Why You Should Liberate Districts In Watch Dogs: Legion

Watch Dogs: Legion has a few new tricks up its sleeves. The game follows the footsteps of its older brothers and still delivers a large, open world game for you to explore, stealth around, and hack. But this go around, the game lets players control a city's worth of freedom fighters, and audiences will need a small army if they want to liberate each district in Legion.

At the beginning of the game, Legion's futuristic take on London is controlled by the paramilitary group Albion. This organization grinds each of the game's districts, modeled after various London boroughs, under its steel-toed heels in the guise of public safety. Normally, any human's blood would boil, and they would loudly march forward in the pursuit of liberating districts from tyranny. There's more to freeing zones than just red-blooded altruism, however.

In Watch Dogs: Legion, completing missions that turn boroughs defiant (i.e., liberating districts) nets you lucrative prizes, so you should do just that as often as possible. Here's why the rewards are worth the effort.

In modern video games, you can't walk five feet or eat a sandwich without unlocking an in-game achievement or trophy. These can act as a "to-do list," as well as bragging rights for when you hit certain milestones. In Watch Dogs: Legion, spreading freedom is one of those milestones.

The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of Legion (and the inevitable Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 renditions) provide achievements/trophies for a variety of tasks. Recruit a video game developer? Ding, achievement unlocked. Stroll into Buckingham Palace while disguised as a guard? You got a trophy. Turn boroughs defiant? The achievement/trophy designers thought of that too.

The first time you liberate a district, you receive an achievement/trophy, and while the game doesn't feature achievements for freeing specific areas, it will reward you again if you liberate the whole of London. If you're a completionist, you were probably going to turn every borough defiant anyway, but if you are an achievement hunter and not the 100% brand of completionist, keep in mind that freeing these areas will unlock some of those, too.

In Watch Dogs: Legion, you're facing a force trained to instill fear and crack down on freedom by any means necessary, so you will need every advantage you can get, including trained operatives and gadgets. You can spend literally forever searching the streets of London for the best recruits and tech points to upgrade your arsenal, but liberating districts can really help you expedite the process.

Each time you swap a borough from oppressed to defiant, Legion rewards you with a specific type of recruit for your roster. For example, if you liberate Westminster and Nine Elms, a spy and hitman will automatically join your ranks, respectively. You could always wander aimlessly and hope to find one by sheer luck, but if you want a 100% assured method of recruiting a powerful specialist, go and let freedom ring. Besides, do you really want to enlist a spy who openly advertises their occupation on in-game Facebook?

However, if you have enough operatives to fill the Albert Hall, you probably want to upgrade tech skill sinstead. While you can find tech points just by completing missions, the most reliable — and unreliable — source is discovering points out in the world. You might stumble upon them by sheer luck, but whenever you liberate a district, your map is updated to reveal all tech points in the borough.