Official Thread Crackdown 3
- Thread starter The Wolf King
- Start date
Agreed. Same thing happened with Quantum Break. Hyped to the moon and back, and was reviewed harshly by some critics. I loved it though, which is all that matters to me.
The colour pallette looks like the "before" part of an ad for anti-depressants.
It looks like a boys boarding schools bathroom, where the kids end up with repressed memories that they'll end up taking out on their wives/coworkers/chihuahuas.
It looks like where happy goes to die.
It looks like the visual representation of a come-down after a weekend on ecstasy.
It looks like the love Melania has for Donald Trump.
It looks like a boys boarding schools bathroom, where the kids end up with repressed memories that they'll end up taking out on their wives/coworkers/chihuahuas.
It looks like where happy goes to die.
It looks like the visual representation of a come-down after a weekend on ecstasy.
It looks like the love Melania has for Donald Trump.
As before the whole city is open from the start and you can try to take on the kingpin from the start but good luck.
Agency building is twice as high as the originals
Agency building is twice as high as the originals
I'm sure CD3 will be fun. Demos look fun. I heard a podcast with Rand who said he had friends play it. Didn't think it looked great but they all said it was fun. I'll probably get it.
I just think it's a missed opportunity not to make this game pretty. By pretty, keep the same general art style but use sharper and cleaner textures. The demo for next gen Borderlands kept the same general cel shading art style but looked super sharp. The colors pop.
I've seen fast Platinum games animate much better so I'm not buying the excuse that the poor animations are a result of the game speed.
It's low budget graphics and animations regardless of the art style.
I just think it's a missed opportunity not to make this game pretty. By pretty, keep the same general art style but use sharper and cleaner textures. The demo for next gen Borderlands kept the same general cel shading art style but looked super sharp. The colors pop.
I've seen fast Platinum games animate much better so I'm not buying the excuse that the poor animations are a result of the game speed.
It's low budget graphics and animations regardless of the art style.
It's the animation that stands out in a bad way to me. They even took out that animation where your agent flails his/her arms and legs when he/she jumps.
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Or maybe the people that expect it to be a disaster are going to be surprised by it actually being good?
Time will tell.
The game looks SOOOO much better when it's played by someone who knows what they're doing.
Also, I think the trailer was broadcast in HDR or something, because it looked completely washed out compared to some of the newer footage.
And I have no idea who that guy they were featuring is, but I'm not sure he's necessary... It's not like there is going to be a 20 minute episode between each level. There's no need to hire a guy that should have ended up in porn.
Also, I think the trailer was broadcast in HDR or something, because it looked completely washed out compared to some of the newer footage.
And I have no idea who that guy they were featuring is, but I'm not sure he's necessary... It's not like there is going to be a 20 minute episode between each level. There's no need to hire a guy that should have ended up in porn.
Same here. I have a hard time believing they held it back to show campaign when campaign was always secondary and E3 was their best chance to hype the game. Would be strange to wait to Gamescom unless the multiplayer will either be delayed or cut back.
Looks great but all i see is an explosion. Where's all the mass destruction from the power of the cloud?
Only kidding. Couldn't care less at this point. Crackdown was a surprise franchise for me to begin with. Just looking forward to playing a good game. Anything else is a bonus at this point.
TeGu
Black lizard baritone-jazz in the soul bone
Crackdown 3 hands-on preview and interview – launching the Xbox One X
http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/20/crack...unching-the-xbox-one-x-6722629/#ixzz4kdvyocQT
GC: I’m a bit confused here because that playable demo didn’t look anything like the one I played at Gamescom a couple of years ago.
GW: So, on the cloud-based destruction stuff. That is part of a separate multiplayer mode. You’ve got a large arena where you play in a competitive multiplayer way, where you’re trying to take down your opponent’s tower before they take yours down. That all works great in multiplayer and we’ll be showing more of that later on. Not at E3, but later on this year.
But when it comes to the campaign there was a couple of reasons why we didn’t want to put that technology into it. Firstly, I didn’t want it to be a completely online game. If you’re using cloud power it needs to have a constant, decent, connection to the Internet. And I wanted the campaign to be playable offline.
GC: Oh, yes. I’d completely forgotten that was how it worked. Sorry, but it’s been so long since we’ve seen the game.
GW: There is still destruction in the campaign, but it’s more of a traditional destruction you’d see in a normal game. And the second reason was just narratively, in a competitive multiplayer decimating the entire city kind of makes sense. But in a campaign where you’re there to save the world it doesn’t make that much sense. [laughs] But both modes will be out and available at the same time.
GC: I can guess the answer, but I’ll ask this anyway: why not offer the destruction as an option in the campaign mode?
GW: Well, it would’ve meant rearchitecting the whole game, basically. Almost building the city twice. Once to work with destruction and once to work without destruction, so it wasn’t an option. Maybe it will be in future games but it just made development sense, ’cause we were already making something which was completely brand new. So we just wanted to make sure it was as simple as it could possibly be.
GC: So how long have Sumo been working on this? Were you working on the Gamescom demo two years ago?
GW: Yes! We’ve been working on it since the beginning. The way it kind of worked out was Microsoft were really keen on bringing back Crackdown. And on top of that there was some interesting technology being worked on by a company called Cloudgine in Scotland. And it just became a great combination of things that came together, where we could add this cool destruction technology to Crackdown.
And then the stars really aligned when they started talking about bringing out Scorpio – the Xbox One X – because we were like, ‘Well, this would be a great launch game for Xbox One X as well. So that was part of the reason why there was a bit of a delay, because Microsoft wanted to make sure that they came out at the same time.
Crackdown 3 (XO) – there’s a range of different agents to play as
GC: At the time the game was originally announced cloud computing was a big buzzword for gaming, but I’ve barely heard it mentioned again since.
GW: I don’t know where other companies are, but I think there’ll be more announcements in the future. But like anything it’s tricky working with new technology. The difficulty was getting the latency right. So, because you’ve got to communicate with the cloud computer, get the results and send it back, there was a delay there. And you know what people are like for latency when you’re playing a game.
So we had to spend a lot of time trying to get that latency down to a level where you could run that game on the cloud or run it locally and people wouldn’t know the difference. So that was challenging. New stuff’s tough! It really is. But that’s why I’m in video games, I like doing stuff like that. I’m a bit of a masochist for it.
GC: In terms of the campaign, the game almost seems like a remaster. In that it looks like how I remember the original – even though I’m sure there’s a vast difference if I compared them side by side.
GW: It’s one of those things, yeah. Sumo are kind of past masters of taking beloved IPs and revamping them and making them fit for purpose for the modern age. So with Sonic Transformed we had all of those old IPs in it. And when we were building a level from Burning Rangers from the Sega Saturn we got fan mail going, ‘Oh my god! That level looks just like it did on the Sega Saturn.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, you have no idea. Seriously, type in Burning Rangers Sega Saturn on YouTube and look at it.’
GC: It is a shock when you see how bad some old 3D games look.
GW: [laughs] And it’s the same thing with Crackdown, because it’s such a beloved IP. It’s a bit of a cult classic really. So a lot of the time in development has been, ‘How can we keep the game feeling like the original but adding modern stuff so that it keeps up with the next gen titles?’
So we added in things like double jumps and air dashes and all the special moves and things like that. Which just make the game feel more fluid. But we didn’t want to go so far that suddenly it started feeling like Assassin’s Creed. Where you just hold down a button and climbed up a building. So it was trying to get that balance of… it needs to be skilled but then if you go back and play the original game you’re like, ‘Wow, this is tough!’
The amount of work going into making it feel fluid but still feel like Crackdown has probably been, from a design perspective, the most challenging thing on the project.
GC: The action runs really fast too, almost overwhelmingly so.
GW: Well, what you did on the show floor there, was you started at level 3 and it was accelerated level progression and by the end you were probably level 5. In the final game it will take you a good 10 or 12 hours to get to the absolutely frenetic pace that you just experienced.
What we wanted to do, is we knew we’d only have 10 minutes with you. So I basically condensed it all into 10 minutes, so people can feel where you get to and feel the power of it.
Crackdown 3 (XO) – better than Crackdown 2
GC: Did you take anything from Crackdown 2, for this new game?
GW: I feel for them a bit, to be honest, because it was a really rushed development cycle. I think they had nine months to make a game. But we took some stuff from them, particularly the rocket boots and the three hit combos, they weren’t in the original game but they were in Crackdown 2.
GC: Weren’t there zombies as well?
GW: Yeah, yeah… didn’t take those. [laughs] There’s enough bloody zombies in video games at the moment!
GC: Amen to that!
GW: So yeah, the zombies stayed on the cutting room floor. And I think that’s probably best for everybody.
GC: So just to confirm, there’s four player co-op for the whole of the story campaign?
GW: Yep, four player co-op through the whole of the campaign. You can play from start to finish in four player co-op. You can drop into my game, I can drop into your game…
GC: That must be tricky to design for, with four people running around at top speed.
GW: Yeah, it’s crackers. That’s been one challenge for us: how do you deal with four level 5 agents at the same time? And in the original game it was basically just dudes with guns for enemies. So in the final game we’ve got big mechs, tanks, we got dropships and stuff… because you need to keep pace with the power of the agents.
GC: Boss battles, or any complex set piece, must also be difficult to design when you can move at that speed?
GW: It is, it is. It’s been a real challenge…
Crackdown 3 (XO) – more giant robots is fine by us
GC: So to paraphrase: how did you make your game?
GW: [laughs] With a lot of trial and error, actually. We found a lot of stuff, which… I’ve made quite a few shooters over the years and we ended up with this mantra which is, ‘subtlety is not our friend’. So you cannot do little, subtle things in this game. So one of the bosses, which has worked out brilliantly, is that we’ve got this Aliens style loading Goliath and this thing just chucks huge rocks at you. And it’s frickin’ awesome, because you get rocks the size of cars being thrown at you, but when you’re facing a level 5 agent you need to be doing stuff on that scale.
You want the player to feel like an absolute god against the grunts, but when you come across the more powerful enemies in the game that’s when you have to start changing your play style. Because they might be immune to standard firearms, or they might have super evasive abilities like teleporting, and stuff like that. So we tended to make certain bosses resistant to certain combat styles, so you have to modify your usual play style. But what we’re really clear on, and this is where we made a bit of a misstep to begin with, was you can’t have a boss where there’s only one way to kill them. There should be multiple ways to kill a boss.
GC: What was the decision process in terms of keeping the cel-shading? I imagine there must’ve been a thought at some point to ditch it?
GW: We always wanted to make the game an over-the-top comic book, graphical novel style. It works for the franchise, it works for the style of the game, and it was just a natural evolution of the original game. I think if we made it very realistic, I think it would’ve come across as a little bit farcical. It needs that kind of comic book edge to it.
It’s been a tricky one, for sure. But we’re open world and we’ve got these big draw distances. We would never be able to go toe-to-toe with The Last Of Us or something like that. So we always wanted to update the comic book style that was in the original, but make it 4K.
GC: What has changed for the game since you realised you were releasing alongside the Xbox One X?
GW: We were really fortunate really, because the game was always PC and Xbox One, and we were always gonna do cross-play between PC and Xbox. So when Scorpio, or One X as it’s known now, started to become a reality we were like, ‘Well, this is just another platform really’.
And to be honest the dev tools we got were great. They pretty much allowed us to get it up and running at 4K straight away. It’s a beast, actually, that machine. It’s so much faster than the PS4 Pro. Comfortably faster, especially in terms of running things in 4K. There’s no question it’s more powerful, the question will be whether third parties make use of that full power or not.
GC: That’s very true. Well look, thanks very much for your time.
GW: No problem at all, good to talk to you.
http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/20/crack...unching-the-xbox-one-x-6722629/#ixzz4kdvyocQT
GC: I’m a bit confused here because that playable demo didn’t look anything like the one I played at Gamescom a couple of years ago.
GW: So, on the cloud-based destruction stuff. That is part of a separate multiplayer mode. You’ve got a large arena where you play in a competitive multiplayer way, where you’re trying to take down your opponent’s tower before they take yours down. That all works great in multiplayer and we’ll be showing more of that later on. Not at E3, but later on this year.
But when it comes to the campaign there was a couple of reasons why we didn’t want to put that technology into it. Firstly, I didn’t want it to be a completely online game. If you’re using cloud power it needs to have a constant, decent, connection to the Internet. And I wanted the campaign to be playable offline.
GC: Oh, yes. I’d completely forgotten that was how it worked. Sorry, but it’s been so long since we’ve seen the game.
GW: There is still destruction in the campaign, but it’s more of a traditional destruction you’d see in a normal game. And the second reason was just narratively, in a competitive multiplayer decimating the entire city kind of makes sense. But in a campaign where you’re there to save the world it doesn’t make that much sense. [laughs] But both modes will be out and available at the same time.
GC: I can guess the answer, but I’ll ask this anyway: why not offer the destruction as an option in the campaign mode?
GW: Well, it would’ve meant rearchitecting the whole game, basically. Almost building the city twice. Once to work with destruction and once to work without destruction, so it wasn’t an option. Maybe it will be in future games but it just made development sense, ’cause we were already making something which was completely brand new. So we just wanted to make sure it was as simple as it could possibly be.
GC: So how long have Sumo been working on this? Were you working on the Gamescom demo two years ago?
GW: Yes! We’ve been working on it since the beginning. The way it kind of worked out was Microsoft were really keen on bringing back Crackdown. And on top of that there was some interesting technology being worked on by a company called Cloudgine in Scotland. And it just became a great combination of things that came together, where we could add this cool destruction technology to Crackdown.
And then the stars really aligned when they started talking about bringing out Scorpio – the Xbox One X – because we were like, ‘Well, this would be a great launch game for Xbox One X as well. So that was part of the reason why there was a bit of a delay, because Microsoft wanted to make sure that they came out at the same time.
Crackdown 3 (XO) – there’s a range of different agents to play as
GC: At the time the game was originally announced cloud computing was a big buzzword for gaming, but I’ve barely heard it mentioned again since.
GW: I don’t know where other companies are, but I think there’ll be more announcements in the future. But like anything it’s tricky working with new technology. The difficulty was getting the latency right. So, because you’ve got to communicate with the cloud computer, get the results and send it back, there was a delay there. And you know what people are like for latency when you’re playing a game.
So we had to spend a lot of time trying to get that latency down to a level where you could run that game on the cloud or run it locally and people wouldn’t know the difference. So that was challenging. New stuff’s tough! It really is. But that’s why I’m in video games, I like doing stuff like that. I’m a bit of a masochist for it.
GC: In terms of the campaign, the game almost seems like a remaster. In that it looks like how I remember the original – even though I’m sure there’s a vast difference if I compared them side by side.
GW: It’s one of those things, yeah. Sumo are kind of past masters of taking beloved IPs and revamping them and making them fit for purpose for the modern age. So with Sonic Transformed we had all of those old IPs in it. And when we were building a level from Burning Rangers from the Sega Saturn we got fan mail going, ‘Oh my god! That level looks just like it did on the Sega Saturn.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, you have no idea. Seriously, type in Burning Rangers Sega Saturn on YouTube and look at it.’
GC: It is a shock when you see how bad some old 3D games look.
GW: [laughs] And it’s the same thing with Crackdown, because it’s such a beloved IP. It’s a bit of a cult classic really. So a lot of the time in development has been, ‘How can we keep the game feeling like the original but adding modern stuff so that it keeps up with the next gen titles?’
So we added in things like double jumps and air dashes and all the special moves and things like that. Which just make the game feel more fluid. But we didn’t want to go so far that suddenly it started feeling like Assassin’s Creed. Where you just hold down a button and climbed up a building. So it was trying to get that balance of… it needs to be skilled but then if you go back and play the original game you’re like, ‘Wow, this is tough!’
The amount of work going into making it feel fluid but still feel like Crackdown has probably been, from a design perspective, the most challenging thing on the project.
GC: The action runs really fast too, almost overwhelmingly so.
GW: Well, what you did on the show floor there, was you started at level 3 and it was accelerated level progression and by the end you were probably level 5. In the final game it will take you a good 10 or 12 hours to get to the absolutely frenetic pace that you just experienced.
What we wanted to do, is we knew we’d only have 10 minutes with you. So I basically condensed it all into 10 minutes, so people can feel where you get to and feel the power of it.
Crackdown 3 (XO) – better than Crackdown 2
GC: Did you take anything from Crackdown 2, for this new game?
GW: I feel for them a bit, to be honest, because it was a really rushed development cycle. I think they had nine months to make a game. But we took some stuff from them, particularly the rocket boots and the three hit combos, they weren’t in the original game but they were in Crackdown 2.
GC: Weren’t there zombies as well?
GW: Yeah, yeah… didn’t take those. [laughs] There’s enough bloody zombies in video games at the moment!
GC: Amen to that!
GW: So yeah, the zombies stayed on the cutting room floor. And I think that’s probably best for everybody.
GC: So just to confirm, there’s four player co-op for the whole of the story campaign?
GW: Yep, four player co-op through the whole of the campaign. You can play from start to finish in four player co-op. You can drop into my game, I can drop into your game…
GC: That must be tricky to design for, with four people running around at top speed.
GW: Yeah, it’s crackers. That’s been one challenge for us: how do you deal with four level 5 agents at the same time? And in the original game it was basically just dudes with guns for enemies. So in the final game we’ve got big mechs, tanks, we got dropships and stuff… because you need to keep pace with the power of the agents.
GC: Boss battles, or any complex set piece, must also be difficult to design when you can move at that speed?
GW: It is, it is. It’s been a real challenge…
Crackdown 3 (XO) – more giant robots is fine by us
GC: So to paraphrase: how did you make your game?
GW: [laughs] With a lot of trial and error, actually. We found a lot of stuff, which… I’ve made quite a few shooters over the years and we ended up with this mantra which is, ‘subtlety is not our friend’. So you cannot do little, subtle things in this game. So one of the bosses, which has worked out brilliantly, is that we’ve got this Aliens style loading Goliath and this thing just chucks huge rocks at you. And it’s frickin’ awesome, because you get rocks the size of cars being thrown at you, but when you’re facing a level 5 agent you need to be doing stuff on that scale.
You want the player to feel like an absolute god against the grunts, but when you come across the more powerful enemies in the game that’s when you have to start changing your play style. Because they might be immune to standard firearms, or they might have super evasive abilities like teleporting, and stuff like that. So we tended to make certain bosses resistant to certain combat styles, so you have to modify your usual play style. But what we’re really clear on, and this is where we made a bit of a misstep to begin with, was you can’t have a boss where there’s only one way to kill them. There should be multiple ways to kill a boss.
GC: What was the decision process in terms of keeping the cel-shading? I imagine there must’ve been a thought at some point to ditch it?
GW: We always wanted to make the game an over-the-top comic book, graphical novel style. It works for the franchise, it works for the style of the game, and it was just a natural evolution of the original game. I think if we made it very realistic, I think it would’ve come across as a little bit farcical. It needs that kind of comic book edge to it.
It’s been a tricky one, for sure. But we’re open world and we’ve got these big draw distances. We would never be able to go toe-to-toe with The Last Of Us or something like that. So we always wanted to update the comic book style that was in the original, but make it 4K.
GC: What has changed for the game since you realised you were releasing alongside the Xbox One X?
GW: We were really fortunate really, because the game was always PC and Xbox One, and we were always gonna do cross-play between PC and Xbox. So when Scorpio, or One X as it’s known now, started to become a reality we were like, ‘Well, this is just another platform really’.
And to be honest the dev tools we got were great. They pretty much allowed us to get it up and running at 4K straight away. It’s a beast, actually, that machine. It’s so much faster than the PS4 Pro. Comfortably faster, especially in terms of running things in 4K. There’s no question it’s more powerful, the question will be whether third parties make use of that full power or not.
GC: That’s very true. Well look, thanks very much for your time.
GW: No problem at all, good to talk to you.
Weird, considering I didn't even realize that Crackdown 1 and 2 had MP. I guess I just remember doing the campaign and getting orbs.
Maybe too much time has passed and I've been remembering Crackdown more fondly than it actually was. But when I watch the footage of the single player portion of this new game in the series it looks really rough. Like so rough that I'm surprised its still on course for its Nov. release. And since I'm not a big multiplayer gamer I would rather those resources went to the single player portion of the game. Is this because of "GaaS" crap that MSFT is now a fan of, I don't know.