There aren't Any Dogs in Watch Dogs Legion

E3 is over, but news adjacent to E3 is still rolling out from publishers and journalists who have lots and lots of stories to share from the giant yearly expose. These tidbits of news often help us learn just that little bit more about a game or how it was made, and sometimes leads to some shockingly human moments. And what could be more human than dogs?

Specifically, the dogs in Watch Dogs Legion. You may have noticed in the trailer that, despite being prominent in the name, there wasn’t a single four-legged furry pooch to be found anywhere in the streets of London. And as it turns out, that’s no accident: according to PCGamesN and creative director Clint Hocking, they intentionally stripped all the dogs out of London so players wouldn’t have to deal with the dogs they might leave behind whenever they kill someone.
 

"When you see the bin man working, and then you shoot the bin man, we make his sister not like you, and we make his brother not like you. When you see the woman walking her dog and you shoot the woman, we really had to ask ourselves 'what do we do with the dog?'"

Yeah, I’m not kidding. Turns out, Watch Dog Legion is an ambitious game that creates a complex web for all the NPC’s that determine their schedules and attitudes and affects how they react to changes in the game world… which is important, considering the whole premise of recruiting ‘anybody’.

But the developers couldn’t figure out how to get dogs into the equation.
 

"Does someone adopt the dog? Does the dog become a stray? Does it disappear out of the world? That doesn’t seem fair. Do we need to up-res the dog and make the dog a part of the simulation? We already bit off a lot, and we were like 'I don't know how we do that. I don’t know how we deal with this problem.' And so yeah—no dogs."

Hey, this game looks pretty crazy as-is. I can respect them drawing a line somewhere, and if that line is “no sad dogs”, well… that’s a pretty great line to have.