Watch Dogs Legion sure is promising the world when it releases next year (or, at the very least, promising all of London). The game got a lot of buzz after its reveal at this year’s E3 with a premise that sounds both exciting and impossible: the ability to recruit everyone in London to fight a fascist government that’s taken over England. But how many people will that be? Well, according to Associate Producer Shelley Johnson, the possibilities are endless, literally.
In an interview with Gamecrate, Johnson was asked just how many NPCs there will end up being, and she gave the bold answer that the game will have literally unlimited amounts of NPCs that one can recruit, even saying that if you had to pin down a number, it’d be something like 9 million.
“One of the numbers that was floating around at one point was 9 million,” she said. “They’re procedurally generated characters. So we’ve spent four years building the technology to be able to deliver on this promise and that includes the ability to piece together this huge city of characters as far as animation, dialogue, census data, like all those bio pieces that you see when you profile somebody, faces, character kids, all of this comes together to produce a unique character every time.”
We do know from an earlier interview that the game has 20 script variations for the story, so obviously a lot of these characters won’t be 100% unique, but it is quite something to try and live up to. We’ll see if Watch Dogs Legion is up to the task when it releases on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia on March 6th, 2020.