It's now been over a year since my team at Ubisoft released Watch Dogs Legion, and a few months since we wrapped up the post-launch. Having joined Ubisoft Toronto specifically for this project, it was an exciting milestone. Despite a decade as a professional game designer, this was a big milestone: my first AAA release. I spent 4 exciting and challenging years on it, seeing the game evolve from pre-production all the way to the final box on the shelves of Best Buy.
Humor me while I reminisce a bit about just a few of the features I worked on directly over the years.
One area was player customization, through all the clothing stores and mask rewards/collectibles. It’s been awesome seeing players go deep into the creative customization options. Especially with the post-launch addition of Hair/Beard/Makeup/etc customization. We had over 2000 purchasable items across 30+ different clothing stores. The Characters team deserve the biggest possible shout-out for creating the massive amount of clothes that made WDL’s London visually interesting and realistically varied. That was an interesting economic challenge, balancing the needs of meaningful reward loops with a “semi-realistic” spread of fashion.
Related to the customization was the ETO (in-world currency) reward economy that I was primarily responsible for tuning. With sources across a variety of missions, world activities, and collectibles. Of course there were some LARGE spreadsheets involved.
Another area I was involved in throughout development is the Online Mode. Wish I could talk more about the varied iterations we had over the years. But I’m proud of the experience we were able to release. Extending the ways player engage with the world, providing a multiplayer sandbox, and creating some of the most challenging content in Legion.
With Online fully separated from Single-Player, I was responsible for the alternative reward/economy systems. In Single-Player, the “Tech Points” used to unlock/upgrade skills were found as fixed world collectibles and earned from Story missions. But in Online we wanted to emphasize replayability, and not have the player going back to all the same pick-ups they might have done in Single-Player. Tech Points were replaced by “Influence”, an alternative currency found from a variety of sources including Weekly Challenges with a primary source from the Seasonal Rank Rewards.
The Rank Rewards is our version of a Battle Pass. That was a feature I took over multiple major iterations, settling on a streamlined single-track entirely-free progression system that would unlock unique Seasonal Cosmetics as well as the Influence Points used to upgrade skills. I developed the associated XP economy with Daily/Weekly Challenges and consistent XP rewards across all the Online content. And I worked with our incredible Art team to define and configure each set of Cosmetic Rewards.
We also wanted to streamline the Recruitment flow, which in Single-Player was done through generated missions. In Online, recruitment became the second (and infinitely repeatable) use for Influence Points. So as long as the player had sufficient Influence, they could immediately recruit any NPC in the world. I worked with another Online Designer to set up this brand new economy, and players have responded very positively.
And with our year of post-launch we delivered some exciting new Operatives, Missions, and other content. Including the Money Heist online mission and outfits.