20 Stupid Decisions That Destroyed Their Franchise

Despite netting mostly positive review scores and selling well, 2014’s Watch Dogs fell short in several areas. Chief among them was its superficial yet overly serious tale of hacking, spying, murder, and revenge set within the dark underbelly of Chicago in autumn.

It’s no wonder, then, why Ubisoft Montreal brightened their 2016 sequel both visually – changing the setting to the San Francisco Bay Area – and tonally – with more lighthearted characters and storytelling – to produce greater results. Luckily, their plan succeeded, with Watch Dogs 2 eventually earning comparable sales while almost universally being seen as superior to its predecessor.

That brings us to 2020’s Watch Dogs: Legion, a game that was detrimentally at odds with itself.

On one hand, its major new mechanic – inhabiting countless NPCs in the open world – encouraged amusingly incongruous experimentations because said NPCs included senior citizens, magicians, beekeepers, beatboxers, furries, and people suffering from flatulence. Legion’s British humor and extensive character customization options also lent themselves to the game's potential ludicrousness.

At the same time, its dystopic future London backdrop and prophetically Orwellian threads of terrorist bombings, mass surveillance, populism, human trafficking, automated technologies, and human obsolescence directly conflicted with those goofier attributes.

Legion’s tonal dissonance was extremely divisive, ultimately hitting Ubisoft where it hurts – their wallet – and leaving the Watch Dogs IP in limbo.