Official Thread Crackdown 3
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@XboxFloat: ORIGINAL CRACKDOWN ON THE LIST FOR FUTURE XBOX ONE BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY GAMES #Xbox https://t.co/YrHpS6yQQK
I have to say, I'm not really sure what to think about the new Crackdown game yet. I get that the destruction of the environment is a big deal but I was kind of hoping for a leap in the graphics that didn't really occur from what I saw in the tech demo of the destruction. I get that Crackdown's always had a cell shaded look to it and they're keeping with that which helps in terms of draw distances and other technical aspects of the game. I don't doubt, for a second that the game play will be fun, but I guess I was hoping to see it become something more this generation in terms of graphics. Its still one of the few must haves for 2016, but, I'm hoping that between now and release I'll get to see more video's that'll show the improvement in the graphics.
Well SP tends to look better than MP even in current generation, and so far we've seen nothing about it.
It could have been an early build of the game. But the explosions and collapses didn't really impress me that much. I loved the single player of the Crackdown, never really put much time into the multiplayer of #2.
Rare started work on Crackdown 2 before being moved to Kinect
http://www.unseen64.net/2015/12/08/crackdown-2-rare-ltd-xbox-360-cancelled/
http://www.unseen64.net/2015/12/08/crackdown-2-rare-ltd-xbox-360-cancelled/
Interesting, wonder if it would have been more of a sequel rather than the expansion pack it turned out to be.
MP in CD2 was sooooo much fun. If it ever comes to XB360 BC you should pick it up and we can go through it
MP in CD2 was sooooo much fun. If it ever comes to XB360 BC you should pick it up and we can go through it
What was it like? Deathmatch? Co-Op??
Controversial opinion
I prefer Crackdown 2 over CD 1
Wingsuit
Rocket boots
Giant infected makes combat more fun
Slightly better melee
Turrets
4 Player co-op
Audio Logs
Magnet Grenades
Golden Snitch orbs
CD1 I only miss the sniper zoom and transforming vehicles.
I prefer Crackdown 2 over CD 1
Wingsuit
Rocket boots
Giant infected makes combat more fun
Slightly better melee
Turrets
4 Player co-op
Audio Logs
Magnet Grenades
Golden Snitch orbs
CD1 I only miss the sniper zoom and transforming vehicles.
http://www.nowgamer.com/the-game-that-could-change-xbox-one-forever/
The Game That Could Change Xbox One Forever
Complete and utter destruction was the target set by Cloudgine and Reagent Games as they set about re-energising the Crackdown licence with Microsoft, but what this has spawned has the potential to change Xbox One games forever. That may seem like a bold statement, but actually what it’s really delivering is the full promise of the console Microsoft intended to launch in 2013, when the world of gaming turned against it over DRM and always-online functionality. This is the game that could take the Xbox One back to being a digital gaming powerhouse. A games console for the online age, using the full resources of the web to future-proof itself.
And it all started so very simply, building on the sandbox freedom and interactivity the series has already established. “We said if we want to do a true Crackdown 3 multiplayer, we really wanted to move that physicality into the online space,” says Dave Jones, original creator of Crackdown, GTA, APB and now president and co-founder of Cloudgine.
“We started off with a high bar of saying, ‘What if for the first time ever we could make the whole world in which you play fully destructible?’. That was what our goal was, because again it was all about this physicality and it begs simple questions, like why in a game can I not just shoot a wall with my bullets and that wall, rather than just having a texture decal stuck on it, why don’t my bullets just go through the wall? And if I want to shoot a bigger hole, why can’t I step through that hole? So it was about breaking down walls in videogames.”
At this point it all sounds promising, but hardly groundbreaking. Battlefield has been doing this for years, hasn’t it? Rainbow Six: Siege appears to be doing something similar. Except, there’s a twist in the form of cloud processing, which changes the potential for scale completely. Crackdown will not be limited to the 8-core CPU or 1.31 teraflops of graphics processing inside the Xbox One’s ample frame. This game will be drawing from Microsoft’s intimidating Azure Cloud server network, an interconnected web of server farms spread across the globe offering cloud computing services for companies, office applications and increasingly games. 2014’s Titanfall already felt the benefit of running on the Microsoft Azure server network and its 27 data centres around the world. It just needed to reach out to the nearest server cluster and find some space to host a clean, strong connection. It worked a treat.
“Unlike other games, this wall has compute power and memory on demand,” reveals Jones as he demonstrates how destructible Crackdown 3 is in a tech demo. “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.” And if you wanted to shoot a metal railing off the side of a building and then wield it, swinging it at the heads of gang members, that’s just fine too.
Chances are you’ve seen some of the more bombastic responses to the latest Crackdown 3 tech demonstrations with claims of 13 times the power of the Xbox One being harnessed for the game. The reality is a more modest than that, but no less impressive. “It’s not the whole performance of the box, it’s just how much we would normally use in terms of physics,” clarifies Jones. What Microsoft Azure really gives Cloudgine access to then is (at present) 13 times the physics computing power of what the Xbox One would typically reserve for such data. Not as sexy, but theoretically that could just be the beginning of what this extra processing potential brings to Xbox One.
“Typical multiplayer games run on a server and if you’re lucky you get one server for your game, but most servers actually share games,” Jones explains as he switches to a debug mode on the demo to show us how the different servers interact with the online game world. “What you see here is that all the different colours are actually different cloud servers. So the cyan and the green are actually on physically different servers. We can just start to add servers and expand the world and make sure everything is at this level of detail. The system is so smart that you’ll see cyan blocks, as they cross physical server boundaries, change colour, as they move across servers.”
So, as you begin to destroy a 30-storey building, one server might be handling the debris and calculating impact while another server picks up the calculations for how this incoming impact will affect the glass tower that stands next to it. And all with no frame-rate drop. “You’ll see everything is physical, there’s cascade damage, everything hits everything else,” Jones continues. “The more damage we start to do, we’ll start to use more and more power. Let’s say we do enough damage to this tower on the right that if we keep shooting the base here eventually that should fall down, exactly as players, I think, would want it to work and expect to happen.
“So the whole thing will fall and everything on it is physical, it will hit the ground, it will damage things farther away, etc. Even when it’s on the ground it’s fully physical; you can stand on it and climb up.” And as we watch the devastation crank up we can see, thanks to a neat debug HUD option, how much additional processing power is being brought to bear. The bar for the Xbox One is full pretty quickly, and each additional bar represents an equal amount of processing from the cloud. One by one, more bars appear on the screen as the debris falls and scatters, destroying and taking chunks off other buildings.
And now the gameplay potential of this technology, as well as its obvious compatibility with the spirit of Crackdown, begins to emerge. For the ultimate sandbox experience, what could be better than a city you can raze to the ground? “Crackdown was a game about doing things the way you want to do them, so imagine that there was a kingpin who lived at the top of this tower and was very, very heavily defended. I could, as a Crackdown player, use agility and try and climb my way up to try and kill him or we could get together and say ‘Screw that’ and just blow the base of the tower up and bring him and the whole tower down.” It’s essentially the CGI trailer we saw a year ago, but made into real, demonstrable gameplay. How often do we get to say that a CGI teaser trailer actually delivered on its promise?crackdown-3-dev-shot
Delivering some semblance of realism is something this development team is really pinning itself to, albeit in a tech-fantasy future setting. Because this game world is a tangible one with a consistent physics engine, if you want to make everything destructible you also need to make sure it can stand up in the first place. “You have to re-imagine gaming in a respect because this whole building here is actually built physically,” says Jones as the scale of the endeavour Cloudgine and Reagent has taken on begins to truly dawn on us.
“Once again, building are usually just put together by geometry and they’re just a picture; they’re fake. If we want to make a fully destructible world we would expect players to say, ‘If that’s fully destructible, I want to shoot out this whole base and I want the whole thing to fall over with my friends on the top and they should fall down with it’. And we say ‘Absolutely’. This building here has been built physically, so it’s clad in concrete, steel and glass and it has a steel infrastructure that runs through it. To do that we had to make that building stand up under physics.” And then apply that to the building on the entire city…
It means we might need to think a little differently about how we interact with the game too. Things won’t be as simple as we first think. “Now, this building, the way that it’s constructed, it has a lot of weight on the left hand side, the way that the architect has designed this. You would expect that when it finally falls down that it would fall to the left, but once again that’s decided by physics. If you did enough damage and stripped it away, it can fall any direction you want. From a gameplay perspective that’s very different.”
Ultimately, and excitingly for those of us who fell in love with this game, it feels like the original Crackdown first did. While many will still only remember Realtime World’s sandbox as the delivery system for a Halo 3 beta, those of us who played and immersed ourselves in Pacific City, levelling up our agents, gathering agility orbs and taking out gang leaders will remember how it embraced chaos. Gang leaders would be surrounded by guards in heavily defended towers of caves, but you could just as easily find a sewer pipe that snuck you through the back as blast your way in from the front. It was very loose and permissive of player experimentation. This even extended to a Keys To The City DLC release that opened up some debug-style options to really let you loose.
All of this new server-driven destruction has been confirmed as being for online multiplayer only, since bringing down every tower would rather ruin the fun of orb-hunting in single-player as well as defeat the objective of ‘Saving the city’. That’s not to say that the solo and co-op portions of Crackdown 3 will be without some destructive potency, just heavily limited so as not to be game-breaking. It has however been hinted by the development team that a game-opening destructive mode might be made available later, much like the original game’s DLC so that you can enjoy some solitary or co-op city-levelling action.
Right now though, Crackdown 3 is still some way away and there’s much to be finalised. While Dave Jones’ demonstration has been impressive, it remains only a demonstration for the time being. “So we’re doing a lot of destruction for destruction’s sake here, but obviously this is a tremendous technology test bed that I believe has a lot of huge gaming opportunities for how we can change multiplayer gaming. How we can make worlds much more physical. And, creatively, how we can start to use destruction in the multiplayer game that we’re building.”
How this will all be applied to game modes and given objectives is to be decided between now and a summer 2016 multiplayer beta. We’ve seen some brief glimpses at how vehicles will once again transform and level up instantly depending on the driving skill of your agent and we’ve seen some of the insane weapons we might get to use, but there’s much still to be confirmed and clarified. For the time being Jones leaves us with a small caveat so we don’t get too carried away. “This is not fully representative of the gameplay,” he warns. “It’s just showing you the possibilities of what we can do.” But with possibilities this impressive, it’s hard to believe this could end up as anything less than spectacular.
The Game That Could Change Xbox One Forever
Complete and utter destruction was the target set by Cloudgine and Reagent Games as they set about re-energising the Crackdown licence with Microsoft, but what this has spawned has the potential to change Xbox One games forever. That may seem like a bold statement, but actually what it’s really delivering is the full promise of the console Microsoft intended to launch in 2013, when the world of gaming turned against it over DRM and always-online functionality. This is the game that could take the Xbox One back to being a digital gaming powerhouse. A games console for the online age, using the full resources of the web to future-proof itself.
And it all started so very simply, building on the sandbox freedom and interactivity the series has already established. “We said if we want to do a true Crackdown 3 multiplayer, we really wanted to move that physicality into the online space,” says Dave Jones, original creator of Crackdown, GTA, APB and now president and co-founder of Cloudgine.
“We started off with a high bar of saying, ‘What if for the first time ever we could make the whole world in which you play fully destructible?’. That was what our goal was, because again it was all about this physicality and it begs simple questions, like why in a game can I not just shoot a wall with my bullets and that wall, rather than just having a texture decal stuck on it, why don’t my bullets just go through the wall? And if I want to shoot a bigger hole, why can’t I step through that hole? So it was about breaking down walls in videogames.”
At this point it all sounds promising, but hardly groundbreaking. Battlefield has been doing this for years, hasn’t it? Rainbow Six: Siege appears to be doing something similar. Except, there’s a twist in the form of cloud processing, which changes the potential for scale completely. Crackdown will not be limited to the 8-core CPU or 1.31 teraflops of graphics processing inside the Xbox One’s ample frame. This game will be drawing from Microsoft’s intimidating Azure Cloud server network, an interconnected web of server farms spread across the globe offering cloud computing services for companies, office applications and increasingly games. 2014’s Titanfall already felt the benefit of running on the Microsoft Azure server network and its 27 data centres around the world. It just needed to reach out to the nearest server cluster and find some space to host a clean, strong connection. It worked a treat.
“Unlike other games, this wall has compute power and memory on demand,” reveals Jones as he demonstrates how destructible Crackdown 3 is in a tech demo. “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.” And if you wanted to shoot a metal railing off the side of a building and then wield it, swinging it at the heads of gang members, that’s just fine too.
Chances are you’ve seen some of the more bombastic responses to the latest Crackdown 3 tech demonstrations with claims of 13 times the power of the Xbox One being harnessed for the game. The reality is a more modest than that, but no less impressive. “It’s not the whole performance of the box, it’s just how much we would normally use in terms of physics,” clarifies Jones. What Microsoft Azure really gives Cloudgine access to then is (at present) 13 times the physics computing power of what the Xbox One would typically reserve for such data. Not as sexy, but theoretically that could just be the beginning of what this extra processing potential brings to Xbox One.
“Typical multiplayer games run on a server and if you’re lucky you get one server for your game, but most servers actually share games,” Jones explains as he switches to a debug mode on the demo to show us how the different servers interact with the online game world. “What you see here is that all the different colours are actually different cloud servers. So the cyan and the green are actually on physically different servers. We can just start to add servers and expand the world and make sure everything is at this level of detail. The system is so smart that you’ll see cyan blocks, as they cross physical server boundaries, change colour, as they move across servers.”
So, as you begin to destroy a 30-storey building, one server might be handling the debris and calculating impact while another server picks up the calculations for how this incoming impact will affect the glass tower that stands next to it. And all with no frame-rate drop. “You’ll see everything is physical, there’s cascade damage, everything hits everything else,” Jones continues. “The more damage we start to do, we’ll start to use more and more power. Let’s say we do enough damage to this tower on the right that if we keep shooting the base here eventually that should fall down, exactly as players, I think, would want it to work and expect to happen.
“So the whole thing will fall and everything on it is physical, it will hit the ground, it will damage things farther away, etc. Even when it’s on the ground it’s fully physical; you can stand on it and climb up.” And as we watch the devastation crank up we can see, thanks to a neat debug HUD option, how much additional processing power is being brought to bear. The bar for the Xbox One is full pretty quickly, and each additional bar represents an equal amount of processing from the cloud. One by one, more bars appear on the screen as the debris falls and scatters, destroying and taking chunks off other buildings.
And now the gameplay potential of this technology, as well as its obvious compatibility with the spirit of Crackdown, begins to emerge. For the ultimate sandbox experience, what could be better than a city you can raze to the ground? “Crackdown was a game about doing things the way you want to do them, so imagine that there was a kingpin who lived at the top of this tower and was very, very heavily defended. I could, as a Crackdown player, use agility and try and climb my way up to try and kill him or we could get together and say ‘Screw that’ and just blow the base of the tower up and bring him and the whole tower down.” It’s essentially the CGI trailer we saw a year ago, but made into real, demonstrable gameplay. How often do we get to say that a CGI teaser trailer actually delivered on its promise?crackdown-3-dev-shot
Delivering some semblance of realism is something this development team is really pinning itself to, albeit in a tech-fantasy future setting. Because this game world is a tangible one with a consistent physics engine, if you want to make everything destructible you also need to make sure it can stand up in the first place. “You have to re-imagine gaming in a respect because this whole building here is actually built physically,” says Jones as the scale of the endeavour Cloudgine and Reagent has taken on begins to truly dawn on us.
“Once again, building are usually just put together by geometry and they’re just a picture; they’re fake. If we want to make a fully destructible world we would expect players to say, ‘If that’s fully destructible, I want to shoot out this whole base and I want the whole thing to fall over with my friends on the top and they should fall down with it’. And we say ‘Absolutely’. This building here has been built physically, so it’s clad in concrete, steel and glass and it has a steel infrastructure that runs through it. To do that we had to make that building stand up under physics.” And then apply that to the building on the entire city…
It means we might need to think a little differently about how we interact with the game too. Things won’t be as simple as we first think. “Now, this building, the way that it’s constructed, it has a lot of weight on the left hand side, the way that the architect has designed this. You would expect that when it finally falls down that it would fall to the left, but once again that’s decided by physics. If you did enough damage and stripped it away, it can fall any direction you want. From a gameplay perspective that’s very different.”
Ultimately, and excitingly for those of us who fell in love with this game, it feels like the original Crackdown first did. While many will still only remember Realtime World’s sandbox as the delivery system for a Halo 3 beta, those of us who played and immersed ourselves in Pacific City, levelling up our agents, gathering agility orbs and taking out gang leaders will remember how it embraced chaos. Gang leaders would be surrounded by guards in heavily defended towers of caves, but you could just as easily find a sewer pipe that snuck you through the back as blast your way in from the front. It was very loose and permissive of player experimentation. This even extended to a Keys To The City DLC release that opened up some debug-style options to really let you loose.
All of this new server-driven destruction has been confirmed as being for online multiplayer only, since bringing down every tower would rather ruin the fun of orb-hunting in single-player as well as defeat the objective of ‘Saving the city’. That’s not to say that the solo and co-op portions of Crackdown 3 will be without some destructive potency, just heavily limited so as not to be game-breaking. It has however been hinted by the development team that a game-opening destructive mode might be made available later, much like the original game’s DLC so that you can enjoy some solitary or co-op city-levelling action.
Right now though, Crackdown 3 is still some way away and there’s much to be finalised. While Dave Jones’ demonstration has been impressive, it remains only a demonstration for the time being. “So we’re doing a lot of destruction for destruction’s sake here, but obviously this is a tremendous technology test bed that I believe has a lot of huge gaming opportunities for how we can change multiplayer gaming. How we can make worlds much more physical. And, creatively, how we can start to use destruction in the multiplayer game that we’re building.”
How this will all be applied to game modes and given objectives is to be decided between now and a summer 2016 multiplayer beta. We’ve seen some brief glimpses at how vehicles will once again transform and level up instantly depending on the driving skill of your agent and we’ve seen some of the insane weapons we might get to use, but there’s much still to be confirmed and clarified. For the time being Jones leaves us with a small caveat so we don’t get too carried away. “This is not fully representative of the gameplay,” he warns. “It’s just showing you the possibilities of what we can do.” But with possibilities this impressive, it’s hard to believe this could end up as anything less than spectacular.
I liked CD2 more myself too, missed the transforming vehicles. I think CD2 was just released too soon after CD1, and the city being the same didn't help.
Official forums are live:
https://forums.crackdown.com/
http://www.dualshockers.com/2016/02...onderful-sense-of-space-and-place-is-massive/
Xbox One Exclusive Crakdown 3’s City Has a “Wonderful Sense of Space and Place,” Is “Massive”
During a podcast released today, the Crackdown 3 development team talked about how they’re building the city that will serve as a setting for the game.
We learn that different areas of the city will have very distinctive looks depending on who lives in them, even more than in previous games. For instance, if you move through the areas in which the bad guys are, you’ll notice it in the buildings and in the architecture. On the other hand, there are also city-wide buildings and systems like the metro system and the power system, that the player will be able to interact with, providing “an entirely new experience.”
Different areas will not only have a different style and architecture, but also a very distinct population. Playing through the game will let you experience a whole range of different “structural spaces,” a sense of demographic change and a sense of change in the power. There will be more “environmental storytelling” than in the previous games.
In order to give the city a more realistic feel, it has been built in chronological order. The developers create the older architecture first, and then layered on the most recent architecture on top of it. That creates a “wonderful sense of space and place.” It also gives the player a real understanding of where the bad guys are and of the consequences of their presence.
There will be moving platforms, huge elevators going up and down along the sides of buildings, monorails moving on their tracks. They create paths, but the player might have to wait for them to align. There will also be fast moving objects that the player can interact with, but they will also interact with the player, throwing him about the place.
The team has also worked on understanding the consequences of ripping off objects from the buildings and use them to cause mayhem, like taking a transformer from a roof and throwing it, and then shooting at it. They trued to layer in as many “toys” as possible that the player can use in creative ways.
The new city is much bigger in layout than that of the first game and “massive in scale,” while retaining the familiar vistas.
https://forums.crackdown.com/
http://www.dualshockers.com/2016/02...onderful-sense-of-space-and-place-is-massive/
Xbox One Exclusive Crakdown 3’s City Has a “Wonderful Sense of Space and Place,” Is “Massive”
During a podcast released today, the Crackdown 3 development team talked about how they’re building the city that will serve as a setting for the game.
We learn that different areas of the city will have very distinctive looks depending on who lives in them, even more than in previous games. For instance, if you move through the areas in which the bad guys are, you’ll notice it in the buildings and in the architecture. On the other hand, there are also city-wide buildings and systems like the metro system and the power system, that the player will be able to interact with, providing “an entirely new experience.”
Different areas will not only have a different style and architecture, but also a very distinct population. Playing through the game will let you experience a whole range of different “structural spaces,” a sense of demographic change and a sense of change in the power. There will be more “environmental storytelling” than in the previous games.
In order to give the city a more realistic feel, it has been built in chronological order. The developers create the older architecture first, and then layered on the most recent architecture on top of it. That creates a “wonderful sense of space and place.” It also gives the player a real understanding of where the bad guys are and of the consequences of their presence.
There will be moving platforms, huge elevators going up and down along the sides of buildings, monorails moving on their tracks. They create paths, but the player might have to wait for them to align. There will also be fast moving objects that the player can interact with, but they will also interact with the player, throwing him about the place.
The team has also worked on understanding the consequences of ripping off objects from the buildings and use them to cause mayhem, like taking a transformer from a roof and throwing it, and then shooting at it. They trued to layer in as many “toys” as possible that the player can use in creative ways.
The new city is much bigger in layout than that of the first game and “massive in scale,” while retaining the familiar vistas.
Wonder when they'll finally give a release date. Personally I don't mind if it comes out a little later in the year....The Division, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, and Quantum Break are all tempting me and are coming out soon....too much work and not enough game time....plus I still have a backlog of games to play and others I still want to buy eventually.
New Podcast right from the developer:
http://www.crackdown.com/2016/02/12/developer-podcast-agility-in-crackdown-3/
http://www.crackdown.com/2016/02/12/developer-podcast-agility-in-crackdown-3/