How Crackdown 3 uses the cloud to make whole cities destructible
COLOGNE, Germany—The time has come, it seems, whereby a single console is no longer sufficient to provide the raw power required to run the most processor-intensive multiplayer games. With so many players running around and, potentially, creating carnage, that humble black box under the TV is beginning to buckle under the strain.
We've already seen this happen with Titanfall, the Xbox One mech-based shooter, which relied on Microsoft's Azure cloud service to drive its AI, demonstrating that the cloud can indeed power games in a real time environment. But with the upcoming Crackdown 3—an Xbox One-exclusive action game due for release in 2016—developer Reagent Games has an all new, and much bigger way of employing computing power from the server side to back up a multiplayer game.
"We really wanted to do something [with the multiplayer] that was very much within the heart of what Crackdown is," explained Dave Jones, Crackdown 3 creative director and Reagent Games founder. "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 order to live up to that original ideal, Jones and his team decided that each and every element within Crackdown 3's world should be destructible. Moreover, total destructivity is something Reagent Games believes more open-world games should evolve towards.
"We thought: what about if, for the first time, we make the whole world fully destructible?" continued Jones. "We asked ourselves simple questions, such as 'why don't my bullets go through walls when I shoot them?' or 'why can’t I step through big holes I’ve made in those walls?' It's a very different way of thinking about games. If there’s a guy behind the wall, I can just shoot him through the wall, shooting both the wall and the guy to bits. That's the way we think game worlds need to evolve."
Buildings, then, are made to a specification that Jones describes as "physical." In essence, they're more than just geometry within a digital space that has been plastered with textures to make them look real. Instead, glass acts like glass, concrete like concrete, and steel as steel. Blow up a concrete pillar and a floor of a skyscraper might come down. Destroy the steel core of a structure and the entire thing might collapse...
Almost time for an Oculus Rift and some haptic gloves.
