Watch Dogs Legion to be bundled with RTX 30 Series GPUs

London. The big smoke. Where the streets are paved with pavement, and where dreams go to die. This is the setting for Ubisoft’s upcoming third entry in the Watch Dogs series, Watch Dogs Legion, which is going to be given away for free with Nvidia’s new 30 series GPUs. We already heard that Watch Dogs Legion is going to built to take advantage of the latest new features Nvidia is offering with the 30 series cards, so it makes sense that it would also be chosen as a game to launch these cards with a giveaway promotion like this.

What perhaps makes slightly less sense to me is the GeForce Now 12-month subscription that is being included. This is the streaming service where you can play your games streamed from an Nvidia datacentre to a local device. There are no games included in the service, you just use existing purchases from Steam, Uplay, Epic Game Store, and other supported services, with the catch that you can only play a game if the publisher has granted Nvidia permission for their games to be used like that.

We’ve seen games added and removed from the service at a pretty wild rate, which does to some extent undermines the appeal of a service like this, it would be rather frustrating to buy a game intending to play it on GeForce Now, only for the game to be subsequently removed from the service. It appears to me that Nvidia took an “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission” approach to putting games on GeForce Now, at least initially. To me, this seems like a service that is far more appealing to people without access to a powerful dedicated gaming system they can use locally, which is not going to be true of anyone who does decide to buy an Nvidia 30-series GPU like the RTX 3070, RTX 3080 or RTX 3090. Perhaps the idea is that you can use the service in tandem with a gaming PC, streaming games from GeForce Now when you’re away from home, and playing in high quality with minimal latency when you are at home.

Certainly, these RTX features like ray tracing lighting and reflections really enhance the look of Watch Dogs Legion’s version of near future-London, with extremely wet looking puddles, and bold neon lighting. If this is a game you’re looking forward too, perhaps you should seriously consider this promotion. If you were planning on picking the game up anyway, then this is effectively a decent discount on those cards.

This promotion not going to be available on all variants of Nvidia’s 30 series cards, with more details being made available on precisely which cards qualify when this bundle goes live on September 17th. We’ll let you know which cards to go for if you want to bag a free copy of Watch Dogs Legion when this information is announced. It’s going to be specific to certain specific retailers and card manufacturers, so it’s something to look at for sure. Watch Dogs Legion is currently scheduled for an October 29th release, although it has already been delayed once, and that was before the pandemic. Let’s hope it can cross the finish line on schedule. We’re particularly interested to put Nvidia’s cards through their paces running open-world games like Watch Dogs Legion, to see just how far they can push image quality and framerates when using advanced raytracing effects.