Crackdown 3 (XB1/W10)

_/\_YUNGSTAR_/\_ wrote:

Photek wrote:anyway its still far from GRATUITOUSLY promoting the cloud.

if I was MS, I'd make sure everyone knew about how much added power this brings to games on Xbox one.

Skippy wrote:strawberry float me this is impressive in person! They had a ticker in the corner of the screen showing the computing power being used and how many cloud servers were being utilised at once (different servers serve different parts of the map). This reached 12 servers when I went hands on and buildings were being brought down all over the shop, but their record is apparently 14. Very impressive stuff.

Also, the 100% destruction doesn't feature in the campaign (which can be co-op) but there is still destruction. There's a separate multiplayer mode with its own map for all the destruction stuff.

Crackdown 3 hands-on preview – the Xbox One killer app

GameCentral reports back from Gamescom on what may be the most technically impressive console game ever made.

There have been a lot of great-looking video games released in the last two years or so, but for the most part the new generation of consoles has done little to drop jaws from their normal position. But that all changed when we got a go on Xbox One exclusive Crackdown 3. The game doesn’t necessarily look particularly impressive in static screenshots, but when you see its destruction effects in motion it feels like the sort of revolution that has been a long time coming.

It was only the first proper day of Gamescom today, but Crackdown 3 was easily the most impressive thing we saw – and that included a hands-off demo of Fallout 4 and the destruction-filled Just Cause 3 (we’ll write those previews up later). In fact amongst our excited demands for the final game we insisted that Jones and his team licence the tech out so we can finally get a decent Superman and Godzilla game.

But what really has us so excited is that this is not technology for technology’s sake. Developer Reagent Games haven’t spent years inventing ways to make slightly more realistic looking moustaches (yes, that was a dig at The Order: 1886), they’ve used it to create something that would’ve been completely impossible in the previous generation. That’s what we’ve been waiting for, and we couldn’t be more excited to see Crackdown 3 finally destroy any lingering disappointment with the current generation.

Crackdown 3 effectively turns your Xbox One into the most powerful console ever made

So, Crackdown 3 might be the most impressive demo I've ever seen. We'll have a full preview up later today, but suffice it to say that all that bluster about "leveraging the Cloud" to bring hitherto unseen levels of physics-based destruction is totally accurate. That moment in the CG teaser trailer where an Agent collapses a building into another building to kill the naughty crime boss inside? You can do that. Easily. I've seen it happen. I have seen such things.

While the offline single-player game plays out like the Crackdown of old, it's in multiplayer - set in an entirely separate city - where the game flexes its next-gen muscles. It works off of a startlingly simple conceit - the city is divided into distinct sections, each governed by a single server. When you start destroying things in an area, the physics calculations are sent to its server, and the results are sent back to your Xbox, which resolves that into everything from a single bullethole to a skyscraper tumbling down.

If you, say, blow a chunk off of a building, which then flies into an adjacent area and smashes the window of the tower block next door, that neighbouring server then helps the original to resolve this. Destruction is persistent, and every piece of rubble remains interactive, and can continue to be shot, blown up or pushed around. Servers can be piled on servers to keep this working - in our demo, we saw 11 being used at once. Producer, Dave Jones, assured me that that was the tip of the digital iceberg.

You'd think this would require an immense internet connection to keep it rolling, not least when four players (this is the current maximum size for a multiplayer party, although it could increase) are doing the same thing in four separate corners of the city, but the relative ease of swapping information between Xbox and server means the strain is fairly small. Jones says that his team are optimising the game for a 2-4mbps connection.

So, I ask the question - does this technology make the Xbox One more powerful? Jones nods. Does it, effectively, make it the most powerful console ever made while those servers are running? Jones nods. While Crackdown utilises it purely for physics, the opportunity here is clear. Who knows what another company could make with this, given the time? For the moment, though, I'm not entirely bothered - I just knocked a penthouse balcony off its moorings and watched it take 20 others out on its way to the ground. I'm still smiling.

The Crackdown 3 multiplayer game will blow you (and everything else) away

We knew before Gamescom that Microsoft would be showing off the new Crackdown for Xbox One. Now, we've seen it, and the multiplayer experience especially is going to blow you away,

We were privileged enough to not just see it in action, but actually to take the multiplayer game out for a spin.

One of the headline features of Crackdown 3 is the use of the cloud to take on the physics computations which allows for the sheer scale of destruction possible. We'll touch on that in a minute, but it's important not to neglect the single player, story driven game. The important thing to put out there right at the start is that the cloud physics are not in the main game. The reason for this is simple: people want to play offline. Since you're already connected to play multiplayer, it makes total sense.

The single player game doesn't take anything away from what Crackdown has always set out to be. It's still a 3D platforming game; you can climb any building you can see, and you're still trying to take down the Crime Lords as a member of the Agency. It's skills for kills, so you'll get better the more bad guys you take out, but there's a new gameplay mechanic in action known as the Hate System.

The Crime Lords are more difficult than ever to beat in Crackdown 3. They're not putting themselves out there in harms way for you to just find and kill. Instead, you have to draw them out, and that's where the Hate System comes in. You'll need to target their businesses, their runners, essentially cause trouble for them and make them hate you. It's not a static measure, either, and hate will drop after a while if you don't keep plugging away. Once the hate bar reaches 100%, the boss comes out and you get your chance. The one we saw in the demo was protected by an exo-suit that bullets couldn't penetrate. So, you have to be more creative, using destructible elements in the world around you to help finish them off.

Then we get to the multiplayer. Where things are going to get crazy.

The multiplayer game is a different map to the single player experience, and it's where the power of the cloud physics comes into play. None of the graphics rendering is affected, all of that is still done on the console. All that goes off to the cloud is numbers, calculations. By freeing up the computing power of the console to concentrate on the rendering, the effects are mind blowing. Truly mind blowing.

You may also be wondering how much bandwidth you're going to need to be able to take advantage of this. The simple answer is; not much. The developers told us that the system is optimized to be used on a 2-4mbps connection, though that's based on 4-player multiplayer only at this time.

So, are we excited for Crackdown 3? Absolutely. It's still a long way off being finished (the multiplayer we went hands-on with is still pre-alpha), so we're going to have to tough it out. But based on the time left until launch to polish and perfect, and what we've already seen, this is one to beat for 2016.

Skippy wrote:strawberry float me this is impressive in person! They had a ticker in the corner of the screen showing the computing power being used and how many cloud servers were being utilised at once (different servers serve different parts of the map). This reached 12 servers when I went hands on and buildings were being brought down all over the shop, but their record is apparently 14. Very impressive stuff.

Cloudgine Interview: Crackdown 3 and Clouds of Destruction

What is Cloudgine and what do they have to do with Crackdown 3? Find out here.

Let us get the big question out of the way. How closely is Cloudgine associated with Microsoft? I know that you are using Azure for cloud based processing but is the core technology i.e. cloud based processing algorithm a sole property of Cloudgine?

Cloudgine is an independent company. We are currently working with Microsoft on the development of Crackdown 3.


There was a lot of speculation regarding cloud based processing. A lot of people were not sure whether Xbox One can be made more powerful using the cloud. How does it feel to prove all of them wrong?

It feels good. The Crackdown 3 demo was an important step in terms of changing public perception about cloud computing and games. However, we are fully aware that players will only be completely convinced once we successfully release the game.


Can you tell us about Cloudgine and the work you’ve been involved with since the beginning?

Cloudgine began as a project we started in early 2013. After a long research phase on the state-of-the-art in distributed computing, we set an ambitious goal: create a development platform, based on grid computing paradigms, capable of delivering a virtually unlimited amount of compute power to craft game experiences never seen before. From the initial reaction to the Crackdown 3 demo at Gamescom, I’d say we may be on the right track.


Crackdown 3 was announced first at E3 2014 but demos of the cloud-based destruction it could deliver were circulating before that. When did Cloudgine first take on the project?

I believe you are referring to a demo that was shown a few months earlier at Microsoft BUILD 2014. That was an initial prototype that we developed to prove the model. A lot of work went into creating it, and it’s paved the way for what we’re doing in the game.


Can you break down exactly Crackdown 3 relies on Azure and cloud computing for its open world destruction and how Cloudgine is helping to make this a reality?

Traditionally, games are held back by the amount of compute power available on the host device. This means that important and computationally-intensive components — such as physics, animation, AI or even graphics — are constrained to fit within a limited resource budget. Our platform, however, effectively removes this limitation and seamlessly provides additional compute power as needed, by tapping the resources from a cloud computing infrastructure such as Microsoft Cloud. Crackdown 3’s Gamescom demo shows this model applied to physics in action. Or perhaps I should say, “in destruction.”


Much has been made about the power of Microsoft’s Azure servers but we’ve only seen small benefits from the same (as seen in Forza 5’s Drivatar AI and Titanfall’s reliance on Azure). Crackdown 3 takes things to a completely different level though in terms of compute scale. How challenging was it to deliver on the demands of Crackdown 3?

With Crackdown 3, we focused on the hardest problem first: the distribution of a very complex physics simulation. Physics distribution comes with a long list of challenges: How to split the cost of a single physics simulation across multiple servers? How to minimize the inevitable latency introduced by the distribution? How to scale the system to use compute power on demand? And more importantly — once we solved the problem of simulating a huge number of physical objects in our cloud platform, how to send their state to an Xbox One through a reasonably low bandwidth (2Mbps – 4Mbps) internet connection?

In short: extremely challenging!


Cloud computing still seems a way off from allowing consoles to fully leverage additional computational power. It’s still mostly used for game streaming. When do you believe we’ll start to see this paradigm shift in cloud computing use?

We believe, in the not-too-distant future, the core games that aren’t cloud-assisted will be in the minority. It’s true that developing with distributed computing paradigms is complex and requires skills not commonly found within the games industry — but we started Cloudgine with the specific goal of making the transition as smooth as possible. We are achieving this by cloud-enabling well-known and understood game engines and middleware solutions such as Unreal Engine 4, Havok Physics and Nvidia PhysX to work in a distributed environment with no additional effort for the developers. They can keep using the development environment they are already familiar with, and our cloud platform transparently takes care of all the intricacies of distributed programming.


Cloudgine can make the Xbox One 13 times more powerful (and in another report, 20 times). So what exactly is becoming powerful? Are you guys increasing the amount of memory or GPU compute units or the number of GPU ROPs? Is there anything you are doing on the Xbox One CPU?

We are not increasing the power of any specific Xbox One subsystem. We are enhancing the gaming experience by using compute power and memory that is available server-side. We offload the expensive computations to Microsoft Cloud through our platform and send the results back to the Xbox One for rendering.


Cloudgine is working on the core engine for Crackdown 3 while Reagent is focusing on gameplay and art assets. The work you’re doing clearly extends beyond just cloud computing on Crackdown 3 – could you tell us a bit more about it?

Reagent Games and Sumo Digital are the primary game developers and Crackdown 3 will be the first game to showcase Cloudgine. Our ultimate plan is to release the platform to other game developers of any size and budget. We’ll share more details on this plan over the coming months.


Will Cloudgine be leveraging Azure to expand or aid video games in other ways (for example, ironing out any bugs that may arise in the game on a quicker basis, improving resolution and frame rate of games etc)?

Cloudgine’s model for compute power on demand can certainly be applied to a wide range of problems. Pretty much every computationally-intensive game task can and will benefit from our model. Just imagine what game developers could do with virtually unlimited resources dedicated to complex A.I. logic, physics simulation or global illumination algorithms. Crackdown 3 is a great example of how our technology can be used to enhance the player experience, and we can’t wait to see what other developers do with it too.


Cloudgine is allowing you to do some wonderful things on Xbox One which cannot be achieved by a high end PC. So that begs the question, what kind of possibilities do you think Cloudgine will provide when used with a high end PC?

Cloudgine as a platform is able to deliver as much compute power as a game requires, and obviously different games will tap into that well of resources in different ways. I expect some developers out there will leverage the additional capabilities of high-end PCs to push Cloudgine even further.


I read in one of the Gamescom articles that the Crackdown 3 demo was running on 14 servers. Technically speaking, is it possible to make the Xbox One even more powerful, say 50 times by ramping up the amount of servers or is there a limit to this technology?

Small clarification first – the Gamescom demo wasn’t running on 14 servers, it was using the compute power that approximately 14 Xbox One consoles would be able to generate in total.

The platform itself doesn’t impose any hard limit on the number of servers. This number is determined by game design and cost considerations. Different games will strike a different balance between costs and compute resources, depending on their requirements and business models.


What are your thoughts on Sony’s approach to cloud computing with PlayStation Now?

At Cloudgine we believe the real added value of a cloud-assisted model comes from the truly new and ground breaking experiences that additional compute power enables. Experiences, as demonstrated in games like Crackdown 3, otherwise impossible to achieve in a game that was not designed specifically to take advantage of this new paradigm.


What other projects is Cloudgine currently involved with? Could we see the company’s prowess on other platforms sometime in the future?

At the moment we are focused on developing our cloud platform for first use in Crackdown 3. But we will certainly have more to announce at a later date.


The Xbox One has a high bandwidth memory in eSRAM. It’s a tad difficult to deal with it but with tiled texture streaming middleware tools like Granite and now the Cloudgine, is Microsoft’s design choice of going with embedded eSRAM for the Xbox One beginning to make a lot more sense?

I think this is more a question for game teams. Cloudgine runs almost entirely in the cloud so we haven’t been dealing with specific Xbox One features such as the eSRAM.


Do you think Cloudgine will make it other platforms? For example the PS4 or PC?

Crackdown 3 is our first priority now, and we want to ensure that the experience on Xbox One is the best it can be. However, like I said, Cloudgine is a server-side technology so there is no restriction on clients connecting to our platform.

satriales wrote:The destruction is impressive but not because of cloud.

Tafdolphin wrote:Meh. Let me know when it comes to PS4 (ie, better).

XBOX MVPS: HANDS ON WITH CRACKDOWN 3

Last Friday, we were lucky enough to host Xbox MVPs from all over the world here at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA for the annual Xbox MVP Summit. A lucky few of those MVPs got a peek behind the developer curtain, and were the very first people outside of the development team to play an early version of Crackdown 3. While we’re not quite ready to show you what these Xbox MVPs had their hands on, you can listen to our Agility developer podcast for exclusive new information on Crackdown 3 and the role Agility will play in the game.

The MVPs had a lot to say about what they played, including:

It’s a really good, fun game. I look forward to playing a lot more of it. The weapons were really cool, the gameplay was fun, and I can’t wait!
Looked good, played well, and the orb collecting was just as addicting as the first game!
The multiplayer seems like it’s going to be a blast – literally.
I enjoyed the destructible environments. Being able to destroy every single little thing was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

From all of us on the Crackdown 3 team, we’d like to extend a very special thank you to the MVPs who came to play and hang out with us.

Fiending for more Crackdown 3 news? Keep it locked on crackdown.com for another content drop coming in March. Psst, here’s a hint: it’s all about Explosives.

At E3 2014, we announced the return of the Crackdown franchise with the unveil of our newest title – Crackdown 3 – and established an exciting and ambitious vision to redefine open-world gaming. Then at gamescom 2015, we showed that creating completely physical and destructible multiplayer environments is possible through the power of Microsoft Cloud and Xbox Live. Today, we are excited to confirm that Crackdown 3 will be available for both Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs, and will be an Xbox Play Anywhere title so you can buy one and play across either device.

Crackdown 3 is a game built for the future with a multiplayer experience that will redefine what it feels like to play games, and as we continue to work on this, it has become clear that our original timeline of delivering multiplayer to fans this summer, while maintaining the size, scope and quality of the game, would be challenging. Our top priority is to give gamers an experience they have never seen before at a scale never thought possible, and sticking to our original timeline would have compromised that goal.

We know that many are looking forward to becoming Agents in Crackdown 3 and we are committed to delivering the best experience in 2017. This decision was made with our fans and their gaming experience in mind.

While we won’t be at E3, we cannot wait to show you the future of Crackdown 3 soon.

Dave Jones
Creative Director, Reagent Games