“Job number one was to make a Crackdown game that Crackdown fans would love. Despite this, Staten is happy that his team remained focused on making a game that was true to the Crackdown formula rather than following current trends. In the nine years since Crackdown 2 was released, open-world action games have become bigger, more cinematic and more immersive than ever before. “Delays are never fun for anybody but in this case the campaign benefited from it.” “As we knew we had to keep pushing on Wrecking Zone to wrangle the technology, it gave us extra time to polish the campaign, to invest more in the story and deepen the experience,” Staten said. Although the single-player campaign doesn’t feature the same level of destructible environments, its non-linear story and increased focus on verticality created an entirely different kind of Crackdown. We had to completely rethink what it is to be a PvP combat experience – so many things had to be relearned.”Īlthough the cloud cover caused plenty of delays, one silver lining was the extended time it gave the team to polish other aspects of the game. “Once you’re able to blow up the entire world, all these tried and true design principals go out of the window so it wasn’t just the technical hill we had to climb. This piece of cover and that line of sight is always going to be there so you can predict the flow of combat,” said Staten. “Any multiplayer game is primarily about predictable geometry. Any time you do something first in the industry, it’s hard.”Īs well as the new technology, developers had to get to grips with an entirely new way of thinking when creating Crackdown 3’s open-world sandbox. It’s never really been done before at this level, so it was difficult to set up. Instead, all this number crunching and heavy lifting is done by Microsoft’s Azure server farms, which theoretically frees up more processing power at your end to focus on graphics.Īs head of production Jorg Neumann puts it: “Cloud destruction is something that’s brand new. It would normally take twelve Xbox Ones to process the physics calculations behind the environmental destruction in Wrecking Zone (the game’s multiplayer mode). Avoiding an accident in Crackdown 3.īy all accounts, Crackdown 3’s ambitious reliance on cloud-based computing is the main reason for its late arrival. “The project began with the basic pitch of ‘What if we harnessed the power of the cloud to create fully destructible environments – and what if we did that with Crackdown?’ Those are some pretty big ‘what ifs’ and the truth is, it just took longer than we thought,” Staten said. “We set big goals for ourselves,” he said. A bad game is bad forever.” By stubbornly refusing to release a major exclusive that didn’t meet its expectations, Xbox has both disappointed impatient fans and raised expectations for a game that at this stage, needs to be pretty special to justify the pushbacks.Ĭreative director Joseph Staten was keen to emphasise that the rocky road to release was a result of lofty ambitions and a refusal to compromise on the team’s original vision. But five years later, the game is finally ready for release and we’re just days from finding out if it’s been worth the wait.Īs the godfather of gaming Shigeru Miyamoto once said: “A delayed game is eventually good. At some points, it seemed as if it might not come out at all. Its development has been beset by controversy, studio restructures and back-to-the-drawing-board moments. Marketing campaigns, studio budgets and years’ worth of release schedules are built around big games hitting the shelves on time, and if there are any delays, it doesn’t take long for the online rumour mill to crank up looking for any signs of trouble.Ĭrackdown 3, originally announced in 2014, is probably the most delayed game of the current console generation, if not of all time. Often releases are targeted as vaguely as “Summer 2019”, or even just “2019” to give developers and publishers as much wiggle room as possible to get their game out of the gate.Īs the hype builds, however, so does the pressure from fans and retailers for a definitive street date, and that’s when the pressure really ramps up. With the possible exception of Hollywood, there is no industry more obsessed and fixated on release dates than the world of video games.Īs soon as a new title is announced, usually years in advance, the countdown begins. Lee Henaghan caught up with the game’s top creative talent to find out if it’s going to be worth the wait. Crackdown 3 is one of the most notoriously delayed games of all time, but it’s finally out next week.
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