14 DAY TRIAL // We might not know too much about the new Crackdown that will be launched on the Xbox One, but one of the developers working on the title says that one of the main aims of his team is to introduce more cooperative play opportunities and make the transition between them and the core campaign as seamless as possible.
Speaking to Total Xbox, Ken Lobb, who is the creative director at the Microsoft Game Studios, says, “Crackdown was one of the first drop-in, drop-out co-op games, but we're going more towards 'there's just the game. You're playing the game, it's single, it's co-op, it's a mash-up.”
He adds, “Choose at will in the game, instead of hiding behind menus and loads and lobbies. Just make the gameplay as if it's one big thing.”
In the first two Crackdown titles, coop was one of the main mechanics, but gamers needed to briefly deal with menus in order to find their friends and then enter their campaign.
The new Xbox One-based title was first revealed during E3 2014 via a computer-generated graphics-filled trailer that showed three of the world’s iconic agents working together to take down a mafia base in a skyscraper where a powerful kingpin was hiding.
The footage featured no actual gameplay, and neither Microsoft nor the development team have offered any clear details about the core mechanics of the new game.
A new piece of technology called Cloudgine is designed to allow the new Crackdown to use the power of cloud computing to deliver more graphics quality for the open-world experience and to enhance the realism of the physics system.
Microsoft has also confirmed that the new game is designed to place more of an emphasis on destruction, with the player character now able to take out entire city blocks in order to reach his objectives.
The story of the new Xbox One Crackdown is designed to exist in an alternate reality to that seen in the second full title in the series.
Microsoft has not yet mentioned a launch date for the game, but it will probably be delivered at some point in late 2015.
The Xbox One has dropped the Kinect motion tracking system from the retail package for more than one month and lowered its price to 399 dollars or Euro, which apparently resulted in an increase in sales, although no actual figures were offered by Microsoft.