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Ubisoft has already made a big deal about Watch Dogs Legion's population of playable NPCs, and the fact that permadeath can kill off your favourite Londoners for good during their adventures across the latest open world hacking romp, but the studio has now offered clarity on how you might be able to avoid the clutches of the grim reaper once the game releases next year.
Speaking to IGN at the Ubisoft Experience fan event, Watch Dogs Legion's Art Director Josh Cook explained how the game has been built with replay value at the crux of its design; "To make a complex system like play as anyone work, we have to have that opportunity to return to different places and do different things; so you might see the E3 demo, where you’re sent to Scotland Yard to perform an objective.
"If I was to do that mission again with a different person," explains Cook, "it might be sending me somewhere else. It might be sending me to Camden police station, or down to the one in Nine Elms or over to MI6."
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Additionally, Cook elaborated more on the concept of permadeath, and how even that presents options for players to freely make their own choices within the game's dystopian vision of post-Brexit London.
"I think it’s very important to note that permadeath is a result of a tactical choice." says Cook. "You have the decision to make, you have the opportunity to surrender, and your operatives will enter a cooldown period where they’ll be placed in a hospital or a prison or in different circumstances depending on how they go down."
If you're smart then, death won't always be knocking on the door of your various NPCs in Watch Dogs Legion, as the options to either pay your penalty in prison or recover from injuries in hospital provide a much more attractive alternative to kicking the bucket.
Unless, of course, your spec ops pensioner just wants to go out in a blaze of glory, Thelma and Louise style. No time in the lockup could fix those wounds.
For more, check out the biggest new games of 2019 still on the way, or watch our Release Radar video below for a guide to everything else out this week.
