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In the past two weeks, two different gaming journalism YouTube channels have put out videos on Watch Dogs: Legion and its "Play as Anyone" system: "Playing as Anyone in Watch Dogs: Legion" (33:10, auto-generated English captions only) from Errant Signal and "How Watch Dogs: Legion Works | GMTK Most Innovative 2020" (13:29, manually captioned in English) from Game Maker's Toolkit. Both of these videos come to the same conclusion about the system: it's technically impressive, but it doesn't have a meaningful impact on the player.
9:26: And since it's kind of the defining trait of Watch Dogs: Legion, I think it's worth looking at the "Play as Anyone" system and what the game gets out of it. Because it's not clear to me - given the final product - what the "Play as Anybody" system is really trying to accomplish.
- Chris Franklin a.k.a. Campster, Errant Signal
8:08: But the thing is - and this bit is quite important: none of this actually matters. One of the most critical questions that Ubisoft had to answer with Watch Dogs: Legion was not "how do you make a game where you can play as anyone" - but instead, "why should anyone care?"
- Mark Brown, Game Maker's Toolkit
I'm leading with this, but neither video leads with this (the leading numbers in each blockquote are a timestamp), and the way they don't lead with this is interesting.
Errant Signal is a side project of Chris Franklin, a lifelong gamer who has chosen to spend a good chunk of his free time on producing games criticism videos on YouTube. He is open on his Patreon about the fact that he is not making a living off this and how the format he has chosen - extended videos released every month - is badly suited to making revenue as an ad-supported content creator and a poor fit for platforms like The Escapist, who tend to present weekly six-to-nine minute episodes rather than monthly eight-to-twenty minute videos. So, yeah, he has a job, and talking about videogames in an in-depth and thoughtful way is something he is paid for but is choosing to do in his free time, and continues to choose to do.
Game Maker's Toolkit is the current main project of videogames journalist Mark Brown, a freelance writer who, according to the Wikipedia page for GMTK, wrote for GamesRadar, Wired, and The Escapist and served as an editor for PocketGamer before transitioning to full-time work on Game Maker's Toolkit, supported in part by GMTK's very successful Patreon. He's worked as a game design consultant, written academic papers, and runs an annual online-only game jam on itch.io. He is an industry professional and good at his job.
The Errant Signal video begins by talking about the protagonists of Watch Dogs 1 and 2, Aiden Pierce and Marcus Holloway, and what these characters are like: the king of the assholes and an idealistic hacktivist, respectively. He talks about how this change from 1 to 2 represents an intentional move away from the toxicity of the original game towards something more meaningful. And, at 7:32, Franklin gets around to Watch Dogs: Legion. From there, he outlines the basics of the game, building to a clear point:
08:30: In Watch Dogs: Legion, you don't play as an insufferable 35 year old or an idealistic 20-something kid; you play as whoever you want. It's a bold choice that surely presented all sorts of production woes and the need for a bevy of new game systems ... but it's also a choice that is ... a bit befuddling, honestly?
Franklin describes, over the course of about a minute, what the game is being sold as, and then transitions to the main point of the video: that this doesn't make sense. If you remember, the quote up top was from 9:26 - just a little ways after this point - and much of the remainder of the video is talking about ways in which this system fails to work.
By contrast, the Game Maker's Toolkit video opens by introducing this as part of his annual series dedicated to "the most innovative game I played in the last 12 months." Then he gets right into it, describing the hype and the technical details and the impressive level of work that went into making it work, including the tremendous amount of information that the game generates and how it ensures that it only generates that data when needed.
7:49: All of this put together leads to a game where every person in London has a rich inner life, a daily routine, family and friends, and a shifting opinion of DedSec. And you can recruit that character and use their unique skills in missions, giving the game a literally infinite supply of unique characters.
But the thing is - and this bit is quite important: none of this actually matters.
If you remember, that last line is the quote from up top: it is only halfway through the video, after spending the majority of the runtime explaining the impressive technical details of the system, that the video begins to talk about how this system fails to create a meaningful play experience.
The thing is, both of these channels are good YouTube channels, and both of these channels do good analysis - and different analysis: Mark Brown talks a great deal more about game accessibility on his channel than Campster does, for example, and of course they have different central focuses. Both of these are good channels, channels where we actually do like and subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications of new videos. And both of these analyses have major limitations: neither video discusses the Ubisoft sexual harassment scandal that came to light during its development, for example.
...but we have to notice, we cannot escape noticing, that the games industry professional made a video which consisted mostly of describing how impressive Watch Dogs: Legion was and buried the "it doesn't actually work" lede deep into the video, while the side-gig game critic who started off as an enthusiastic amateur doesn't beat around the bush when it comes to what works and what doesn't. The insider piles up almost a full seven and a half minutes of hype - heck, features the game as his superlative "Most Innovative 2020" - before he speaks any ill of it, where the outsider takes his time putting the game into context before giving his thoughts about it. And it makes us think that Mark Brown is speaking out in support of his professional peers to take the sting out of his negative comments, while Chris Franklin ... doesn't work for the games industry.
Mark Brown's perspective as an industry professional is a good one - he can talk about details that most videogames commentators don't have access to - and he uses that position both to educate the public on how to make better games and to push the gaming industry to be better than it is. (As I said, he talks a lot about accessibility.) But that perspective cuts both ways, and I think we see that when we compare these two videos.
