Items

London gives up its collectibles unevenly. Some of them the map will point at once you have done the groundwork, some come with a running count and nothing else, and one set is handed to you as a stack of blurred photographs with no pin at all. That difference in how much searching the game does for you is the most useful way to line up the three hunts our pages cover: tech points, the 38 masks and Bagley's memory fragments. It also happens to be the order you will meet them in, because the first pays for your gadgets from the opening hours and the last does not exist until the credits have rolled.

Tech points: the map helps, the marker lies

Tech points are the only collectible here that buys anything. They pay for every gadget and upgrade on our best tech and upgrades page, from the Infiltrator Spiderbot to the Deep Profiler at 25 points and the Skin Mesh at 45, and you can start earning them after the first few missions, either as mission rewards or as pickups in the open world. Liberating a district puts its tech points on the map, which our essential tips guide calls the fastest route to a well-equipped team, but both of our borough pages warn that the icon is not the item: it gets you to the building, and the point itself is usually up a wall, inside a vent or behind a wooden panel marked with a red cross.

That is why the Tower Hamlets page tells you to have a Spiderbot and a Cargo Drone before you set off. Of the nineteen points across our two borough pages, ten are Spiderbot jobs through air vents, garages and restricted interiors, and three are Cargo Drone rides to a station roof, an embassy waterfront or a hospital balcony. Our tech points page lays out all nineteen with the gadget each one needs, and a construction worker on the roster can summon the drone for you if you have not bought one yet.

Masks: a number and a city

Masks sit in the middle of the scale. The game assigns you all 38 of them and our mask page pins down 37 by borough, from a ledge at the Perry Harris Redevelopment in Westminster to the entrance of Battersea at the far end of the list, but nothing on our pages describes a marker or a hint doing the work for you. The page's own summary is fair: most are easy pickings, a few make you earn them. The hard one that our secrets page singles out is inside the Roberts and Scott Hall, where a ctOS terminal opens an underground room dressed as a DJ party, with a poster on the wall that nods to a character from the first game.

A surprising number of the others are indoors in places you would not wander into by accident: the stairway of the DedSec safe house, a side table inside New Scotland Yard, the control room of the Albion Internment Centre, a first-floor table in Cemetery Park that comes with a guardian, and the TV room of the Walkie Talkie. Rooftops carry many of the others, including Camden Market, the Xcess, the Brixton Barrier Block and the generators on top of the European Processing Centre, so the Cargo Drone earns its keep here as well.

Bagley's memory fragments: photographs with no pin

The last hunt is the one the map refuses to help with, and it is not available at all until the main story is done. Once it is, the side quest is picked up from the console in the DedSec Safehouse and hands you eight blurred photographs, filed under Bagley's Collectibles in the Data Menu. Your only other help is an on-screen prompt when you are near one of the spots. Our Bagley page names all eight: the National Gallery, Duck Island Cottage and the Wellington Arch near Buckingham Palace in Westminster; the Millennium Wheel and the Brixton Recreation building in Lambeth; the World of Tomorrow in Islington and Hackney; the Crosier and Cherry bar in Camden; and Guy's Hospital in Southwark.

Two practical notes from that page. If the camera shutter fires and the quest does not tick over, the angle is wrong rather than the location, so shift the frame until the prompt confirms it. And eight is not the end: with all of them captured, a ninth request sends you up the elevator of the Walkie Talkie to shoot from the Skygarden balcony, which is what finally unlocks The One That Got Away.

Borough by borough

Laid out by borough, the three hunts overlap far less than you might expect. Tower Hamlets and Nine Elms carry every tech point we have mapped and hold no memory fragment, while Westminster has three of Bagley's eight and masks from Buckingham Palace Gardens to Downing Street but no tech point page yet. Our darts locations guide uses the same borough split for its 21 boards, and it is worth a look before you drive across town for a single mask.

One caution on the mask column. Our mask page has no Lambeth or Nine Elms heading, and its long final Southwark section runs south of the river through places our other pages file elsewhere: the Brixton Recreation building that the Bagley page puts in Lambeth, the European Processing Centre and the Xcess that the darts page puts in Lambeth, and the Battersea entrance that our Nine Elms tech point page treats as its own turf. Read that section as the whole south bank rather than one borough.

The other currency

None of these hunts pays in ETO, which is the money you earn by liberating boroughs, and that is by design: our clothing stores guide points out that ETO has almost nothing to buy except outfits and a few weapon skins. Tech points are the currency that changes how you play, so if you have to choose an afternoon, spend it in Tower Hamlets with a Spiderbot rather than at the shops around Piccadilly Circus. How those points fit into the rest of the game, from recruiting to the last chapter, is on our Watch Dogs Legion guide, and the story moments and secrets that sit alongside these hunts are in our choices and secrets guide.