“Development has been going incredibly well. I’ve actually been playing a ton of it,” she told me. “To be honest, because we obviously have this Crackdown Online mode and then we also have the traditional Crackdown campaign, which has multiplayer online. But we want to launch our online beta so that it’s not too far in advance of the complete campaign. It’s actually the campaign that we’re doubling down on now. We’ve got internal play sessions every week for Crackdown Online. We’re starting now to get the campaign in. Building these open world games is both challenging and a blast, because you have to build all of the systems that interact together. Before you get to the point where you can actually experience what the game feels like and can start building your missions and telling your stories.”
“So the Crackdown campaign is definitely the most fully featured campaign we’ve ever done. It’s basically running a sim on top of the traditional Crackdown environment. We created this thing called a ‘hate table.’ Depending on what you choose to destroy in the environment, there will be massive, big reactions all over the city. Gangs will get together against you. This is the first time we’ve ever had something like that. It’s just starting to come online. We have lots of time to put together our missions. I don’t like letting gamers down and asking them to wait, but I’m also kind of proud of giving developers the time they need.”