When it comes to finishing missions and doing side quests, Watch Dogs Legion gives you a lot of options. You can run in and shoot everyone, sneak around using stealth, recruit an enemy, and use them to walk into a hostile area unnoticed or you can just sit in your car and be lazy. This has become my preferred option.
I didn’t set out to become a lazy hacker, it just sort of happened. Early on, after I had unlocked some new gadgets and recruits, I got curious about a mission. It seemed simple and easy and I wondered, could I just hack my way to the end of it without going inside the mission area at all?
In Watch Dogs: Legion, like previous Watch Dogs games, you can hack cameras, and once you do that you have a lot of possibilities. You can start to hack other cameras using the position of your currently hacked cam. This lets you jump around a huge facility, scouting enemies and finding ways to get it in. But these cameras can be used to hack other things. Like cellphones, computers, doors, steam pipes, cars, and more. Using all of this correctly, I decided to see if I could complete a small mission without leaving my car.
I pulled up to the place and hacked a nearby camera, then I started jumping from camera to camera until I found my target, a random gang member who I needed to hack for some data. They were too far from any camera to hack, so I blew up a steam pipe closer to me and got his attention. Then as he got closer and within range I began hacking him. But, he decided a giant explosion wasn’t worth much investigating (I guess I’m not the only lazy person in Watch Dogs) and he started to leave the area. I needed him to stay close so I could finish my download, so I hacked his phone and distracted him. That gave me just enough time to download my data and complete the first part of the mission. Now I needed to go to another location to destroy some servers or something. (The missions in this game start to blend together after 12 hours...)
So as I drove to the location, I wondered if I could stay in my car and finish that mission using only hacks and technology. Spoilers: The answer was yes.
I was able to use a spider bot to hack a door open and then bring a drone into where the servers were and using the drone, shoot the server, and blow it up. Mission complete and all from the comfort of my stolen compact car. Since this successful completion, I’ve created a new unofficial goal for myself: Be very lazy in every mission. Sometimes this means using a drone to carry a spider bot up somewhere high, instead of going up there myself. Other times it means using environmental hacks, like steam pipes or parked cars, to complete objectives. Did you know a car running over your target and killing them counts towards any assassination mission? It does!
What’s surprised me the most from being lazy in Watch Dogs: Legion is just how possible it is to complete so much of the game from the comfort of a parked car outside. And while not every mission lets me sit around on my ass, more than you might think let you puzzle your way through them using only hacks, bots, drones, and patience. It’s a testament to how flexible the gameplay in Legion is and how many options you always seem to have at your fingertips for doing just about anything.