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https://m.ign.com/articles/2018/11/...-multiplayer-is-real-and-we-finally-played-it

Crackdown 3's Cloud-Powered Multiplayer Is Real and We Finally Played It
Buildings go boom.
by Gabriel Huerta
Nov 12, 2018 10:53 AM PST
Dropping an entire building on my enemies while leaping up in the skies and going through the windows of a building has never been so colorful until I did it in the multiplayer mode of Crackdown 3. At this past weekend’s X018 event, Microsoft gave a new, earlier release date for their next big first-party exclusive (February 15) and formally presented its multiplayer mode. It’s called Wrecking Zone, it puts the “power of the cloud” to work, in real time, and we got to play it.
The mode we tried is called Agent Hunter. This is a 5v5 match where both teams have to face each other in a 10-minute round. The objective is to kill and obtain the greatest number of Badges that the enemies drop when they die. The twist in this mode is that what counts is not the kills, but the Badges obtained. These disappear after 10 seconds, so you must be fast or have been close to the enemy to get them, otherwise your effort will have been in vain. Considering that enemies can be over or below you, you have to think twice when and where you make that final shot.
Before I talk about gameplay, I should mention that I was really amazed by what I saw compared to the last time anyone saw something during E3 2017. What catches my eye is not the details on buildings or characters, but the level of destruction. This doesn’t mean that the whole level can be destroyed, but it's not just walls that can fall. You can smash through windows to escape from sight, and use your weapons to make parts of the buildings fall, all depending on the level of explosion. It was really fun to drop bridges during the demo, as many people never saw that coming, and when a piece of virtual concrete falls over you, it can be devastating. With all the chaos, falling debris, and explosions, the framerate never dropped, which is amazing (yay cloud!).
Before starting each round, the demo let us only choose from a limited number of weapons to decide our loadout. That being said, being Crackdown these are big and tough weapons, so the destruction is always imminent. The sidearm weapons are machine guns, plasma rifles and shotguns, while the explosive weapons are rocket launchers, homing missiles, and experimental weapons. Finally, you can also select from two special powers, in this case Vertical Blast, which sends you flying even more than the classic double jumps, or Overshield, which protects you when you are under heavy fire.
Agent Hunter greatly rewards how you move on the map, your awareness, and how aggressive you act. This is noted with small details, like your health being regenerated if you don’t get shot for five seconds, or that the game shows you when you are in the line of sight of an enemy agent, with several laser sights appearing on your character. Knowing how to move between buildings and use them to your advantage to disappear and hunt other agents is really important to survive because of the combat’s lock-on targeting system.
The stage we tried, Blackout Zone, is part of the simulation that The Agency uses to train their agents. The level is largely black with lots of neon lights, giving off a cool virtual Tron vibe, full of tall buildings that take advantage of the high jumps that Crackdown agents are capable of – and even adds several launch pads within the level. Also, important to take notice is that you can always know where the other players are, teammates and enemies, since a particular silhouette appears with your team’s color. Considering the size of the map and the verticality, this really works to let you know where to jump next.
During combat, you can buff you character with the Overdrive Energy, which is a bar that appears on the lower left side that charges depending on the number of Kills, Assists, and Destruction made during the match, or by grabbing some of the red orbs that appear on the level. When the bar is full, you can activate it and become faster, more resistant, and more powerful for a short time.
Something that should be mentioned is that this demo showed us a really basic multiplayer experience, so it’s difficult to know how deep the final multiplayer will be. With few weapons, just one level, and no signs of any type of progress (nor, thankfully, microtransactions), it’s difficult to know how it will hold up long-term. But at least it’s finally, finally almost here.
 


Crackdown 3 targets a February 15, 2019 launch date, complete with separate campaign and multiplayer competitive modes. The multiplayer modes, dubbed "Wrecking Zone," take place in a virtual arena dotted with gigantic explosive-filled skyscrapers, huge twisting sci-fi walkways, and electrified pitfalls. Notably, every chunk of these arenas can be destroyed by players, offloading physics computations to Microsoft's Azure cloud.
Leveraging Azure, multiplayer matches in Crackdown 3 utilize massive amounts of additional processing power beyond your base Xbox or PC, bringing persistent, dynamic physics-based destruction across sizeable urban-industrial-style maps. Last week, we talked to Microsoft about how it all works, and the implications it could have for the future of gaming.

Getting Crackdown 3's Wrecking Zone into a playable state sounds like it has been a gargantuan task for Microsoft. We spoke to Brian Stone, Microsoft Studios' head of engineering, to learn a bit more.
Crackdown 3 has traversed various incarnations since the early demonstrations in 2014. The original prototype showcased grey isometric shapes spilling out of a featureless, monochrome building. Today, we have towering neon skyscrapers with fully destructible building blocks, right down to the foundations.
Stone impressed the technical grind required to get Crackdown 3 to where it is today, and how Cloudgine, Ruffian Games, Reagent Games, Sumo Digital, and Certain Affinity all collaborated at various stages of the project on a very particular vision: completely destructible environments, offloaded to Microsoft's Azure cloud.
Microsoft encountered a range of unforeseen technical challenges as a result of that vision. Stone gave us some further insight into how the tech works, and a glimpse at the depths of complexity Microsoft's team had to deal with in order to get these features to work. From him:
Collectively, a lot of people working on the vision for the game at that time had made this bet — something that's always been true of Crackdown: you're this badass guy or woman, this character who can just light s*** up. 'What if we actually made that real? What if we made a space where everything you shot at was destructible?' We knew we couldn't do that online if we limited ourselves to just the console client that you have in your living room. [But] what if we did physics in the cloud?
Two years of pure engineering work to ... actually show something, all just tech. The ability to distribute computation across multiple servers, and because objects can get thrown from one spot to another, seamlessly hand off ownership of every chunk from one server to another without dropping a frame. Marshalling that data to the game server, and then from there to the client, that was a lot of hard work. Being able to dynamically scale the amount of servers we throw at the problem, so that we're not spending compute unnecessarily. That when you're starting out, only a few cores are needed, and then as destruction scales up, depending on what's happening, we can dynamically throw more cores at the computation.​

The demo Stone was referring to was the above clip from Build 2014, which shows how physics calculations done over your internet connection can vastly increase the processing capability for what you see rendered on your home console. We were told that Crackdown 3's Wrecking Zone can use anything up to and beyond 12 times the power of a base Xbox One X.
Stone noted how Microsoft's on-going investments in datacenters and Azure hardware upgrades have helped mitigate some of the potential issues.
There are some problems that we would have had in the past, that we don't have anymore. There used to be regions where we just had unacceptable ping times. It doesn't happen anymore. We were worried about population density, from an Xbox install base perspective, so we had to think about transferring server control from one data center to another. Investment in data centers has solved that.​
So how does it all work?
Those concerned that Crackdown 3 will need some kind of advanced internet service package or additional data bandwidth to run properly can rest assured that it works the same way any other multiplayer game would. Still, getting Crackdown 3 into a position where it wouldn't overwhelm your data caps also represented some hard technological challenges. Stone explained:
When you have thousands of fractured chunks all blowing up simultaneously, you don't just have a problem of how to spend enough server compute to simulate the physics. You also have the problem of, 'How do I get all of that data down to the client?'
There is some local prediction that has to happen. So that when you jump, there's not a round trip to the server and back. Anything literally local to you, that you collide with, needs to be predicted on the client. [T]here is some magic happening on the client, so that it feels as responsive as possible. [W]hatever is happening on the server, across multiple cores of physics work, gets marshalled onto a game server, and then there's a whole other set of compute that gets applied to compressing that, using some very sophisticated compression. We then send that compressed stream to the client, then the client decompresses, and renders the information as graphics. That 10 second description represents two year's worth of hardcore programming work.​
Crackdown 3 as a foundation
Stone offered a developer quote to describe Crackdown 3 from an engineering perspective, "It takes you half the time to do 90 per cent of the work, and then it takes you the other half to do the last 10 percent." I inquired about whether or not this tech could be applied beyond Crackdown 3's Wrecking Zone, perhaps to other Microsoft or even third-party titles as a sort of middleware suite, like Microsoft's Simplygon and Havok software. Stone said:
I certainly hope it gets applied to other games in the future. Right now, my head is 100 percent focused on Crackdown. ut absolutely, my hope is that when we've proven that this is possible, not just show it, that other developers will pick it up and run with it.

Back when Microsoft originally announced the Xbox One in 2013, the "power of the cloud" became a sort of meme detractors claimed to be nothing but buzzwords or vaporware. With Crackdown 3 around the corner (and having played it myself), it certainly seems like those original promises are about to bear fruit.
I also spoke with Stone about whether Microsoft was right to have talked cloud so early on in the Xbox One messaging:
It maybe wasn't clear back then, but one of the big audiences we were speaking to was not necessarily consumers but developers. I work with the best developers around the world. As part of that, I also get to sit in a leadership role at Xbox thinking about how Xbox, not just as a publisher but as a platform holder, is a great partner for developers. I think that's what I hope to show with Crackdown. There's a journey you have to go through as a platform holder. First, you have to build the platform, make sure that it works. Then you have to sell that vision to developers, [and] then the developers have to go and make the great games.​

Crackdown 3 and the future

Ultimately Crackdown 3 represents the culmination of an intense amount of engineering prowess that few companies outside of Microsoft can muster, both from a programmatical perspective, and an infrastructure perspective. Whether or not Crackdown 3 goes on to be a hit, it's a proof of concept for a new way of thinking about physics in games, innovating on the back of Azure's near-limitless processing capability.
Microsoft is razer-focused on making Crackdown 3 as good as it can be and hasn't even begun exploring how the tech could be applied to other titles, but the potential is not only obvious it's exciting. Stone agrees:
I want people to have a ton of fun with Crackdown 3, and Wrecking Zone in particular. I think we're going to deliver that. I think we're going to deliver that in no small part because the cloud-based physics really do work. If people take away a larger message of 'Hey, maybe there really is something to this cloud thing,' I'll be happy.​
 
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https://m.ign.com/articles/2018/11/...-multiplayer-is-real-and-we-finally-played-it

Crackdown 3's Cloud-Powered Multiplayer Is Real and We Finally Played It
Buildings go boom.
by Gabriel Huerta
Nov 12, 2018 10:53 AM PST
Dropping an entire building on my enemies while leaping up in the skies and going through the windows of a building has never been so colorful until I did it in the multiplayer mode of Crackdown 3. At this past weekend’s X018 event, Microsoft gave a new, earlier release date for their next big first-party exclusive (February 15) and formally presented its multiplayer mode. It’s called Wrecking Zone, it puts the “power of the cloud” to work, in real time, and we got to play it.
The mode we tried is called Agent Hunter. This is a 5v5 match where both teams have to face each other in a 10-minute round. The objective is to kill and obtain the greatest number of Badges that the enemies drop when they die. The twist in this mode is that what counts is not the kills, but the Badges obtained. These disappear after 10 seconds, so you must be fast or have been close to the enemy to get them, otherwise your effort will have been in vain. Considering that enemies can be over or below you, you have to think twice when and where you make that final shot.
Before I talk about gameplay, I should mention that I was really amazed by what I saw compared to the last time anyone saw something during E3 2017. What catches my eye is not the details on buildings or characters, but the level of destruction. This doesn’t mean that the whole level can be destroyed, but it's not just walls that can fall. You can smash through windows to escape from sight, and use your weapons to make parts of the buildings fall, all depending on the level of explosion. It was really fun to drop bridges during the demo, as many people never saw that coming, and when a piece of virtual concrete falls over you, it can be devastating. With all the chaos, falling debris, and explosions, the framerate never dropped, which is amazing (yay cloud!).
Before starting each round, the demo let us only choose from a limited number of weapons to decide our loadout. That being said, being Crackdown these are big and tough weapons, so the destruction is always imminent. The sidearm weapons are machine guns, plasma rifles and shotguns, while the explosive weapons are rocket launchers, homing missiles, and experimental weapons. Finally, you can also select from two special powers, in this case Vertical Blast, which sends you flying even more than the classic double jumps, or Overshield, which protects you when you are under heavy fire.
Agent Hunter greatly rewards how you move on the map, your awareness, and how aggressive you act. This is noted with small details, like your health being regenerated if you don’t get shot for five seconds, or that the game shows you when you are in the line of sight of an enemy agent, with several laser sights appearing on your character. Knowing how to move between buildings and use them to your advantage to disappear and hunt other agents is really important to survive because of the combat’s lock-on targeting system.
The stage we tried, Blackout Zone, is part of the simulation that The Agency uses to train their agents. The level is largely black with lots of neon lights, giving off a cool virtual Tron vibe, full of tall buildings that take advantage of the high jumps that Crackdown agents are capable of – and even adds several launch pads within the level. Also, important to take notice is that you can always know where the other players are, teammates and enemies, since a particular silhouette appears with your team’s color. Considering the size of the map and the verticality, this really works to let you know where to jump next.
During combat, you can buff you character with the Overdrive Energy, which is a bar that appears on the lower left side that charges depending on the number of Kills, Assists, and Destruction made during the match, or by grabbing some of the red orbs that appear on the level. When the bar is full, you can activate it and become faster, more resistant, and more powerful for a short time.
Something that should be mentioned is that this demo showed us a really basic multiplayer experience, so it’s difficult to know how deep the final multiplayer will be. With few weapons, just one level, and no signs of any type of progress (nor, thankfully, microtransactions), it’s difficult to know how it will hold up long-term. But at least it’s finally, finally almost here.
Finally, this can put to rest about the cloud thing.
 
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Discussing Crackdown 3 delays, design vision, and a dream of Crackdown 4

Crackdown 3 has been notorious for its delays and for its cloud-powered destruction promise, but the full package has a lot more to offer. We spoke to Microsoft to learn more.
Jez Corden23 Nov 2018

Crackdown 3 is aiming to launch on February 15, 2019, following a string of high-profile delays. The cloud-powered title represents cutting-edge technology for Microsoft, who are using the game to showcase physics calculated in the cloud, leading to computations far, far beyond the capabilities of a base Xbox One.

Beyond its multiplayer arena gameplay modes, Crackdown 3's campaign is a crazy superhero sandbox, where players can earn the power to throw gasoline tankers, punch enemies across the map, and jump across skyscrapers.
To learn more about the full package, we caught up with Microsoft Studios' Creative Director Joseph Staten and Head of Production Jorg Neumann to discuss Crackdown 3.

Delays, delays, delays

Crackdown 3 has been a project notorious for its delays, since it was first announced at E3 2014. Microsoft Studios' Creative Director Joseph Staten, noted that the technology behind the cloud contributed to the long development cycle, but that ultimately, the goal has been reached.
[We] knew going in when we started Crackdown 3 that this technological heavy lift — Azure powered, multiplayer fully destructible environments — was going to take a lot of investment, a lot of time to get right. To a large extent, the project schedule has largely been driven by that technology investment. We really have landed this fully destructible Azure-powered experience. It's really unlike any game that we've tried to design before, where you can blow up all of the geometry.​
In conversation with both Staten and Engineering Lead Brian Stone in a previous interview really made it sound as though the cloud-powered destruction systems in Crackdown 3 created various unknown technical hurdles to overcome.

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.
One of the things I always think about when designing a game — geometry is gameplay. 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.​
I certainly experienced some of those new ideas when I played the game at Redmond a few weeks ago. 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. 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.
In this case, we took our vision public very early on. It's a motivator to fulfil that vision, because that's what you promised.​

Boosted campaign

While the focus on Crackdown 3's coverage in the media tends towards the technical achievement with Azure, the game will also feature a large story campaign long-term Crackdown fans will find familiar, in a highly vertical world that's four times bigger than previous Crackdown titles.
Set in the corrupt city of New Providence, Agents infiltrate a benevolent corporate exploiting (and perhaps tied to) a global terrorist catastrophe for their own ends. The campaign will feature nine bosses split across three unique factions. One focuses on robotics, another revolves around industry and tech, and another is more militarized. Players will have to battle these factions to work their way up to the big bad at the top.
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] just took us time, longer than we originally thought. 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. We absolutely want to ship games as high-quality and polished as we can.​
Crackdown 3 was originally billed as a four-player co-op, but that has been dialed back to two-player in recent times. Neumann outlined that this was at least in part due to the chaotic nature of Crackdown 3.
[It's] friend-invite only. Crackdown 3 has very little structure, that's always been the appeal of the game. It's a big open world, with a huge set of guns, you can do things at your own pace. There's no prescribed way to play through the bosses, for example. 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. We felt the best experience in Crackdown 3 was to play with a friend, making plans of attack, [healing] each other, blowing s*** up together.​

On the topic of blowing s*** up, you have to wonder why there was never an intent to add cloud-powered destruction to Crackdown 3's campaign. It seems that the decision was philosophically-driven, rather than technologically-driven.
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. We wanted to make sure that we offered that, but it was in a separate mode that was entirely about destruction. We felt that multiplayer PvP, blowing the hell out of each other, was this great thematic match for destruction in Crackdown. So we decided early on that we were going to put destruction entirely in multiplayer.​

Multiplayer vision

Wrecking Zone currently has two game modes. One is similar to Kill Confirmed in Call of Duty, where you have to grab the dog tags of downed enemies to get a point for your team, while also having the ability to deny points for the enemy team. The other is similar to domination, where you have to capture and hold areas of the map to earn points. I asked about plans for future Crackdown modes, and plans for post-launch.
[We] prototyped a bunch of modes. We have all kinds of dreams how this can take off. [People] were asking about Battle Royale, "why aren't there 100 players?" There's a reason we have five versus five, and the map sizes too. There's so much stuff that you need to keep in memory, due to the destruction, that there's limits. Once you have a map that is a nice size and creates the pace of destruction the way we dreamed of it, having more players can be counter-productive, but we're still experimenting, tech will evolve too.​
Right now, Microsoft is focusing entirely on Crackdown 3's launch, which is a departure from other multiplayer games which often come with a season pass and the promise of additional content down the line. It sounds as though Microsoft is still fleshing out what that might look like for Crackdown 3.
We're not committing to anything right now, we're still experimenting with what's best to do. We're looking at what people find fun, tweaking the balance and so on. We also look at the long-term hooks. We know that we didn't want to go with microtransactions. We're not going with the concept of loot crates. There will be things you can unlock, increasingly cool things. Whether they're rank based, or based on the number of matches, we're honestly still playing with it. We've made hundreds of things to unlock. We can take that to many places.​

The future?

sddefault.jpg

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. But like all good things, Crackdown would have to earn it.
Every game that Microsoft Studios makes... that's the hope, that's the dream for every title we publish. Some games earn that, and some games don't. Our hope is that every game that we ship, we give it the best shot at becoming the next big franchise. The way we look at that is, you have to earn that. It's not a foregone conclusion. We think Crackdown has a lot of potential, it's a really fun game, we hope people love it.​
I certainly feel like Crackdown as a franchise has potential to be up there with the best of them for Microsoft. 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. 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. Time will tell.
 
Crackdown 3 Devs Drop New Campaign Details, Promise No Microtransactions or Loot Boxes

WCCFcrackdown33.jpg


Believe it or not, it seems like Crackdown 3 is actually coming together. Earlier this month, Microsoft finally unveiled the game’s Wrecking Zone multiplayer mode, which actually delivers the cloud-powered total destruction promised years ago. Windows Central recently sat down with Microsoft Studios’ creative director Joseph Staten and head of production Jorg Neumann to find out more about the game’s multiplayer, campaign, and post-launch plans.

According to Windows Central, the Wrecking Zone 5v5 multiplayer mode currently has two modes –- one involves collecting dog tags from downed enemies, while the other is a standard domination mode, with players attempting to capture and hold map points. Microsoft’s reps actually had more to say about Crackdown 3’s campaign, which is set in the corrupt Providence City and tasks players with infiltrating a corporation, which may have ties to a terrorist organization. The campaign sounds fairly meaty, with nine bosses and three factions to battle against, but it won’t feature the full destruction found in multiplayer. Staten explained the reason for that…
“[The campaign is] friend-invite only. Crackdown 3 has very little structure, that’s always been the appeal of the game. It’s a big open world, with a huge set of guns, you can do things at your own pace. There’s no prescribed way to play through the bosses, for example. […] But ultimately we decided that this is a game about saving the city, and helping people, rather than reducing it to rubble. We wanted to make sure that we offered that, but it was in a separate mode that was entirely about destruction.”
Staten also touched on the post-launch plans for Crackdown 3.
“We’re not committing to [any post-launch plans] right now, we’re still experimenting with what’s best to do. We’re looking at what people find fun, tweaking the balance and so on. We also look at the long-term hooks. We know that we didn’t want to go with microtransactions. We’re not going with the concept of loot crates. There will be things you can unlock, increasingly cool things. Whether they’re rank based, or based on the number of matches, we’re honestly still playing with it. We’ve made hundreds of things to unlock. We can take that to many places.”
No microtransactions? Or loot boxes? Hundreds of things to unlock in game? Well, doesn’t that all sound refreshingly old-fashioned? Given all the delays, I guess Microsoft is feeling generous.

Crackdown 3 brings the boom to PC and Xbox One on February 15, 2019.



https://wccftech.com/crackdown-3-cam...otransactions/
 
Crackdown Could Become a Microsoft Mainstay Franchise, Says Microsoft Executive

“We think Crackdown has a lot of potential, it’s a really fun game, we hope people love it.”

Crackdown-3-.jpg


Five long years after it was announced, and a decade since the last entry in the series, Crackdown 3 will be launching a few months from now. But is that it, then? Will Crackdown fans have to go another decade without a new game in the series? According to Microsoft’s creative director Joseph Staten, no.

Speaking to Windows Central, he expressed a desire about wanting Crackdown to become a Microsoft mainstay franchise, alongside Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, noting that the IP of course has to earn it, but also hoping that Crackdown 3 is that moment for the series, echoing similar statements that have been made about the game in the past.

“Every game that Microsoft Studios makes… that’s the hope, that’s the dream for every title we publish,” he said. “Some games earn that, and some games don’t. Our hope is that every game that we ship, we give it the best shot at becoming the next big franchise. The way we look at that is, you have to earn that. It’s not a foregone conclusion. We think Crackdown has a lot of potential, it’s a really fun game, we hope people love it.”

I do hope the game comes together after five years of development time and so many studios having worked on it. Hopefully Crackdown 3 fills a slot in Microsoft’s otherwise lean first party portfolio, and can become a familiar part of it going forward. My interest in the game is piqued after Microsoft confirmed it won’t have microtransactions or loot boxes. Crackdown 3 launches for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs on February 15, 2019.



https://gamingbolt.com/crackdown-cou...soft-executive
 
No post game content? I read it more like they don't believe it'll be worth the investment.

And MP with aim-lock on?

LOL.
 
They have definitely made some improvements since the initial reveal that's for sure, still not the best looking game but it looks MUCH better than when they first showed it. Hopefully the fun factor is there, looks like it could be.
 
They have definitely made some improvements since the initial reveal that's for sure, still not the best looking game but it looks MUCH better than when they first showed it. Hopefully the fun factor is there, looks like it could be.

Animation is still weak, and I don't like the posing. He just feels too damn light :(

That bit at the end where he is squaring off with the digging mech has such underwhelming posing, it makes me sad. The animation style looks ancient and ham-fisty. Using gravity to pull enemies into his hands is a pretty weak way of not having to create specific animation too, but at least it covers the lack of it, lol.

Other than that, it looks Ok, but the rendering just doesn't live up to the upper end stuff. I'm sure it's fun, though.
 
Animation is still weak, and I don't like the posing. He just feels too damn light :(

That bit at the end where he is squaring off with the digging mech has such underwhelming posing, it makes me sad. The animation style looks ancient and ham-fisty. Using gravity to pull enemies into his hands is a pretty weak way of not having to create specific animation too, but at least it covers the lack of it, lol.

Other than that, it looks Ok, but the rendering just doesn't live up to the upper end stuff. I'm sure it's fun, though.

Oh for sure, but it still looks much better than the initial showing which honestly looked bad. I don't really consider this a AAA game, I think it's a AA game that ended up having a ton of development issues and as a result has taken far longer to make than it should have and that along with a rather sparse line up has given it more spotlight than it probably should have had. Doesn't mean it can't be fun but yeah it's nowhere near what the best studios are doing these days, not even close.
 
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It looks fun. Does look like a game though that has been in development for so long that the animations and graphics look dated.