knowledge.

Watch Dogs Legion

Set in a dystopian version of London, Watch Dogs: Legion rounds out the trilogy from Ubisoft. As members of DedSec, you must fight to rid the city of Albion, a sinister corporation that controls everything.

Released

October 29, 2020

ESRB

Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol

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