Over the years I’ve developed kind of an obsession with virtual recreations of real places, and since I’ve mentioned it in the past on PITB, I figured virtual London would be a good place to start.
The gates of Buckingham Palace at night. Although Legion depicts a future London, Queen Elizabeth II was still going strong in 2020 when the game was released, and her reign felt like it could go on forever. There’s a hologram portrait of her somewhere in the city, but I cannot remember where I saw it. (Near the British Museum perhaps?)
So the next best thing is an illustrative image of the gates of Buckingham Palace in this future dystopian London, where a private security megacontractor has essentially taken over the city, leaving people pining for a sight of the queen:
In Legion you’re part of an activist/hacker collective called DedSec, fighting back against a police state. As a result, any Londoner is a potential ally. You can recruit police officers, judges, barristers, construction workers, street cleaners, assassins, spies, office workers, store clerks, disc jockeys, the homeless, and people from any background you can think of.
Each has its advantages: judges and cops allow you to get access to restricted spaces and manipulate the legal system from within. Construction workers have access to equipment no one else can touch, and security won’t think twice about them walking into a construction site. Street sweepers are largely invisible to a public that ignores them, allowing them to listen in on conversations.
Every person has a different attitude toward authority, challenging it, and the direction the UK has been heading. Recruiting them involves winning them over to your side by proving you can be trusted, sometimes by helping them out personally, sometimes by keeping secrets, and sometimes by striking back at the authorities.
One of the most fun parts is that DedSec’s secret headquarters is tucked into the back of this pub, The Earl’s Fortune, accessible via a secret door in a back room:
Early morning in Piccadilly Circus, before the crowds:
The Sky Garden at the top of the “walkie talkie building” affords incredible views of the city:
The Eye. Yes, you can ride it. Yes, you can take photos from it.
This is called Waterloo Plaza in the game. I’m not sure if it’s a real place or if it’s been renamed due to rights issues:
A tube station with an advertisement that reads “Illegals hurt homegrown Brits.” The game clearly took inspiration from real life political events and grievances:
The “gherkin” from the Sky Garden. Again because of rights issues, the logo is from a company that does not exist in the real world:
Beefeaters standing guard:
“Larry?! Larry, where have you run off to?”
The authorities do not like you getting anywhere near No. 10 Downing St. It took a lot of sneaking around for me to get this close and get these screenshots. Sadly, I did not see Larry.
I’m not sure exactly where this is, but the game recreates streets and neighborhoods in astonishing detail. Note the puddle on the pavement. Modern gaming technology actually recreates the way light bounces off of water, stone, windows, plants, etc. In the past, if you saw a reflection in a game, it was a static texture. Thanks to ray tracing technology, all reflections are dynamic, meaning if you’re looking in a store window and a bus passes behind you, you see the bus pass in the reflection. It’s awesome.
A street adjacent to Piccadilly Circus:
The view from an Eye capsule. The Thames is dirty AF!
Big Ben:
In reference to the ray tracing effects mentioned above, note the way the windows reflect the surrounding area. You can see the light behaves differently based on whether it’s in shadow or sunlight, and the surrounding structures are reflected in the windows. At night the windows behave dynamically so they are turned on and off randomly. Using shaders, you can see the interior rooms from street level.
Regretfully I did not take enough photos of random neighborhoods. In Southwark, for example, there are run-down areas, public housing and you don’t see the grand structures of historic neighborhoods.
There are parks with people kicking footballs around and laying in the grass, bicyclists, buskers, people talking on their phones, mimes, cops on the beat.
Another view through a Sky Garden window:
In the future, free wifi will be even more plentiful!
What’s next? Tokyo? New York? Ancient Athens? Future Detroit? Los Angeles? Miami?
All images captured on my PC: AMD Ryzen 7 8700F 8-Core Processor (4.10 GHz), AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT (12 GB), 32GB DDR5 G-Skill RAM, Windows 11.
Pain In The Bud 
If there’s one thing we have to give Ubisoft credit for, it’s that they’re good at recreating places. London is one of my favorite cities, even though I’ve never been there, but I’d love to explore it in Watch Dogs Legion.
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You can definitely tell it’s Ubisoft because some of the limitations are the sort of thing you’d see in Assassin’s Creed games, but I think in any open world game like this there are going to be similarities.
The game is fun, but the whole “recruit any person you encounter” thing means they’re not fully fleshed out characters. They all look unique, they’re fully voiced, they have unique skills and backgrounds, but no game studio can do bespoke writing and voice overs for thousands upon thousands of characters, so you’re not gonna get the camaraderie of Watch Dogs 2 or a Mass Effect game.
I’ve never been to London either, which makes it a much different experience than, say, GTA IV or Spiderman where characteristics of New York can be extremely accurate and oddly off, depending on what it is.
The recreations of Tokyo I’ve played in 3 different games have all been excellent.
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That’s very true, it’s a very ambitious project to be able to recruit any character from the game, and it’s a lot of hard work. I haven’t played it yet, so I can’t really judge. Also, for Londoners, it must be great to see their city in a game, and for non-Londoners, it’s nice to get to know the city this way. I’m sure you enjoyed seeing New York in video games.
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It will be interesting to see how far Rockstar goes with Miami in Grand Theft Auto VI. That’ll set the new standard and it should. The game had a 10+ year development cycle and cost an estimated $2 billion to make a market!
The previews look amazing. As usual, the PC version will be much more customizable, offer higher resolution, mods, tons of tweaks and more content vs the console versions, but the tradeoff is having to wait another year.
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