Barring any further delays, Watch Dogs Legion is coming on October 29. The tantalizing hook of Ubisoft's open world game is that you can recruit any randomly generated NPC to join your DedSec team of activist hackers.
Construction workers, musicians, celebrities, murderers, ambulance drivers—if you meet them, you can recruit them to your crew. This means your team can include everyone from elderly grandmothers to suave MI6 spies.
But what about elderly grandmothers who are MI6 spies? Could a character even randomly spawn as both a grandma and a secret agent? In an AMA on Reddit, creative director Clint Hocking fielded a number of questions about Watch Dogs Legion today, and predictably several of those questions were about grandmas.
Early on in the AMA, someone asked if it was possible to find a granny with "gunkata takedowns"—gunkata being a skill that allows the character to perform an instant takedown while holding a gun. When I got some time with the beta, I had a character with the gunkata skill—but he was a hitman, not a retired florist, so it fit his character quite well.
Hocking replied that it's possible for a grandma to spawn with the gunkata skill—but that it was "extremely improbable/unlikely" for it to happen. Elderly characters in Legion have low mobility which means they can't take cover or sprint, and gunkata is a skill for trained weapon experts, so the chances of finding a gunkata grandma aren't great—though not out of the realm of possibility, apparently.
Another player asked if they'd be able to form "an army of MI6 spy grandmas" in Legion.
"A grandma who is a spy would be an incredibly rare spawn," Hocking said. "I have never seen one, and seeing more than one in a single playthrough would be one in a billion, I imagine. If you manage to get a spy crew of grandmas, make sure to share!"
Those are long odds, sure, but something tells me a player will still manage to pull it off. It's one thing for a team of designers and testers to play a game before release and never see random generation come up with a rare combination of attributes. But after launch, when potentially hundreds of thousands of players all dive into Legion? That's a different story.
In other words, don't give up on your beautiful dream of putting together an all-granny spy squad. Dollars to donuts, someone will step into Legion's London, find a bunch of elderly spies hanging around in a pub, and make it happen.
