Watch Dogs: Legion - 10 Tips To Know Before Playing

There's a lot going on in Watch Dogs: Legion. As a member of the hacker resistance group DedSec, your job is to bring down the terrorist organization Zero Day and fight back against Albion, a paramilitary company that has all but taken over London in the wake of an attack on the city. To do that, you have a bunch of tools at your disposal, like the ability to hack all sorts of machinery--and you can recruit just about anyone in the city to serve as a playable character, with each potential recruit bringing their own skills.

There are a lot of systems to keep in mind as you run around London fighting fascism, though. You've got your hacker gear, weapons, and a melee fighting system that's new to the series. You'll also find all kinds of side quests that have various benefits and with a city full of potential recruits, it can be tough to decide who to bring into your organization.

To help you get DedSec on its feet, we've compiled 10 tips you should know about as you begin your career as a cyberpunk insurrectionist. Here's a rundown of what you should upgrade, what you should look for in recruits, and what you should prioritize in the game's first few hours. And if you haven't yet, make sure to check out our Watch Dogs: Legion review.

1. Find Tech Points And Spend Them, Quick

After the first few missions at the start of the game, you'll liberate your first London district, which reveals the hidden locations of all its tech points. It's worth going after them (and keeping track of the ones you're earning for completing missions)--tech points allow you to unlock a host of additional hacks and gadgets. These include weapons, AR cloaking tech, and more, and having access to those gadgets can drastically change how you approach situations. Early on, it's easy to forget that you're accumulating tech points and that you can spend them on the Gear menu, but you should identify what you want to upgrade and start making moves to get better gear as soon as you can.

2. It's All About Spider Bot

In Watch Dogs: Legion, you'll use Tech Points earned from completing missions or found in the world to buy and upgrade different gadgets you can equip to your characters, or to earn additional hacks to your repertoire of abilities. One of the first options you can afford is the spider bot, and you should prioritize it. The spider bot is ridiculously useful--it allows you to send a tiny robot pal into hostile territory, where it can climb through vents, hack most objects, and even flip some physical switches or pick up collectibles and additional tech points you'd otherwise need to reach yourself. The spider bot can't do everything you need to do in a given area--sometimes you need human hands to work on a circuit board or ctOS breaker--but when the spider bot can do the job, it keeps your character well out of harm's way. You'll get a ton of use out of your spider bots, so unlock them and upgrade them early.

3. Upgrade Your Drone Hacking

There are lots of drones in London, and they come in many varieties. You'll start with the ability to hack the most basic ones--your ctOS surveillance drones and traffic drones, essentially--but you'll find before long that there are tougher, better-armed drones in closed-off areas that can give you trouble. One of your first priorities should be to upgrade your drone-hacking to at least get the ability to shut down Riot Drones and other combat drone types. If nothing else, you want to be able to disable any drone that's about to spot you (or shoot you) while stealthing through an area. That'll give you time to reposition or smash the drone before it gets a second chance to sound the alarm.

Further upgrading your drone-hacking lets you hijack combat drones so you can use them to scout an area or even fight enemies, which can go a long way toward keeping your operatives alive. Hacking the right drone can let you go loud and fight a host of enemies without your operatives ever facing danger--which is great if you decide to play in permadeath mode.

4. Scout With Cameras And Mark Targets

This one is a pretty standard Watch Dogs element, but if you haven't played an entry in the series in a while or this is your first one, it's worth explaining. Your primary hacking capability is hijacking cameras, which allow you visual access to areas you can't otherwise reach or would have to sneak into. Cameras can let you scout out an area before you enter it, which is extremely useful for finding a path toward your objective and seeing what opposition you're facing. You'll also want to sweep your targeting reticule over enemies as you look around with a hijacked camera. Doing so allows you to "tag" enemies so you can keep tabs on them on your radar and at a distance with a little bit of extra highlighting on your screen. It's extremely helpful to pan over all the enemies you can find before you head into a restricted area, so use cameras to your advantage. It's also worth noting that you can often hack objects through cameras if you have line-of-sight on them.

5. Go All-Out With Traps

As you're scouting a location through hijacked cameras, you should spot a bunch of interactive items throughout most restricted areas. These are traps you can set that will explode if any enemies wander past them, and if you want to soften up a location and make your job a lot easier, go ahead and arm them all. Enemies on patrol will often just meander into traps and take themselves out, and while that can put other nearby enemies on alert, they'll never quite figure out what's going on. In areas with lots of traps, you can knock out a bunch of enemies before you ever even set foot inside the building, which means a lot less opposition or fewer opportunities to get found out. Traps are easy to deal with and they're just about everywhere, so make use of them when you can.

6. Cargo Drones Make Stealth A Lot Easier

Though you can go just about anywhere in London early in Legion, you should prioritize getting through story missions early in the game. Though you can go anywhere in London from nearly the start to recruit some extra characters and get access to one of the best abilities in the game: the cargo drone. These big, crate-lugging robots are large enough for a character to ride on, giving you the ability to ascend, Lakitu-like, over the streets of London--and the rooftops of most buildings.

The cargo drone makes infiltration a lot easier in many circumstances. Instead of having to find a way to unlock a front door, bypass a security system, and sneak past guards, often with the use of a spider bot to open the way, the cargo drone lets you just float over walls and above security. It won't work in all circumstances, but it works in a lot of them, offering different and easier ways to approach some tough stealth situations. You'll find you can float through an area to reach a tough spot, or get close to an objective and then chuck in a spider bot to finish the job. Prioritize working through the story far enough to get a cargo drone, as you'll find plenty of opportunities to use it.

7. Your Next Upgrade: The Deep Profiler

We've recommended several upgrades you should prioritize from the Gear menu, but once you've got drone-hacking in place and a spiffed-up spider bot, you'll want to snag the Deep Profiler upgrade. This thing gives you additional information about possible recruits, and while you won't need it right away if you're just following the story, it quickly becomes extremely helpful for getting better, tough-to-sway recruits on your team.

As you profile possible recruits in London, you'll find that some aren't too keen on DedSec in general. Without some work to change their opinion of the hacker group, you can't get them to join up. The Deep Profiler will give you information on those people's schedules and backgrounds, providing you with information about the tasks you can perform to bring them around to your side, and the places their schedules will take them. With that info, you can work on recruits who can be extremely helpful for your team, like Albion soldiers and police officers. Which brings us to our next point...

8. Build A Well-Rounded Team

The early portions of Legion's story will net you a few recruits without much difficulty--you'll pick a recruit near the start of the game from a large batch, get a high-level hacker when you follow the story quests to liberate Camden, and add a construction worker with a cargo drone within an hour or two. But once the story starts to pick up the pace and brings you to tougher locations (around the time you start looking into Clan Kelley), you're going to start building out your team so that they can handle a variety of situations. At this point, you should begin profiling people whenever you're wandering around to keep an eye out for teammates who might be helpful.

In addition to a quality hacker, you'll want teammates who are good in a variety of situations. Look for operatives who are good in a brawl, ones who have a focus on stealth, and ones who get perks in a gunfight. There are also potential recruits who give the entire team benefits--doctors can shorten the heal time of anybody who's injured, and some recruits provide buffs like making it easier for your squad to escape the cops. And some characters come with uniforms that allow them easier access to certain restricted locations. Take the time to build a team with multiple strengths and you'll provide yourself with a lot more options for dealing with missions, as well as one that can adapt to unexpected situations more easily. You can always dismiss a recruit from the team if you find someone better later on.

9. Explore The City And Its Districts

Unlike past Ubisoft open-world games, there's no magic map-revealing towers to climb or outposts to destroy in Legion. If you want to know what's going on in London, you'll need to cruise around the streets and figure it out on your own. There are a lot of fast-travel points in the game that can make getting around a little easier, but when you're first starting out, steal a car and drive as much as you can. You'll want to get familiar with the boroughs of London for when you inevitably have to flee the police or avoid an Albion checkpoint decked out with turrets, for instance. Uncovering the map will also show you where shops are so you can deck out your operatives in new clothes.

The most useful things to find in any given district, however, are the places you need to attack in order to eventually liberate it from Albion oppression. Each district has several objectives you'll need to complete, and they won't all immediately be apparent until you do some exploring. Liberate a district and the map will reveal all its tech points, so you can earn yourself some quick upgrades, should you need them. Uncovering the map as early as you can will give you a lot more information as you make getaways and open up fast-travel locations so you can easily get to missions, and that'll save you time in the long run.

10. Make Liberating Districts A Priority

There's one other major benefit to liberating London's various districts: every time you do, you unlock a high-level DedSec recruit automatically. These characters are especially good at their roles and come with a bunch of useful passive and active perks, which means they're going to be very helpful in your quest to bring down Albion and Zero Day. You'll have to do some extra work to unlock them, though. Each district has objectives you'll need to complete, like hacking billboards or freeing imprisoned freedom fighters, and once you do that, you'll unlock a final mission for the district that you'll need to complete. The effort is worth it, though, especially as you're building out your team and filling roles to make sure you can handle lots of different situations. Check the districts for what kind of recruits they're offering and knock out their missions to give yourself a big leg-up in creating a strong, well-balanced DedSec crew.