What We Know About Crackdown 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ALndqfagE&src_vid=RQphk81Koo0
First, we know it won’t be called Crackdown 3. Just like the recently non-numbered Tomb Raider adventure of Laura Croft, this new Crackdown forXbox One is a bit of a reboot.
Microsoft Studios creative director Ken Lobb told Eurogamer:
“I don’t like X game number seven. It’s a good idea sometimes to have a game with a subtitle. But some games, and Crackdown is a perfect example, is it really 3? It is the future. This is a different place, long after the original game. But is it 2? Is it a different universe than 2? Yeah, it’s kinda a sequel to 1,” Lobb said.
“It’s Crackdown,” he said.
And judging from the trailer, the game goes out of its way to capture the wildness and aesthetic of the first game, and to avoid the look and feel of Crackdown 2, which featured a more apocalyptic plot with Pacific City overrun by mutants. From Lobb’s words we might speculate that Crackdown 2 will be ignored in the upcoming game.
We also know that Dave Jones, director of the first game for Realtime Worlds, is on board and his new company Cloudgine’s focuses on cloud-based gaming tech will be used to help the new Crackdown game realistically simulate open world destruction.
According to Xbox chief Phil Spencer in an interview with Kotaku:
“A couple of things happen when, say, a building gets destroyed in a game. You’ve got the physics calculation of all the pieces that something’s going to break into and all of what happens to those pieces as they collide with one another. And you kind of, in the truest sense, want it to be somewhat non-deterministic, meaning that if I shot, like, say, a missile from one angle instead of a slightly different angle, that the destruction looks different based on the pure physics of the impact. So what we’ve been working on is this capability of actually computing [in the cloud] the physics calculation of millions and millions of particles that would fall and then just having the local box [the player’s console] get the positional data and the render, so, ‘Okay I need to render this piece at this particular location. I don’t know why.’ The local box doesn’t know why it’s going to be at this location or where it’s going to be in the next frame. That’s all held in the cloud. You have this going back and forth between the two.
“That’s just an example, because it’s the example that we showed. Let’s run getting a pure physics model in the cloud, because we can use multiple CPUs there and then locally using the power [of the console] to render and make things look good locally.”
Here’s a video of Microsoft showing off the proposed technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxHdUDhOMyw
Finally we know Buildgine won’t be the sole developer of the game. It will work on engine, but another developer will be brought in to work on art and other game features.
