Half of Watch Dogs Legion's weapons are non-lethal

One of the weirdest parts of previous Watch Dogs games was how poorly it reconciled being a civilian-turned-hacker-hero who also was totally okay with casually murdering just about anyone. Watch Dogs 2 tried to rectify this by adding a paintball gun in a free update along with two non-lethal weapons added in a later paid DLC, but those options still left you with a limited arsenal. Thankfully, half of the weapons you can use in the upcoming Watch Dogs Legion will be non-lethal, according to its creator director.

Speaking with Twinfinite, creative director Clint Hocking told them that the team "Really focused on having non-lethal weapons this time around so about half of the weapons are non-lethal and then we focused on making on a pretty robust melee system so if you don’t pull out guns, the enemies won’t pull out guns—in most cases."

As Hocking explains, police won't just roll up guns blazing like they do in, say, Grand Theft Auto 5. Instead they'll attempt to arrest you first so long as you aren't using lethal force yourself. That's a great addition since it'll hopefully making encounters with Legion's authoritarian police force more nuanced and realistic. If you're playing as regular civilians recruited into a resistance movement, it makes sense that most of them probably wouldn't like the idea of murdering people just because.

"We really wanted to make sure that non-lethal was an option in any combat encounter," Hocking told Twinfinite.

That said, unlike Cyberpunk 2077, Hocking isn't sure if it will be possible to beat the game without killing anyone. "It’s not a goal for us," he said. "The goal was to make sure we have robust non-lethal options for players."

That's fine with me. Though it would be cool if you could complete the game without resorting to excessive violence, I can understand that there might be times where it's unavoidable. I just think it's cool that Watch Dogs Legion is striving to get the player more agency in those situations.

Watch Dogs Legion will be out on March 6, 2020. Sam played it at E3 and it was the most impressive demo he's seen in years, so you should read about that.

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With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.