The big deal with Crackdown 3 is that the Red Faction-esque multiplayer environmental destruction is done through “the power of the cloud.” Unfortunately, this means that the single player campaign does not feature the “full” destruction tech. (Whatever that means.) You get “limited destruction” because you’re supposed to be saving the city. Presumably, it’s also so players don’t destroy stuff that is essential to campaign progression. On the up side, you can play the single player campaign offline.
The devs talked about this a bit in the Twitch broadcast (about 4 hours in).
AW HELL YEAH. This is probably the single biggest reason for my Xbone purchase right here. I even enjoyed the hell out of Crackdown 2, which was a bit of a disappointment I’d have to admit. Personally though, I don’t really find the destruction all that interesting, seemed like a nuisance in Red Faction when I ended up blowing up a bridge I needed to cross. But hey, I’ll give it a fair shake.
From what I understand, there are different maps. The campaign/coop map, which has limited destruction, and the multiplayer maps that are destruction-happy.
I’ve been always sceptical about the cloud computing for games, in supplying “power” to compensate for the weaker Xbox hardware. Not because it’s technically impossible, they are right in that for some calculations it can be done (let’s say 40 ms going to the server, 30 ms of calculations, 40 ms to return the data, total time 110 ms, enough to do it 9 times per sec.)
But let’s imagine people embrace the idea, and most games start using it, like they want. Now… what? Consoles sell dozens of millions, let’s say they sell 30M Xbox Ones, and 10% are used on average. Do they really have three million of unused servers to use for the Xbox? If yes, is that profitable? Won’t there be congestions in the network in Christmas when the next Call of Duty and next Assassins Creed release? I know MS has lots of servers in the Azure cloud, but I suppose a decent amount are being used, and by paid customers.
In other words I can see it working now, but precisely because it has failed in getting used as a primary feature of the console, imagine if every game, in every mode would have used it as standard feature for physics, AI, etc.
The problem of scale, at least on a console audience level, is largely solved already. There’s only so many game players. There’s only so many that will play this game during these hours, etc.
The issue to me is when the system doesn’t work due to things like DDoS, singular peak times like Xmas morning or a game’s launch day, or when you lose connection because life happens. Even worse, publishers are prone to shutting down servers when player population gets too low. For something like Forza 5/6, it’s not a big deal because the Drivatar stuff doesn’t make that big of a difference for the normal player. For other games, it’s a real issue.
I’d hate to have all my stray rockets destroy the entire city during the campaign so I’m ok with that call. Will definitely be following this since Crackdown’s still one of my favorite all-time games.
It’s not so much an technical problem of scale as it is an economic problem of cost. If MS is using idle servers and bandwidth it’s already paid for, then it’s all gravy.* If, on the other hand, MS is buying new servers and additional bandwidth for this, then they’re effectively subsidizing the player’s hardware. There’s only so far that can go before MS either says “no more” or increases the cost of the game to the consumer.
*Which is possible, since peak hours for their cloud servers now may not be the same as peak hours for game-playing.
The cost of server time isn’t even the biggest issue, the expense of engineering a hybrid local/cloud compute system is unlikely to be worth the benefits that affords for anyone who isn’t doing it as a vanity project.
I only see this happening for the occasional Microsoft owned game. Although at least this looks like a valid use for the extra processing power instead of the lame talk of Titanfalls idiot bots that somehow needed the “power of the cloud” to work.
I just watched a video of this where the multiplayer showed buildings collapsing on each other. Please please let this be the awesome superhero game with a fully destructible environment I’ve been dreaming about.
Crackdown 1/2 one of my favourite Xbox games so this could be fun. Except I do not have a PRISM ONE. The original Crackdown developer disappeared with APB did they not?
