Watch Dogs: Legion - How To Recruit Hostile Operatives, Retire & Resolve Kidnappings

Operatives are the secret ingredient that makes Watch Dogs: Legion something totally unique. Instead of playing as a set protagonist, you can choose your character from an entire city’s worth of people — and everyone has unique, specific skills. This system permeates everything in the game, and in the first few hours, we had a few questions.

Specifically, we wanted to know how to stop getting kidnapped so much, how to remove Operatives we didn’t want, and how to recruit hostile operatives that hate DedSec. If you’re unsure and need to know what’s up, we’ve got answers listed below, explaining some of those critical questions players are asking all about Operatives.

More Watch Dogs: Legion guides:

How To Improve Performance On PC | Low FPS & Crash Fixes Guide | The Best Operatives You Can Recruit Right At The Start Of The Game

How To Recruit Cops, Soldiers, Albion & More | Hostile Operatives Guide

To recruit Operatives that are your enemies, or in rival factions, you’ll need to unlock the Deep Profiling tech upgrade.

Deep Profiling: Tech upgrade that costs 20 tech. Allows you to complete special missions to recruit hostile recruits.

It’s an expensive upgrade, but it allows you to tag cops or other hard-to-recruit characters. You’ll gain a special mission — if you don’t complete it successfully, your target will permanently hate DedSec, so you’ll have to try someone else.

How To Retire Operatives You Don’t Want

Eventually, you’ll gain more operatives than you need — or you can get operatives that waste your precious ETO.

How To Remove an Operative: Open the Operatives menu, then select the operative you want to retire. In the lower-right corner, you’ll see an option to retire them.

Retiring an Operative will remove them from your playable roster. On PS4: edit your operative and press [Square] to remove them.

How To Avoid Getting Kidnapped | Operative Rescue Missions

In Watch Dogs: Legion, you’re operatives can get kidnapped randomly when you’re not using them. This usually happens if DedSec is extremely hated by different factions — when a kidnapping occurs, you’ll gain a mission to rescue your lost operative.

To lower your chances of kidnapping, use non-lethal shock weapons and takedowns. Or don’t injure anyone at all during missions — which is very possible.

Kidnappings against DedSec occur due to faction hatred, and faction hatred is caused by killing / injuring members of the faction. Non-lethal takedowns generate much less hate against your faction, especially compared to killing with guns. If you’re planning on going out on a shooting spree, expect some retaliation.