Watch Dogs Legion: Post-Brexit dystopia inspires Ubisoft's next big game

French video game company Ubisoft is courting controversy with one of its newest titles, Watch Dogs: Legion.

The new game, unveiled at E3, presents a dystopian vision of a post-Brexit London, where there's an immigration crisis of people trying to re-enter the EU.

"Everything's gone completely off the rails," says Clint Hocking, the game's creative director.

"Authoritarians are taking over, the economy has collapsed, private military corporations have sort of rolled in to fill the gap after the defunding of the Met and defunding of the military.

"The surveillance apparatus that has protected us for 75 years is being turned against the population, undesirables are being filtered out, people are being pressed out of the country."

Gamers play as people fighting the authoritarian regime in a resistance movement - called Deadsec. A new feature means gamers can recruit and play as any character in the game, each with their own backstory and skills, meaning there's not one main character.

"There's a massive immigration crisis," says Hocking. "People are being pushed out of the country, they're trying to leave, the EU has put in a pre-processing centre to sort of stem the flow of people flooding back into the European Union, so that they can understand what's going on and track everyone."

The game is set for release in March 2020. Hocking says it's their duty to "talk about things that matter to people and sometimes that means controversy".

"People care about the world we live in and we have to be able to speak to that as game developers."

Newshub.