How are you doing leading up to the game’s release? I’m sure you guys are getting busy.

Sean Crooks: Yes, we’re equal amounts busy and equal amounts excited.

The game was originally set to be released in March but is now coming out at the end of October. What changes and improvements have the team made to the game in that time?

One of the cool things we did is we moved away from having RPG stats on characters and now all our abilities in the world are action-oriented. Because you can play as anyone in Watch Dogs: Legion, everyone in the world is like a little, secret cubbyhole of hidden abilities and traits that you can explore and find. One of the things I love about the change is when I play the game now and look around the open world, everyday I find some new combination or some new ability that surprises me.

Where did you draw inspiration from for all the characters that are available?

What we did is looked at the distribution of ethnicities, people with jobs, and the type of composition in different boroughs. For example, we’ll look at the type of businesses that are in the city of London and make sure that each of those businesses, the types of people that visit that borough, and the types of cultures are somewhere represented. As you start to look at the fabric of London, we start to list and categorize all those different jobs and careers – it might even be down to people doing fitness in the park. That creates a rich fabric of different activities and jobs of what people could be doing whilst visiting London. We use that as a fabric to say: “What if I had a construction worker? What would they have?” So, we look at the fantasy of those jobs and what we would expect in real life of that job or that person and extrapolate it backwards. We fill in those features to make sure that as much as possible, whenever you grab a person from the world, they do what you would expect, and to add a little bit of what you wouldn’t expect on top of that.

What can players look forward to in terms of improvements in graphics from the last game?

One thing that we’re really proud of is our work on Ray Tracing reflections. We’ve partnered up with Nvidia for its new series of graphic cards and we’ve heavily implemented gorgeous-looking Ray Tracing on its new cards and hardware. We’ve also partnered up with Microsoft to bring a level of Ray Tracing to its next-generation consoles –on both the Xbox Series S and the Xbox Series X, and we’re bringing that technology to the PlayStation 5 as well. So that looks amazing, especially after a bout of London rain looking around the world and seeing reflections accurately recreated in the water.

So, it was lot of working closely with Microsoft and Nvidia with the team?

Yes, we’ve worked very closely with them to understand the limits of the hardware and to get the best and most out of those chips, so we’re pretty excited and it’s been a really positive experience. The game shows that for sure.

The city of London in Legion is so colourful, especially with the street art and the cybernetic colours of technology. What are some areas that really show off the game’s stunning visual capability?

One of the areas in London that looks really beautiful, especially after a rain shower, is Camden. Camden is an area full of custom storefronts and heavily exotic neon lights. We also took that near future step of adding some holographic projections there too. Because you have a lot of these units that have small storefronts, you can see their gorgeous reflections of those in the pools and the cars driving past that look absolutely amazing – especially at night time. We also have Chinatown that features a giant hologram of a dragon that looks absolutely beautiful reflected. Between all of these and just ambiently walking around and seeing those kinds of details in puddles of water, or just anything metallic, and reflective surfaces, the game looks beautiful and it really shines.

Is every location explorable? Which of Legion’s versions of these locations can players look forward to enjoying?

I think Watch Dogs: Legion probably has one of the densest environments in any video game. London is a very dense city with not many large, open spaces, unlike Watch_Dogs 2 [which was set in the San Francisco Bay Area] – so we had obviously a lot of technical challenges that we managed to meet in terms of realizing that level of density.

What we did is take the essence of most areas. One of the major challenges and one of the major things that makes London pop as a city: its rich culture, its density, and how much each area of London changes. Also, on top of that, we have a lot of variety in terms of the population. Because you can play as anyone, you can account for lots of diversity, etc. in the game world that also add a layer of realism to London and the richness of the simulation.

Could we see a future game set in Canada, possibly in Toronto or Montreal?

I’m currently focused on London, London is as far as I can see right now.

Is there anything else you would like players to know about the upcoming game?

Recently we announced what our Post Launch content looks like. There’s a really strong offering for online coming out in December, with lots of multiplayer co-op games. One of them is out co-op “tactical ops” which require a lot of coordination. They have a higher difficulty and can take a while to get through. They require teamwork and skill. So, we also have a very strong online component joining the resistance just after launch

Watch Dogs: Legion is available now. Catch every detail of the vivid, futuristic city of London with the lightning fast response time of an LG UltraGear monitor.