Watch Dogs: Legion (PEGI 18) is the third instalment in Ubisoft’s open world action-adventure series. The game is set in a futuristic London, where players must recruit other playable characters and complete a variety of missions.
The game requires access to the majority of the controller to have full access, but it also has a range of settings such as button remapping, aim assists to autodriving, which can potentially help to make it more accessible for some players.
In this post we will have a look at some of these settings related to the motor accessibility . Watch Dogs: Legion is available on Xbox One, Xbox Series consoles, PS4, PS5 and PC. This post will be focussing on the console version.
Gameplay Settings
Within the Gameplay settings menu, there is a list of options that could be helpful for some players.
Difficulty
There are three difficulty settings (Easy, Normal or Hard), that will affect things such as enemy alertness and enemy weapon damage.
Permadeath Mode
During the game, you complete missions that then allow you to recruit the majority of the other characters that you come across in the game, including many of those you see when travelling around the city. As standard, if any of these characters take lethal damage when playing they go to hospital or prison and will respawn after a period of time, and you can keep them as part of your team. However, with Permadeath Mode enabled, if you lose a life then you lose that character permanently (unless they are arrested). You can choose to have Permadeath Mode on and then switch it off part way through a playthrough. However, once you have switched Permadeath off, you cannot switch it back on again for that playthrough.
Camera Centering
This option allows you have the camera auto adjust to the direction you are facing. This can be set to auto adjust when sprinting only, always on, or always off.
Melee Mode
By default, Melee Combat involves tapping on the A/Cross button for each individual punch/kick. Melee Mode allows you to hold the button down to continually strike as long as the button is held. This can be helpful if rapidly tapping buttons is difficult.
Climbing Mode
When on foot, your operative will need to climb and jump over obstacles in game. When setting Climbing Mode to hold, you can keep A/Cross held down whilst moving forward with the left stick to continually climb. You can also have it set so that a single tap will allow you to jump over one obstacle, and means that you do not need to keep the button held down.
Toggle Options
There are several controls that can be set to either Hold or Toggle. This means they can be set so that a single press will start the action and a second press of that button will stop performing that action. The following actions can be set to Hold/Toggle: entering Hacking Mode, entering Aiming Mode (aim down sights), and for accessing both the Weapon Wheel and the Emote Wheel.
Controller Settings
Control Scheme
Watch Dogs: Legion has four different control schemes; Default, and three different left-handed options. Within each of these control schemes, there are eight different layouts for On Foot controls, Driving, Drone, Turret, Camera, Crane, Spiderbot, Kick-Up, and Menu/Text chat. The controls are different depending on the situation you are in; for example, by default moving the left stick up and down moves your character forwards and back when on foot, but to move forwards when driving you would need to hold down RT/R2 to accelerate.
It is also possible to create three different custom control schemes. To create a custom profile, choose the control that you want to change, and press A or Cross to reassign it. You can now select the button that you want to swap this action to. If there is a potential conflict with the controls, the game will give you three options: assign action to another button, leave unassigned, assign anyway.
In this example we have tried to move Parkour over to R2, which also acts as Sprint. We can either swap these buttons, leave the action unassigned, or map them to the same button. Mapping to the same button means that when holding down RT or R2 to Sprint, we will automatically vault over and climb any obstacles whilst sprinting. This could potentially be helpful as it means that it is possible to run and do parkour moves at the same time by only using one button, but could also mean that the player would accidently vault or climb over things unintentionally when sprinting.
Invert Options
Within the Controller settings there is the option to invert several controls. You can invert the Camera’s X Axis, the Camera’s Y Axis, Movement X Axis, and the Movement Y Axis.
Sensitivity
There are the options to change both the looking and aiming sensitivity separately. This means that if you needed general camera control to be more sensitive but wished for a lower sensitivity when aiming down sights, you could set each to your preference.
Aim Snap
You can adjust how strongly you would like the camera to snap onto targets when aiming down sights. This can be set to Off, Default or Strong. Please note that within the Accessibility settings you can set “Aim Lock On” to On or Off. With this setting On, the Aim Snap option that you choose has no impact. Therefore, you can only use one of these settings at a time.
Aim Magnetism
This setting adjusts how strongly the camera movement slows down whilst aiming down sights at targets. It can be set to Default, Strong or Switched Off. It can potentially help by making aiming/shooting more accurate if you are aiming at a specific area of an enemy, such as when trying to carry out a headshot for example.
Movement Settings
Within movement settings you can adjust how sensitive you want the movement to be when on foot, when driving (steering), when controlling drones and when controlling the Spider. Increasing the sensitivity leads to faster response times.
Autodrive
There are many vehicles that you can drive in Watch Dogs: Legion to travel around London, including cars, trucks, motorbikes, boats and large drones. Some of the cars, trucks and buses have the ability to utilise an option called Autodrive. You can do this by tapping A or Cross when your vehicle is either stationary or moving at a low speed and you will begin to follow the road. If you wish to travel to a specific location, you first need to set a waypoint on the in-game map. Once you have done this, tap A/Cross to start to Autodrive. The vehicle will follow the rules of the road and may take longer to get there than if you are driving it yourself, but can be a way to get to various locations if the you need a break or find driving difficult. Press A/Cross again to switch off Autodrive. Some of the vehicles that have this option will have a ((A)) logo on the windscreen. Note that motorbikes, boats, drones and all other vehicles do not have the Autodrive option.
We hope that this post has been helpful in highlighting some of the options in Watch Dogs: Legion. If you have any questions about video game accessibility, please Contact Us.
Developer Resource:
For more video examples of how developers have improved the motor accessibility of their games, please visit https://specialeffectdevkit.info/
