right off the bat i know you havent played either game. or didnt pay much attention to the story if you did. also remember the context for why they did this: watch dogs came out and people were not happy with it over mostly trivial shit, so ubisoft took the wrong approach and made the other two games completely different from the original
I never really saw people complaining about WD1 for the story only the downgrades, over promises, and gameplay. Watch dogs 2 is the better game due to the improved gameplay elements but in terms of story I always found it worse. Their marketing analytics whatever the fuck department decided that Mr.Edgeboy trying to avenge their family was no longer the route and over corrected with the most annoying faggot characters ever in watch dogs 2. I don't know about the london one because I am allergic to british people and refuse to even pirate it.
I enjoyed the interaction between Mr Edgeboy Pierce and the more humorous fixer guy in 1 they really nailed the Jordi Chin character.
I mean they could have toned down the edge a bit on Pierce but I overall enjoyed the story.
That being said the downgrades in watch dogs 1 weren't trivial at all, especially if you look at the demo they sent out. They got everyone hyped up that this game was going to be a new era of gaming bla bla bla, amazing graphics, gameplay, so much shit to do, random events, NPCs reacting to the environment. Then they drop videos of several actual playable game demo's showing that all this cool shit is "real"... Game drops and none of those features are in there, it's a very technologically basic game for the time and people feel betrayed so it gets pretty hardly shit on.
It seems trivial now with this scam being pretty popular, but at the time this was the worst of them to date, the downgrades were so substantial and they sent MANY many videos of their over scripted demo sequences.