It's easy in this day and age to slap together a cohesive, alive open-world and have single protagonist running around in it. Open-world gaming is now just a popular as annual mainstays like Call of Duty and Battlefield. It's a lot more difficult to take that formula though, and remove the concept of a single hero, which is exactly what Ubisoft has done with Watch Dogs Legion.

What's just as difficult is explaining just how this works, and why it's both fascinatingly ambitious and downright scary in concept. Here's a snippet from our own hands-on:

In Watch Dogs Legion, every person populating this futuristic dystopian London also has purpose. They each have skills, relationships to other people in the world, jobs, criminal records, dodgy or altruist agendas. They have personalities that define all of the above, and you need to work with them to gain their trust and hopefully recruit them to the cause of Dedsec. Sometimes this doesn’t work, sometimes you can fail at helping them and produce a knock-on effect of negativity that goes against Dedsec’s goals. But if it does work, you can use their skills and jump between any active person on your roster at any moment in the game. If they find themselves in trouble, they can also be dropped at death’s door (figuratively) where you’re given a choice to revive them for another go at it, in real-time right in front of what dropped them in the first place, or you can surrender.

Click here for our in-depth hands-on preview of Watch Dogs Legion.