While most of our readers were not yet born when Crackdown 3 was originally announced by Microsoft, seasoned gamers may remember loads of hype surrounding the announcement, mostly related to the promise of real time dynamic destruction. Series creator Dave Jones was to return to the Crackdown franchise and the involvement of Cloudgine, his then-new cloud computing service, was hyped as the future of distributed computing with regards to its possibilities for gaming. More than four years since that debut, Crackdown 3 has experienced delays, most recently a push back into February of 2019 that was made official by Microsoft last week at E3 2018. If that wasn’t concerning enough for fans of the series, today’s news that Jones and co-developers Reagent Games left the Crackdown 3 project will do little to build optimism.
The news comes around six months after Epic Games announced the acquisition of Cloudgine. Microsoft has not show off Crackdown 3’s touted destruction physics since a closed door demonstration back in 2015 at Gamescom.
When asked directly by Polygon at E3 2018 about the destruction physics, Microsoft Studios head Matt Booty said, “It is still part of [Crackdown 3]. We’re not showing a lot of details about that here. We’ll have more to show as the year goes on.” When asked for clarification on whether Cloudgine’s technology was still being used for the game, Booty replied, ”You know, I’m not going to get into the actual technical breakdown. Let’s just say that we’ve got access to a great infrastructure, and the game’s got some great tech in it, and we’re going to put those two together in the way that makes the most sense.”
It’s possible that Crackdown fans may need to keep waiting until next February to learn the fate of the game’s much heralded destruction physics.
Source: Shacknews Crackdown 3 Loses Series Creator Amid Developer Shakeup