Crackdown 3

Games
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Has anyone heard any info on The ever delayed Crackdown 3? Some articles I read said it may be optimized to run at full 4K on Scorpio, which leads me to think they may wait and release it with Scorpio. Anyone got the inside scoop or looking forward to this one?

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I quite enjoyed the first Crackdown - but I didn’t see what the sequel (2) offered over the original, so I barely played it.

For the same reason I’m not overly interested in a third.

I never played co-op though, so perhaps that was the problem?

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I think the online atmosphere for consoles has come a long way since the first one. It seems like a game that, if done right, could be a great game for communities like this one.

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If i was in the marketing department I would be developing it to help lead the way with Scorpio. Crackdown 1 was very fun and adding a multiplayer element will only be that much better

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For the price they are going to want to get for Scorpio I wouldn’t be surprised if it shipped with it.

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First Crackdown was awesome and I bought the game for that and not the Halo beta (those that knew me then knew my campaign was Viva La F The Beta). Second game was such a piece of shit so hoping they go back to their roots with this one.

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Wow talk about putting the message out wrong. Apparently destructible environments will only be in MP. Wish we had known this last night when recording @anon42851937.

Crackdown 3 made a decent impression at E3 2017, what with a trailer featuring Terry Crews shouting and some solid-looking gameplay. But as fans looked closer, they began to wonder: where were the 100-percent destructible environments glimpsed years earlier? Game design director Gareth Wilson told Eurogamer they haven’t gone anywhere - it’s just a feature unique to multiplayer, which wasn’t the focus at E3.

“The destruction was always planned for the multiplayer side of the game,” Wilson said. “We’ve got this big competitive multiplayer game where you play in a large multiplayer arena, 20-30 minute battles, and the aim of the game is to smash the crap out of their tower, and they have to destroy your tower before the time runs out. That’s where the destruction works great.”

Wilson said that there were two main reasons for not including such significant destruction in the campaign: the ability to play offline and story. Since Crackdown 3 uses online computations to help handle the stress of such vast environmental destruction, the game would require a constant internet connection (even in single-player) if developer Sumo Digital were to implement destruction in both modes. Wilson also said that the story of Crackdown 3 is about saving the city of New Providence, not destroying it.

Personally, I’d add in “satisfying gameplay” to those reasons. Sure, blowing up a building once is fun, but eventually you’d tear the entire city down and be running around a flat desert of rubble. Plus, how would you collect Agility Orbs hiding on top of a skyscraper if it no longer existed? That doesn’t sound particularly fun to me.

Wilson said keeping the multiplayer destruction limited to multiplayer was always the plan. “With hindsight, we didn’t do a particularly good job of messaging that. It was always that we were going to have two games: a classic campaign with four-player co-op, which is a homage to the original title with similar mechanics and updated graphics and more narrative. And then the cloud stuff was always going to be in the multiplayer.”

Well, glad we cleared that up.

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Delayed to spring 2018, according to Microsoft.

12

Vaporware.

Games looks like ass anyway.

13

Who’s ass?

14

Crackdown 3 Delayed to February 2019

When it comes to Crackdown 3, it’s getting to the point where we’re not quite sure what to expect. The problem is the game was announced four years ago at E3 2014 — back then it was simply known as Crackdown. Over the last four years, the game has been wheeled out at the occasional big game conference, namely Gamescom 2015, E3 2016, and E3 2017. In between those events, we hear and see nothing. Some players have suspected the game is in trouble, even going as far as to suggest it’s cancelled. While it seems like that isn’t the case, E3 2018 is the moment Microsoft has chosen to confirm the unsurprising news that the game has been delayed again.

Speaking exclusively to Windows Central, Microsoft said:

Our fans’ response to the signature antics and explosive gameplay of “Crackdown 3” has been incredible. To ensure we deliver the experience they deserve, “Crackdown 3” will be launching in Feb 2019. We look forward to sharing more on “Crackdown 3” this Sunday during the Xbox E3 2018 briefing.

So there we have it. Will we see the game in February? Only time will tell, but in the more immediate future, you can tune in to Microsoft’s E3 show on June 10th at 1PM PT / 4PM ET / 9PM BST / 6AM AEST (June 11th) to see the game in its latest form.

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This game is never coming out.

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lol

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Vaporware.

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Not a believer yet

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When Crackdown 3 was announced in 2014, Microsoft emphasized the return of series creator Dave Jones and his new company Cloudgine, which provided a cloud computing service to help power in-game destruction that would otherwise be impossible on a baseline Xbox One. In an interview with Kotaku around that time, Xbox head Phil Spencer, now executive vice president for gaming at Microsoft, said, “[Jones’] Cloudgine company is doing a lot of the technology behind Crackdown.” But earlier this year, Fortnite creator Epic Games announced it had acquired Cloudgine. Jones left the creative director role at the project’s co-developer Reagent Games, and with it Crackdown 3, to take the role of director of cloud and esport strategies at Epic.

The move raises questions about Microsoft’s plans for the game’s big multiplayer destruction. The initial description of the destruction sounded almost futuristic. “Unlike other games, this wall has compute power and memory on demand,” Jones told GamesTM magazine. “Each single bullet will take away a little bit of the geometry. And everything is physical. In true Crackdown style if I want to be at the top of a building, any building, and create a little sniper nest and shoot my friends from there so they can hardly see me, then that’s pretty exciting. That’s the kind of thing we can do.”

A Gamescom 2015 demo displayed publicly, for the first time, how this would work. While the visual fidelity didn’t compare with modern open-world games, the physics and destruction approached Jones’ bold promise, with the player bringing down skyscrapers piece by piece.

Last week at E3 2018, we spoke with Microsoft Studios head Matt Booty about the status of the destruction mode, which the company hasn’t shown since that 2015 demo. Booty confirmed the destruction-heavy online multiplayer mode remains in development. “It is still part of [Crackdown 3],” said Booty. “We’re not showing a lot of details about that here. We’ll have more to show as the year goes on.”

Booty was less clear on which cloud tools will power that mode. “You know, we’re super lucky as part of Microsoft that we get to work so closely with the Xbox platform team, that the cloud shows up in all of our games in pretty exciting ways. […] Over time, things will evolve and I can’t really speak to what’s in the game, but it’s — these days with a big game like that, we’re very fortunate to have access to industry-leading cloud technology.”

Asked for clarity on whether or not this meant Cloudgine and Microsoft’s own cloud tools would power the mode, Booty responded, “You know, I’m not going to get into the actual technical breakdown. Let’s just say that we’ve got access to a great infrastructure, and the game’s got some great tech in it, and we’re going to put those two together in the way that makes the most sense.” Booty’s response marks a sharp departure from Spencer’s 2014 claims about the role Cloudgine would play in the final product.

Booty also confirmed that Microsoft is no longer working with Jones or Reagent Games on Crackdown 3. “We’re just working with Sumo [Digital] right now,” said Booty. “That’s our main development partner. And as you know, I’m sure you know, any game has got a number of folks that come in to help us with content and some development, but Sumo’s our main … Sumo is our main partner on Crackdown.”

The status of Reagent has been a mystery since Epic announced the acquisition of Cloudgine in January. Even though Cloudgine and Reagent are technically separate companies, they seem to have close ties — Jones having co-founded Cloudgine and founded Reagent, and having served as creative director at the latter. Following the Cloudgine acquisition, multiple Reagent employees left the company to join Jones at Epic or take jobs elsewhere, according to their personal LinkedIn pages. On LinkedIn, only three people have Reagent listed as their current employer. Two of those employees have added other jobs since November 2017. The other, when contacted via email, confirmed they no longer work at Reagent, but declined to go into detail regarding the project or the status of the company.

Emails and phone calls to Reagent have gone unanswered. The company’s Twitter account hasn’t posted since January 2017, when it tweeted a job listing for a software engineer. The included link is now dead, as is the rest of the company’s website.

Dave Jones has not commented at publish time, and when contacted about the acquisition earlier this year, Epic Games’s PR team denied requests for an interview with Jones.

In an E3 2018 interview with Giant Bomb, Jeff Gerstmann asked Phil Spencer about Crackdown 3’s original announcement and its emphasis on cloud-based destruction. “I thought we got a little bit into talking about how we’re building the game and not talking about the game,” said Spencer. “So after some of the stuff, I was like, it’s not about the power of the cloud — and everybody can find a video of me saying that, so I understand — but let’s talk … just talk about being Crackdown.”

“There’s still creative work to do,” Spencer continued. “I’m not saying the game’s perfect by any stretch right now. But we are committed to the game. We definitely had a heart-to-heart as we were rolling into E3: ‘If we’re going to show this and we’re going to say it’s coming, I don’t want to head-fake the community again.’”

Part of that commitment will involve Microsoft’s own cloud tech. Crackdown 3 will still benefit from Microsoft’s Azure cloud server network, the actual computing source that, in recent years, Microsoft reps have said would grant games 13 times the physics computing power of the Xbox One. How Azure will support the destruction mode without the support of Cloudgine should become clear once the game ships in February of next year.

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What comes out first, Crackdown 3 or Star Citizen?

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Crackdown 3 if I had to pick between the two.

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Yeah, at least Crackdown 3 has incentive to hit full release - they’ve haven’t made 9 figures being in alpha.