Watch Dogs: Legion — Fixer Contracts
The second half of Bloodline follows the story of Wrench, the second protagonist of the DLC.
While the first half of the DLC with Aiden already differed quite a bit from the main game narratively, mainly with having a constant protagonist with an explicit storyline, the gameplay beats we used were still quite similar (download this, destroy that, neutralize that guy), which to be fair saved quite a bit of development time, but I felt like it didn’t quite hit the limit of what the engine and scripting tools were capable of.
So using the experience I gained developing some of Aiden’s resistance missions, I decided to start prototyping with no particular idea in mind, just seeing what can be done using the tools we had with little to no other dependencies.
Eventually, after coming up with a handful of promising technical prototypes of new “exotic” gameplay, pitching those to my team first and later to the lead studio in Toronto, these prototypes became what now lives in the DLC as Fixer Contracts.
01 — Rempart Rampage:
The first fixer contract given by Jordi Chin is a simple one, wreck havoc.
The idea was to give the player the ability to fly using a beefed up CT drone (machine gun + rockets), and destroy multiple layouts one after the other, by disabling the distance limitation between the drone and the player (rendering restrictions obviously didn’t just go away, so the height ceiling and slow drone speed were still needed).
The gameplay was quite repetitive, and the layout design didn’t help much since the player simply approached from the sky, but luckily that actually helped to let the player focus on the narrative while enjoying blowing things up with no repercussions.
I was responsible for Designing, prototyping and pitching the mission.
Scripting, balancing and polishing by Anton Nedogonov.
02 — Laddie:
The second fixer contract has Wrench break into an Albion layout and steal a robot (new DLC enemy type).
When the DLC production started, it was clear from the get go that we were to get a new enemy type, a Robot, to be added to London.
Coming from a game that HEAVILY featured its main focus, which was “Play as Anyone”, the DLC had to give you the ability to play as a robot, right? Wrong.
Unfortunately there were no plans to make this a systemic feature (doesn’t really make sense to “recruit” a robot, and the DLC doesn’t even have a resistance for them to join), but since the technical backbone of the feature is still there, I decided to prototype a mission where you get a taste of what it would feel like to control one.
The second half of the mission has Wrench fly a CT drone wrecking havoc (again), while dangling the pet robot from the bottom.
The idea was to use the robot as a sentry while flying to the destination, however both technical and time constraints forced to use whatever systemic gameplay was available (controlling a drone) and simply attach the robot from underneath.
For this mission I was responsible for all aspects; designing, pitching, prototyping, scripting, polishing and bug fixing.
03 — Faster than L33T:
The idea of the third contract was to conduct a “race” of sorts completely remotely, which allowed the usage of multiple vehicles (boat, car and drone).
There was only one race in the main game, which was a borough uprising mission (a series of exotic one-time missions you complete to liberate a borough).
Unfortunately since it was only used in a single mission, the race script was hard-coded to that specific route, and didn’t allow any systemic reuse for later missions. That, along with the addition of switching the vehicle during the race, meant that I had to script the mission from scratch, including creating a semi-automated method of placing and moving the race checkpoints to reduce time spent on that, and focus more on iterating over the balance of the track instead.
I was responsible for Designing, prototyping pitching, and scripting the mission.
Balancing and polishing by Yevhen Stadniuk.
04 — Ghost Car of London:
The forth contract is a tongue in cheek adventure where Wrench has to look for a car that has gone invisible, it focuses mainly on the narrative but gives the player a bit of a challenge at the end, where they have to catch and stop a speeding invisible vehicle.
The objective is quite simple, and the setup of the mission was even simpler.
One of the abilities in the game was to use an AR Cloak where the player becomes invisible to the AI, along with a semi-transparent shader slapped on top to make it clear to the player when the ability is turned on and when it isn’t.
Driving the invisible clown-car with a blurry Wrench inside is probably one of my favourite memories of the DLC’s development.
I was responsible for Designing, prototyping and pitching the mission.
Scripting, balancing and polishing by Oleksandr Fihurnyi.
05 — Devon v Devin: London Culling:
The fifth and last Fixer Contract, the one that sets the return of the main protagonist from the second game, Marcus Holloway, as well as the infamous in-game actor Jimmy Siska who plays Devon Von Devon in the same game.
The idea of the mission came from a “popular demand” for a crossover with the second game’s protagonist, Marcus, and is revolved around filming scenes from an in-game movie, where the player is completing stunts that are filmed by Marcus to be cut into the movie.
The theme of pretty much all beats revolves around the filming; triggering a car stunt from a news drone that’s filming, top-down view of Wrench setting up an explosion that’s then filmed by Marcus, and a boss-fight with two robots as an epic finale that’s also filmed by Marcus.
Probably the most difficult Fixer Contract to script due to the amount of exotic moments and edge-cases, and definitely took the longest time to bug-fix, which at the same time made it the most satisfying in terms of payoff as a conclusion for the DLC as well as the positive player reactions.
For this mission I was responsible for all aspects; designing, pitching, prototyping, scripting, polishing and bug fixing.
Conclusion:
All in all I am extremely proud of all the work put into this DLC from both the lead studio in Toronto, and the Kyiv team that I was a part of.
I have had a great opportunity to delve deep into the tech that made Watch Dogs the game that it is (breaking tech to use it in unorthodox ways is always fun), and have learnt a great deal in mission design, technical design, and working in a large team with many collaborators, and it’s an experience that I would gladly go through again.
