Last playthrough, I chased down some connections between Albion and Clan Kelley. This time around I was going to tackle the Watch Dogs Legion 404 missions which started with a cryptic message on the dark web.
Intro to Watch Dogs Legion 404 Group
The mysterious 404 leader tasked me with infiltrating the Walkie Talkie club that I had been to in an earlier mission. It was a the typically douche type of rich penthouse place. Clan Kelley was using a Facial Recognition AI to get blackmail info on politicians and that club had a hub connected to it. There was a nice view, but I was only there to do a little sneak and hack to find the source of the Facial Recognition AI.
We found that source was Broca Tech, a company started by a child Genius, Skye Larson (she’s important in these missions). The wonderful uniformed access I discussed last time allowed me to just stroll right into the building and up to the server. There was 1 or 2 people I had to knockout, but my AR Shroud kept them nicely hidden. From there it was easy to delete the Facial Recognition AI data and escape the area.
Bagley, our friendly DedSec AI, was nice enough to leak all that juicy blackmail material to the public to make sure it can’t be used against them, while exposing their misdeeds.
The leader of 404 was pleased with our progress and was happy to find we were DedSec. She was a big fan and revealed herself whiling giving us the name “Nowt” to call her by.
Somerset House
Nowt wanted me to meet her at the Somerset House. It had a lot of 2 things: security and awesome holographic displays. My crew of uniformed access people allowed me to walk right in and enjoy the displays. Yeah I had to walk away from some of the guards to stay undercover, but just a distraction here or there and it made it easy to get to the Nowt’s AV server.
Hacking that showed a video feed into Nowt’s safe house where she was beating the hell out of an Albion guard. He was looking into her tresspassing, but he got treated like the trespasser. She decided to give me an important contract.
First I had to head to Nexus tower to delete a quantum computer Albion uses to simulate civilian response to different scenarios to see what they can get away with. My Albion recruit let me walk in and delete the data without a gunfight or much sneaking. It was a progress meter type of wait, but no one gave me a 2nd look.
Nowt’s Watch Dogs Legion 404 Big Contract
Now that I proved myself, Nowt was ready to give me the big contract.
I made my way to the GBB House to hack the feed into Skye Larson’s conference. A nearby cargo drone made it easy for me to hack and ride my way to the top of the building to install a rootkit on the GBB hub.
Once in the conference, Skye Larson had a cool holographic display of herself over the stage. She was introducing Project Daybreak, a way to upload people’s consciousness to the cloud. You know the whole promise of immortality thing, so you know she will end up being evil.
Skye Larson’s Mansion
Nowt sent me to Skye’s mansion to find out just how evil she was. After a quick network bypass to get inside, I was surprised at just how good it looked. It was an obvious smart home where everything was shiny white, but it got weird from there.
After taking the elevator downstairs, I was amazed how the “basement lab” was a recreation of Skye’s childhood home. Trees and flowers all around, even simulated skyline with sunshine. To unlock the door to the house and the doors inside, I had to pickup parts of Skye’s childhood memories (medicial bracelet, trophy, etc.) which would trigger AR reconstructions of the memory associated with it. Pretty trippy stuff.
The memories alluded to horrible things that Skye was doing and that her mom did not want to be a part of it (her mom had a degenerative disease). These evils were verified when going into the garage and seeing that she had uploaded her dogs consciousness into a spider bot. It was pretty shocking and I had to put it out of its misery.
The whole time in the house, Skye’s AI was guiding me around. This AI finally lead me to surveillance footage that showed Skye’s evil extended to humans. She forced her mother into the upload process and then deleted pieces of her consciousness to control her. All this while her mother begged to end the pain. The AI was actually her mother after all those deletions. It was pretty sick and I had to head her pleas, so I shut her down as requested.
Nowt gave me this Watch Dogs Legion 404 mission partially because she couldn’t do the compassionate thing to turn Skye’s mother off. Completing this finally gave her enough trust to meet face to face. She asked for help to take down the evil Skye before she can do this to all the people that signed up for Daybreak.
Blume Campus in Watch Dogs Legion 404 Mission
After shutting her mother down, Skye threatened our group to not interfere or she would track us down, like we would listen. To get her location, it was off to the Blume building. My uniform access let me get in pretty easily. I was able to use net hacks to hijack a drone inside the server room. It was a massive server room that required me to fly the drone way down through a puzzle of vents and conduits.
Hacking the server gave me a video message of Skye giving away the location of her quantum lab to the Blume board of directors. It was to go under the Blume campus. Time for more of my Albion guy’s uniformed access. That uniform allowed me to walk right up to the elevator to the quantum labs.
Skye’s Quantum Lab
The lab was definitely high tech with a huge holographic brain in the middle of the chamber. I could hear Skye talking to herself running diagnostics. There were two heavily armored and armed guards, guarding the 2 hemispheres of the quantum computer. I had to hack both sides, so I tagged the badass guards for later recruitment and took them out. It was not too bad using the combination of distractions and my AR cloak to get the drop on them.
Once I hacked and terminated both hemispheres of the quantum computers, more guards were called and I had to dispatch of them like the others. It was close, but I was able to isolate each and take them out. This gave me clear path to Skye’s chamber. The Watch Dogs Legion 404 mission was almost complete.
She tried to plead I not shut her down using holograms along my path. I was given a choice to side with her vision of a future in the cloud by allowing her to upload herself, or side with Nowt and shut her down. After seeing what she did to her dog, my mind was already made up that she was going down. I turned her off and it was time to escape, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
Losing my Albion Guy in the 404 Mission
Another wave of stronger guards came my way and I tried to just slip by them with distractions and my AR cloak. Unfortunately, I was prevented from going up the elevator while being pursued. The long hallway and slow cooldown timer for my hacks prevented me from doing anything other than running into a hail of bullets from those guards.
That was the tragic end of my Albion recruiter, who’s uniform access served me so well. Having permadeath on made this loss hurt, as I really started to like the guy. It does add to the fun of the game, because this makes it a part of my story. I was then forced to decide between not having an Albion recruit or finding a new one.
I did end up getting a new one following my Watch Dogs Legion 404 missions, but he wasn’t the same. He was the new guy and he was so cocky compared to my other guy. For now, I guess he’ll do. Next time I’ll tackle some missions to go over the leader of Albion, Nigel Cass.