Microsoft has been talking about leveraging cloud computing to supercharge the Xbox One since before the console even launched, and if reports coming out of Cologne are accurate, Crackdown 3 might finally be the game to make that dream a reality. Crackdown 3 comes with two modes: one is playable offline, and should be pretty familiar to fans of the series. It's the online mode, however, where things get really interesting. The team is promising a full, 100% destructible environment, where players might be able to blow the base out of a building in order to topple it into another one and take out a crime boss in a symphony of rubble and fire. It's the sort of sandbox fantasy developers have been questing after for years, and developer regent games says that they've been able to leverage the computing power of Microsoft's cloud to actually make it happen.
"We really wanted to do something [with the multiplayer] that was very much within the heart of what Crackdown is,"Dave Jones, Crackdown 3 creative director and Reagent Games founder told Ars Technica. "It's a very physical game with you being able to go into the world and pick up every trash can, rip stuff out of the street, tear car doors off and use it as a shield, or even pick the whole car up. It was all about physicality, so we really wanted to bring that physicality to the online [multiplayer] space."
In a demo, Jones showed Ars an overlay of just how much power the game was taking from servers in the cloud, saying that the team has in the past been able to draw as much as 13 times the power of a single Xbox One to power the Crackdown 3 simulation. The idea is that the player should be able to destroy literally anything, with every pice of glass, concrete and metal behaving just as it would in an absurd reality, crashing through other buildings, twisting down to the street and even leaving all of its debris around the for the entirety of a game.
It's quite an amazing promise, even if I'll reserve any actual judgement until I can see it in action, in my own home. But early reports from multiple websites seem to be saying that yes, the thing actually works. I'll be even more interested to see this sort of technology used in other games going forward, as well: this sort of technology will only get better, and it could effectively serve to make this generation of consoles totally plastic in terms of computing power.
Crackdown 3 is due out in summer 2016.
