The amount of effort that has been poured into the technology powering Crackdown is immense, and I'm looking forward to experiencing what that will be like in the final product, even if questions remain about the full package. Whether or not it's Crackdown 3 that achieves that, it's too early to say, but that won't be for lack of trying. I certainly feel like Crackdown as a franchise has potential to be up there with the best of them for Microsoft. We think Crackdown has a lot of potential, it's a really fun game, we hope people love it. The way we look at that is, you have to earn that.
Our hope is that every game that we ship, we give it the best shot at becoming the next big franchise. Some games earn that, and some games don't. that's the hope, that's the dream for every title we publish. But like all good things, Crackdown would have to earn it.Įvery game that Microsoft Studios makes. I asked Joseph Staten whether Crackdown could eventually find itself up there with Forza, Halo, Minecraft, and Gears of War as one of Microsoft's "flagship" franchises, given the promising cloud technology and relatively unique proposition in Microsoft's first-party lineup. So we decided early on that we were going to put destruction entirely in multiplayer. We felt that multiplayer PvP, blowing the hell out of each other, was this great thematic match for destruction in Crackdown. We wanted to make sure that we offered that, but it was in a separate mode that was entirely about destruction. We thought about it, but ultimately we decided that this is a game about saving the city, and helping people, rather than reducing it to rubble. It seems that the decision was philosophically-driven, rather than technologically-driven.
On the topic of blowing shit up, you have to wonder why there was never an intent to add cloud-powered destruction to Crackdown 3's campaign. We felt the best experience in Crackdown 3 was to play with a friend, making plans of attack, each other, blowing shit up together. If you have too many players with completely different stuff on their mind, we found that they tend to go off in different directions and never see each other. There's no prescribed way to play through the bosses, for example. It's a big open world, with a huge set of guns, you can do things at your own pace. Crackdown 3 has very little structure, that's always been the appeal of the game. Neumann outlined that this was at least in part due to the chaotic nature of Crackdown 3. We absolutely want to ship games as high-quality and polished as we can.Ĭrackdown 3 was originally billed as a four-player co-op, but that has been dialed back to two-player in recent times. What that's afforded us on the campaign side is that it allowed us to go after a deeper story, add more tools to the sandbox, and create a more polished experience over all. just took us time, longer than we originally thought. Staten noted that while getting the cloud tech right did impact the schedule for the game's release, that it has led to an improved, and more polished campaign experience. It's a motivator to fulfil that vision, because that's what you promised.
In this case, we took our vision public very early on. The best players in Crackdown 3 will be those who anticipate where the line of sight could become an issue while getting creative with rockets. Not only do all agents come equipped with standard weapons, but you also come equipped with huge explosive weapons designed to destroy the environment, and thus, strip cover away from fleeing enemies. I certainly experienced some of those new ideas when I played the game at Redmond a few weeks ago. Whether it's cover based, or any sort of shooter type game, so much of the gameplay is about "what is my position relative to cover? what is the enemy's position relative to cover?" If you can just blow up everything, a lot of those principles of game design need to be rethought. One of the things I always think about when designing a game - geometry is gameplay. The ability to destroy all surface geometry in the game, including all buildings and physical structures, also led the teams working on Crackdown 3 to reconsider how shooters work in general.
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