Microsoft Studio’s Creative Director and Writer Joe Staten was recently asked by VentureBeat some interesting things about the development of Crackdown, from the customization of characters, how long will it last the campaign and how the game benefit from cloud computing technologies.
Crackdown has a decent menu. Bigger than some, not as big as others. If you want to play by yourself or with a close friend, if you just want to have a relaxing story experience, great. We have this really cool 15-hour-plus campaign. If you’re in a mood to bash in people’s teeth, be super competitive, we have that mode for you as well. You don’t need to actually bash anyone’s teeth, but you know what I mean. That’s the reason we have the campaign. We want to make sure that when millions of people jump into this game in Game Pass and they think, “Well, how do I want to play Crackdown? I’m not really a multiplayer person. Does it have something I can play by myself?”, yep, we do. Hopefully they’ll fall in love with Crackdown that way, and other ways as well.
He was also asked about how does cloud computing enables Crackdown to destructible scenarios in wrecking zone.
What we’re doing in Wrecking Zone is we’re running Havok in Azure. We’re spinning up the equivalent of 12 Xbox Ones, that level of cloud compute, to do this lockstep full destruction. What this means is that if you’re on a day one Xbox One from four years ago, or a brand new Xbox One X, that experience of destruction will be the same on all platforms. An Xbox One X will be rendering it in 4K and an Xbox One will be in 1080p or what have you, but a destructive chunk is a destructive chunk regardless of the platform. It’s really nice. It means that even if I have an older piece of hardware, I’m not getting a downgraded Wrecking Zone experience.
There are no technical limits to how big we could make this map or the number of players we could put into it. I mean, I’m sure there are eventually some limits, but there are no hard, immediate technical limits. The reason why the map is the size it is, the player count we have, those are all design choices. We could have chosen to spin up more Azure servers. There are, of course, costs associated with that, so we had to find some balance between the experience and the cost. But that’s how we’re using cloud compute, to create this consistently fun, fully destructible experience for everyone on all platforms.
Crackdown 3 was originally scheduled to release in 2017, but it was delayed several times in order to give developers more time to release a more polished game, it’s now releasing for the Xbox One in less than two weeks, February 15th, the game will be included in Xbox Game Pass.
Source: Wccftech Via: VentureBeat
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