Game characters – and leading game characters in particular – are so often built as a vessel for players to fill out that they end up, paradoxically, lacking much character at all. Watch Dogs 2’s Marcus Holloway was a very different kind of lead, a character that displayed a consistently sympathetic flicker between brash confidence and nervousness, a passionately held personal philosophy, and a general friendliness missing from so many scripted protagonists. As with most AAA open worlds, that character could become veiled by gunfire and absurdity when you actually began to control him, but the Marcus Holloway of Watch Dogs 2’s cutscenes felt notably like a person, not just a collection of voice lines designed to string missions together.