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Crackdown 3 Gameplay First Look

MouldyK

Member
From the Website:

Open World gaming has always been synonymous with “go anywhere, do anything” – and while the campaign for Crackdown 3 is set to deliver a massive new city for you to play in and explore, it’s our groundbreaking multiplayer mode that truly embraces the “do anything” part of the open world promise.

Envision a wall.
For decades, walls have existed in games – and they’ve remained largely unchanged over time. From the humble wall in a 3D monster maze, to any wall in current gen games, these barriers tend to exhibit two common characteristics: they are there to constrict you, and they are fake. You shoot them with an assault rifle and a game designer tells the game to stick a “bullet hole” decal at the point of impact. Shoot it with a rocket launcher, you get a bigger “scorch mark.” Even colossal mechs find walls in most video games to be immovable objects with infinite health.

Why can’t you shoot a hole in the wall?

Why can’t you blast an opening and step through it?

Why can’t you make the wall collapse, crushing the enemy that was hiding behind it?

The answer is simple, and it’s the same answer that has historically held back how rich and detailed game developers can make their worlds: Compute power and memory.

The walls in Crackdown 3 Multiplayer are not inhibited by such things. Our walls are connected to the Microsoft Cloud, which provides compute power and memory on demand.

Every bullet you fire at a wall in Crackdown 3 Multiplayer removes a piece of it. Barriers act as you would expect when being peppered by projectiles…

Now imagine an entire city.
Buildings, bridges, tunnels – everything is physical.

No doors around? Not a problem, create one. Want to slice off the top of a skyscraper and have it crush your enemies below? Go ahead. Want to bring the whole building crashing down in the direction of your choice? You can make it happen in Crackdown 3 Multiplayer.


While most multiplayer games today run entirely on a single server, we are enabling multiple server cloud connections just to manage the structures in our world – arming each of our players with 20x the power of a single Xbox One to unleash 100% destruction.

All this adds up to more unlimited possibilities. Play the game how you want to play it.

“Do anything”…



Dave Jones, Founder & Creative Director
Reagent Games
 

SerTapTap

Member
IS it my eyes or is the destruction running at a significantly lower framerate than gameplay? Looks like there's more to destroy than RF Guerilla but it doesn't look as smooth IMO. And if it's multiplayer only...well I guess I'm not interested. Did they confirm that? I just want to dick around and explode shit not worry about multiplayer.
 
You have a fundamental misunderstanding.

Instead of pointing me that I am wrong, why not improve your posting by explaining the technique for me?

Sure beats the fancy GAF posting of late by saying someone is wrong without anything remotely interesting coming at the end of it.
 

Golgo 13

The Man With The Golden Dong
Looks, uhh.... Pretty good I guess? From the 3 seconds of on-screen gameplay shown. Game seems REALLY early, and I'll be honest, I don't like the intense focus on multiplayer. Crackdown 1 did it right, 2, not so much.
 

JaggedSac

Member
Instead of pointing me that I am wrong, why not improve your posting by explaining the technique for me?

Sure beats the fancy GAF posting of late by saying someone is wrong without anything remotely interesting coming at the end of it.

Apologies. Imagine multiple dedicated servers handling a single multiplayer match. Those remote server resources are where they are saying the 20x comes from.
 

PulseONE

Member
Instead of pointing me that I am wrong, why not improve your posting by explaining the technique for me?

Sure beats the fancy GAF posting of late by saying someone is wrong without anything remotely interesting coming at the end of it.

Basically they mean that (and this is an assumption here) that the physics for the destruction is handled on servers (on the cloud) with much more processing power than the XB1, then the data is sent back over the net to the Xbox which just renders the movement without having to calculate the physics (which from the scale of it, would be very hardware intensive)
 

daveo42

Banned
Game itself looks good, though I hope they improve the movement animations a bit. They look off to me. I also wish they'd drop the broad "cloud" talk. My guess is that they are using the cloud to offload some of the physics calc for destructible environments, which is cool. Them hawking it as "20x more powerful" is far too broad and seemingly laughable phrase.
 

Haunted

Member
Shooting looks like shit, but the large scale destruction looks fucking phenomenal, if it actually works as advertised.

Orbs and huge jumps are in there, so they've already took care of the most important thing. :D

edit: oh the destruction is MP only? well, fuck that
 
Apologies. Imagine multiple dedicated servers handling a single multiplayer match. Those remote server resources are where they are saying the 20x comes from.

Basically they mean that (and this is an assumption here) that the physics for the destruction is handled on servers (on the cloud) with much more processing power than the XB1, then the data is sent back over the net to the Xbox which just renders the movement without having to calculate the physics (which from the scale of it, would be very hardware intensive)

I see. That sounds great in theory but I highly doubt that will have its full effect in practice.
 

DevilFox

Member
Pretty boring, honestly, and artistically uninspired (not that I expected anything marvelous from Crackdown, but still). However, the multiplayer could be totally another thing if they keep on the promises. Will wait for more footage.
 

Leflus

Member
Super happy to hear that the cloud stuff is reserved for MP. Hopefully that means that the campaign/SP is offline enabled.
 
The game requires the power of the cloud to calculate the full destruction of the city. Thus if you want to have that level of destruction you must be online. More than likely the game will have single player and coop share the same world and campaign. If you want that destruction you must be online and you likely have the option of people joining your game if you want. If you can't be online you don't get that destruction. I'm thinking Solo/Open in Elite Dangerous.

If people didn't spend all of their time complaining about this game requiring online when it was obvious to everyone that it was necessary to hit the scale, they could have just made this game online only but we can't have nice things because of reasons...
 

Dyna

Member
Seems like a really ambitious project, that destruction looked crazy. On the other hand it didn't look really that great in other aspects even if it's pre-alpha. Still quite excited for it, don't think it'll launch next year though, early 2017 seems like a safer bet.
 
Games with object / environmental destruction are just the best. Running around exploding structures in Red Faction Guerrilla was the shit. Wish there were more games based around dynamic / modifiable environments. Really bummed I don't have an Xbox One.
 

Falchion

Member
The destruction is cool, I hope it's not gated off behind some multiplayer mode where teams race to destroy the most of the city.
 
Seems like a really ambitious project, that destruction looked crazy. On the other hand it didn't look really that great in other aspects even if it's pre-alpha. Still quite excited for it, don't think it'll launch next year though, early 2017 seems like a safer bet.

Sounds about right. I"d rather them take their time and make it a truly great experience rather than rush it out and have it turn out like Crackdown 2
 

Liamario

Banned
Game looks a little unfinished, but that's to be expected. It looks underwhelmingly like crackdown, but I expect the major changes won't be around the basic gameplay.
 
Loved the first, second was a bit meh and I am not sure on this.

Destruction looks decent, they really should stop with the cloud compute spiel though.
 

a.wd

Member
This looks fucking awesome, but then as long as they did the criminal infrastructure right and had a scalable city with dem orbs they automatically had the best open world game this gen.

I'm all in, love me some crackdown...
 

Drac84

Member
lol power of the cloud.

XrxMc.gif


Game looks fun though.
 

frontieruk

Member
Loved the first, second was a bit meh and I am not sure on this.

Destruction looks decent, they really should stop with the cloud compute spiel though.

Without the cloud compute spiel you don't get the 100% destruction. I'll take the spiel to watch the world burn.
 
The game is still pretty early on it seems so movement and shooting not being that great is expected, I imagine they can improve on it by release. That destruction was amazing.
 

Skilotonn

xbot xbot xbot xbot xbot
Having MP destruction being 100% is a huge thing for me. Can't remember the last game that featured that, and despite technology improving over time, destructibility has been shown less as more games come out. Battlefield being a huge example of less destruction for each title moving forward.

It was pre-alpha footage so I'm not bugging about it, but once they fix that strafe animation, which I'm sure they will, I'll be completely satisfied. I'm already sold on the game as that's the Crackdown I want on new hardware and new technology.
 

Leonsito

Member
Smart to hide cloud calculated physics only in MP.

I also think that it was inviable to have 100% destructive environments in a SP campaign, a lot of scripted things can go wrong.

I can't believe people is still doubting that cloud solutions exists and/or work. They have been here for years, just stop guys.
 

sangreal

Member
Loved the first, second was a bit meh and I am not sure on this.

Destruction looks decent, they really should stop with the cloud compute spiel though.

The game is actually using the cloud (aka Xbox Live Compute) so it seems silly to complain about it here. They're pushing a game, not some abstract idea of cloud power. I mean, they literally named their company Cloudgine
 
Full destruction is either multiplayer-only or online-only.

Neither are fun conclusions.

Well what would you prefer they do? If the calculations are too complex for the CPU, then it has to be done that way. Physics calcs are math heavy, which is what allows them to be offloaded. All that has to get sent back are the calculations on where the items move for each frame.
 

Augustiner

Neo Member
I can't watch the video. Is the game online only, or will there be offline support? Impressions seem to be indicating both.

GIF's look pretty neat.
 

KaiserBecks

Member
I don't get why there's so much confusion. Crackdown has always been a coop-centric game and they are saying that the destruction is based on cloud computing. It's going to be an always-online game with drop in coop.
 
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