Wow! Ubisoft really did not get the respect it deserved when it came out in 2016. Fast forward, and people are looking back at it and saying, “Yo, this game was kind of fire.” Dropping into this abyss of conversion, one wonders how did they do-it’s just a matter from this to…whatever Watch Dogs Legion pretended to be.
The original tweet that began this whole dialogue called WD2 an underrated masterpiece, pointing to art direction, parkour mechanics, and graphics that still hold up today. And honestly: they weren’t wrong. The San Francisco setup is decompressively filled with all sorts of little details that bring the world into life-something that Legion skips upon.
Back then, what was probably the most important thing to remember would be: If not just easy on the eyes games, what were Watch Dogs 2? Smooth gameplay, and hacking was…well, actually fun (contrary to the clunky approach of the first game), and it was really just a chill vibe. The gist of it was being too fun to just fly around carrying out acts of mayhem with drones and RC cars. Commenters concurred with the map being referred to as “alive,” and the animations were described as “fluid as hell.”
Of course, there were dissenting voices. Among those who actually liked WD1 for a while, the change in tone just sat poorly with them. Aiden Pearce’s gritty and personal revenge tale was switched for a bunch of hacktivist misfits-well, sometimes the writing might have been…questionable. One comment even said the characters were “insanely cringe,” which is fair enough. In any case, the majority would agree with me on the gameplay saving its own ass.
The biggest tragedy of it all? Ubisoft had something beautiful here, and it dried up at… Legion. Players just couldn’t understand how they ended up in Legion’s bland and repetitive mess after WD2’s polished and radiant world. How did the company mess that hard? Almost every single comment jokingly referred to Ubisoft “ruining every franchise,” and after Legion, it’s starting to feel like a serious case.
And there surely still are the real WD2 supporters. Some even said it rivaled Rockstar’s open-world design when Ubisoft actually tried, right there with GTA V. With the movie regarding the series about to hit in the near future, maybe we finally get a worthy follow-up for this series.
But for now? If you missed out on WD2 back in the day, go try to get into it. The world remains gorgeous; the hacking is a blast, and bottling cops into some random Benny Hill-style chase uphill never gets old. Just don’t let that be a standard for comparison to Legion.
So yeah: Watch Dogs 2—underrated, overlooked, still one of the best open-world games Ubisoft has put out. Surely, they just have to come down off that long dry spell and finally get to this again, right?
