Ubisoft shows Watch Dogs: Legion with ray tracing on Xbox Series X

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Facts first: on October 30, 2020, a day after the launch of Watch Dogs: Legion on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Stadia, the official Xbox channel published the video “Watch Dogs: Legion – Xbox Series X Inside Look”, with a close look at the next-gen version. The star of the video was real-time ray tracing, applied to the game’s futuristic London, a city of glass, metal and lights where truly calculated reflections make a difference.

Translating the jargon: ray tracing simulates the path of light rays to generate more realistic reflections, shadows and lighting, in place of the rasterization tricks traditionally used. It’s an expensive technique in terms of processing, and the new Microsoft and Sony consoles arrived with hardware acceleration for it. On PC, Legion also offered ray tracing and DLSS, Nvidia’s image reconstruction technique.

The Xbox Series X version was set for November 10, 2020, the console’s launch day, as the video’s own description stated, and the PS5 received its version in the same month.

The game

Developed by Ubisoft Toronto, with creative direction by Clint Hocking, Legion is the third game in the series. The map in numbers: eight London boroughs, plus the City, to explore on foot, by car or through the subway stations. The big novelty was the character system: you can recruit practically anyone in the city to the DedSec hacker group, each with their own skills, and with optional permadeath. In practice, this means there is no fixed protagonist.

What came next

Reviews were “mixed or average” on Metacritic. The online mode arrived in March 2021, and the Bloodline expansion, with Aiden Pearce and Wrench, came out on July 6, 2021.